the polish connection

background music : paperweight by schuyler fisk

i just got back an hour ago from a day with aneta and her family. this is a way overdue reunion.
aneta is my first friend here in the US. she was the head teacher of the classroom where i first worked in. my first job here was as a teacher assistant. it was nerve-wrecking for me. FOB and all. aneta struck me right away. she is gorgeous and very tall. very graceful. she looked like a model to me. but her easy smile and warmth won me over.

you see, i have this silly,pre-conceived notion about pretty mestiza/white girls. i thought they are all suplada. i guess this is brought along by my deep rooted insecurity being called negrita as a child. but you know what virginia, i have close friends who are mestiza and white, and they are not suplada at all. case 1 : lulubelle aka yanna aka eva aka lubs. case 2: fanny. case 3: moonshine charly.

hemingway, so back to aneta, i found out that she and i had a lot of things in common than i thought. though she was caucasian, she felt she did not belong in that school where we worked. she felt her being polish separated her from the rest of the american staff in the school. she was my first live lesson on american-immigrants dynamics. the two american head teacher biatches did not treat her as an equal. and as for teacher assistants? forget that! aneta was also instrumental to my meeting and working for richard and olivia's parents. she recommended me to jennifer when she was looking for an english tutor for her kids. the rest of course is history.

after six months of working my ass off that school, i left and went to another school, this time as a classroom teacher for toddlers. that was my "mary poppins on acid" gig as moonshine called it.

i lost touch with aneta. she moved to upstate new york. eventually i got my teaching license and started teaching middle school. i moved in my current hometown. i tried calling her old phone number but it was already disconnected. i thought of her every once in a while, wondering if she was still in NY ir if she moved to another state.

fast forward to 2008, in one of our getting to know you conversations, i told Z that my first friend in america is actually one of his peeps. he asked me what happened to her, and somehow "i don't know" was just not good enough.

thank goodness for google. i traced where jacek was working, ecstatic at the fact that they moved back to jersey.i made a bold and crazy phone call to his office and left a message with his receptionist. that same night i got a call from aneta. the 45 minute call was not enough to catch up on almost 5 years of lost time.

and so today it finally happened. i met her at a strip mall near her place. she dropped off her two boys to polish school and we hung out at their home. after lunch, jacek came home from his clinic and joined us. jacek, a wine enthusiast as well as an excellent pediatrician was only too happy to talk about wine with me.

we picked up the boys from polish school. then after the boys had their lunch, we went for a leisurely walk around aneta's neighborhood to talk some more.


before heading home, jacek gave me a bottle of good red wine and a listing of another recommendation. before he deposited me to where bruce was parked, we dropped by a liquor store overlooking lake budd and we both got a bottle of tokaji, a hungarian king of wines and wine for kings.

lush. don't worry i did not drink a drop.

next month we intend to see each other again, this time with nancy, the other third to our troika. nancy was also a teacher assistant in aneta's class. she is hysterical. she is a trip, that one. and she is another immigrant, a true blue dominican. together we form united colors of benetton.

take a look at my lunch courtesy of aneta
on the left is golabki (polish stuffed cabbage) on the right is fresh french baguette topped with butter and smoked salmon. yuuuummmm.