Old love, new reflections

When I was a young girl, only fourteen, I went with my mother and my brother on holiday to a very beautiful small place at the Baltic seashore, Jurata. I have mentioned the place in my previous posts. It seems that the magic times of seashore holidays are still on my mind and heart. During my stay in Gdansk this year, I was reminded why my associations with Jurata are still very strong. There were formative years in my life and in Jurata I met and experienced my first love.

 My first holiday in Jurata

The story seems like from a different era and a different life. In some sense it was a different lifetime and now it is just a story and maybe some sentiments. It makes me mushy though.

There was a girl and a boy. It took us more than one year of thinking of each other before we said the first hello. The reason why it took such a long time was that after one month holiday I went to my home town and came back for the next holiday one year later and one year older. A sweet sixteen. He was still there! Not very surprising as he was a local boy. He also remembered me and this time it did not take long, maybe a week or two, before we plucked up courage to smile at each other. It was a speedy affair, ha? Such were the times and such was innocence of us two. After few more days we went for a walk, this was awkward and nerve racking. Be both blushed a lot and did not know what we should be talking about. We both rehearsed it before but it was not easy to act it out. The time was passing and the short one month of summer holiday was coming to an end. Heather bushes started to show their delicate lilac colours, rowan trees were already covered in rowanberries. There were signs that August in Poland was coming to an end and that it will be time to leave the place were the first love was waking up in two young hearts. Ever since that time, when I see heather blooms or rowanberries I get the feeling that something wonderful is inevitably coming to an end. When we took our last walk along the path surrounded by the symbols of autumn, he kissed me! Wow! This was quite an experience even if it lasted only few seconds. I was to remember the feeling for many months. It was the last thought of each day, before I fell asleep and sweet dreams followed.

At home looking nostalgically at dried heather blossoms, waiting for the next chapter of the love story

Later on I heard that my boyfriend, as he already had this status in my heart, went through a crash course in kissing and was appropriately instructed by one of his more experienced pals. He was told where he should place his hands, how to tilt his head and was given some other technical instructions. Mind boggles. I thought that he executed his instructions masterfully. Alas, I could not make any comparisons.

The next year my family came back to Jurata again. We were like Polish boomerang in this respect. I was very nervous about meeting my dream boy. Will he remember me? Will he have another girlfriend? Being sixteen, eleven months is a very long time and a lot can happen. But he was there and he looked so happy to see me! The feeling was extraordinary. Now we were seventeen, quite grown up really. Or so we thought. The whole month together, till the heathers bloom. If you think, sex, think again. There were different times.

We walked along the beach, took some dips in very cold Baltic sea, ran, kissed during walks, laughed and touched each other hands lightly or played some fighting games. Need for physical contact was evidently there.

During my time in Gdansk we met after many, many years of not having any contact and I got photos of young us. Boy, we were beautiful!

Our relationship lasted another two years. We corresponded and he even came to my prom to be my partner. I do not remember much from the time unfortunately. But we definitely were a couple then.

The next year we both moved to Warsaw and the romance became more of an every day life. Were going out together until, fickle me, met a man about the town who later became my husband. A sophisticated man from Warsaw, already a student, riding his Lambretta, smoking, dancing modern dances… He was too strong a competitor to my first love. I wanted to experience more.

I wonder how my life would turn out if, if…I do not have any regrets though, I love my life as it has been. But the memories are really, really beautiful. Was it really me? Hmm… 

A very good film; I wish I did not see it

This is my feeling about Holding the Man. An Australian film about love.  A very, very moving; very, very  sad and very, very cruel film.

As I just came back to Sydney, I checked my local cinema for what’s on. Interesting that I went to a cinema only once when in was Gdansk. I must have had better things to do? Maybe I just had a better selection on TV than I have here and this is why I went to see a film in the cinema only once in the three months I was there.  It was Irrational Man. I was disappointed with the film.

Holding the Man was definitely not disappointing but very difficult to take for a sensitive person like myself (lol). This is about homosexual love, very beautiful and shown with sensitivity and also full technical details. This was confronting, too much information sort of a thing. After an initial shock I was accepting the scenes without  prude reactions. The boys who grew into men really loved each other. This was a beautiful, giving and forgiving love. I almost wonder if anything that close and true can happen in a heterosexual relationship.  

                                                                    

                                                                    

The film is based on a book and the book is based on life of the author Timothy Conigrave. As the love affair started early, when the boys were at school, later on, the author of the book wanted to learn more about life and experience more than monogamy with his lover. This lead to a short lived break up in the relationship. Tragedy happened, Tim contracted AIDS.  From the first scene of the film we know that both of the men will die before the story finishes, I was prepared for tragedy but at the end I could not take the explicitness and cruelty of medical procedures and the suffering of the two loving each other men. I left the cinema before the film finished. This has not happened to me before and I am now wondering: am I too sensitive or is the film so good?

I have not missed much of the film and the scenes are still flashing in my mind. I can not get rid of them even though I would very much like to. I am not sure if I am recommending the film of warning against that. Both at the same time.

The film is very well acted by all and Ryan Corr playing Timothy Conigrave in my opinion is absolutely exceptional. I have seen him few times on television. He also played The Water Diviner. There is something in his face that is particularly expressive and when he plays sadness, one really gets moved. He matches well tragic characters of Dostoyevsky; he would play many of them very convincingly. 

Hi Sydney !

I have been in my second home country just over 24 hours. No jet lag, but not a full brain capacity or motivation to do anything. I gave myself a break and decided to get over the bewilderment caused by the big change. I know that I am fortunate to be able to live in two great or at least interesting countries during the best time of the year in each of them. This is one side of the coin. Maybe this coin should have only one, positive side? There is a change of lifestyle, language, friends, food, landscape, ways… It is all good and also a bit challenging.

                                           

My trip started at the Gdansk Lech Walesa Airport. The place is turning to a really nice, efficiently working, small airport. The journey started pleasantly with the exception of my flight being late. There were weather problems in Germany and I was flying Lufthansa.

The first stop - Frankfurt. This was a very brief stop, hurried in fact. With some help of the Lufthansa staff I managed to catch my flight to Bangkok. Boy, it was a race. I managed but my suitcase did not. I am still waiting for its delivery. Frankfurt airport is one I like least, out of the ones I know. It is too big and too impersonal. It does not work all that well either, in spite of famous German efficiency.

The Lufthansa flight was quite pleasant though. They improved their seats the last year and I was able to stretch. The food was also very nice and I said “taste you later” to fantastic, one of its kind bread that they can only bake right in Poland and Germany. Maybe Austria as well, at a push? Not sure about it though. The rest of the world eats some different type of bakeries calling it bread. I suspect that I may be byes, just a bit. But try for yourself if you get an opportunity. Especially dark bread variety.

                                           

Not typically for me I did not watch any film on this flight. All my neighbours watched some catastrophic, terrifying films. New version of Matrix? I was not attracted to it at all. And I had a new book to read.  

Then Bangkok and a looong wait for the next flight. I had 9 hours to kill and this time I slept few hours at the airport. It was a good idea and I will try to schedule my future flights the same way. The Bangkok airport has been modernized few years ago and now it has facilities that make lay off time not that hard. Maybe even pleasant if one is not in a hurry home. There are restaurants, coffee places rest areas, spas, massages and shops of course.

I find mentality of the Bangkok airport people very different to what I am used to and difficult as well. They are very officious lot and not helpful. The staff rarely smiles and their English is often insufficient. They always answer questions confidently but often not correctly. It is the only airport I know that I had things confiscated from my luggage without any need. They always look into and mess up the hand luggage. Even if it goes through x-ray stations they need to check it out. This time there was a new attraction. Passengers need to take the position like criminals on films for police officers to frisk them. Hands up, legs apart facing an x-ray for quite some time. A bit humiliating really.  Does it stop more people with wrong intentions? I doubt it.

It finished well for me

One may wonder if I like any airport really. Yes, I do. I like Singapore. And I feel at home at Kastrup in Copenhagen, so I like it. It is familiar and works well. And Lech Walesa Airport, of course.

                                       

Sydney Kingsford-Smith is now in a reconstruction stage and I would have some critical remarks here but I got my suitcase back as I wrote this post. No problem, no fuss and delivered to the door. Thank you Kingsford-Smith. You are great!

Au revoir to Gdansk

I will be going back to my second home tomorrow. With some regret I will be saying “see you later Gdansk”. A lot has happened in Gdansk for me. Good, fantastic, uplifting, bad and sad. This year it has been more good than during my last stays here. I have been able to reflect on what next and even if I do not have all the answers I feel that I have made progress. My proverbial “how to live prime minister?” has some answers now.

I have done a lot of flaneuring in Gdansk and I discovered a lot of beauty in the old streets, old parks, coffee places and European lash nature. I am aware that I lived through the summer best. The doom is just around the corner and I am flying away to my warm count

My favourite park

My favourite street

I always loved the concept of café life. The famous café Les Deux Magots in Paris the hub of literary life always woke up special feelings and reflections in me. Mind you it was in the first half of the XX century but some of that atmosphere is still alive in Europe. I do not know people in Gdansk I could sit for hours at a table in a corner of an atmospheric cafe and discuss important things. But I can go to a place of an old beauty and sit there for hours with a book, notebook or a computer. 

This is the view from one of such cafes 

 But I can go to a place of an old beauty and sit there for hours with a book, notebook or a computer. They usually even have a wi fi.  Nobody comes to indicate that my time in the place is up. Such is the case in Sydney and I think in the whole Australia. Coffee places are places of business and that requires that new orders are placed frequently. The European ways are not money spinners and I have no idea how it all functions from the financial point of view, I suspect not very well for the owners but great for me – a customer.

I will be missing all that.

Still about The Goldfinch

I am still dwelling on some parts of The Goldfinch that particularly caught my attention. The book is full of interesting observations so AC Observes is compelled to notice and make her own conclusions and parallels.

I stopped and pondered on Theo’s reflection regarding people who loved him and supported him. There were two people in his life that cared for him exceptionally much, they were guessing his needs and his worries in attempt to fulfill the first and remedy the second. This is a very special type of love and our mothers usually give us that. Good mothers, that is. Mine was a good mother and she smothered me with guessing what may worry me or what may hurt me. Sometimes this was even irritating and I tried to shake off her affectionate caring. I wish I could experience such moments again, I would take it in a different way. Unfortunately, I do not think that it will happen, not my age and not with my mother passing away. Not all her caring was particularly clever. She may have helped me to become a hypochondriac or at least thinking about my health too much. It was also unfortunate that she did not appreciate value of physical fitness. Very few people did in Poland in the time I was growing up. One day we had a running competition at school and I won the run for 100 meters. It was exhilarating but my mother checked if I did not get by any chance sweaty as the result of my sporty achievement. I did. This was the end of my running carrier and I obediently took her council. Silly and funny. For many years I followed old saying “in healthy body lives a healthy cow” and kept away from sport and redirected my efforts to intellectual pursuits. I wish I could reverse the time and correct mistakes.

My mother was right caring for me the best way she knew. 

                                                          

Lives turn in unexpected ways. We plan, work towards some goals, go about our days as usually and then suddenly something happens that changes the course of our life. If we only knew, we may have chosen different path and our life would be different. Maybe better, maybe worse. Theo’s life changed dramatically when he and his mother on the way to Theo’s school went to the Met Museum to see a particular exhibition. There are many “if onlys” that Theo deliberates on. Things could have been different and his mother would have been alive, if only… Many of us have such situations in life that from a distance of time we see that we could have changed the course of our history. I do. And sometimes we blame ourselves; the right steps are so obvious when we look at the situation later on. We are now aware of the signs that should have redirected our steps and actions. We feel guilty that we were not able to correctly foresee the future, use our intuition to protect ourselves. Theo does in hard times of his life. He realizes that he had at least partial knowledge that could have taken his life in a different direction. I, myself sometimes experience similar feelings. One of such moments was my last goodbye to my mother at the Warsaw airport. If I only read the signs, stayed with her maybe she would not pass away so early. She left such a big gap in my life.  And here Donna Tartt comes to the rescue. She says that sometimes after the events we think we knew what we should have done but this is not so. We had only partial knowledge, nor sufficient to make different decisions. We did not know enough. Later, we found new pieces of the puzzle and only this information would have allowed us act differently. Then it was already too late. For a person like myself this is very uplifting explanation.

Quo Vadis?

                                               

I perhaps read too much into the book’s messages but I still maintain that this is the beauty of the book that takes us on our own tangents, things that are significant to an individual person.  

The Goldfinch

I have finished The Goldfinch of Donna Tartt two days ago. I am usually a slow reader, maybe because I read difficult books, rarely novels. I get my brain rest watching feel good repeats on television. Books are meant to teach me something. Lately, I have been making some exceptions though, reading Knausgaard’s My Struggle and more. At the moment I have more books on the go than usually, this is because there were so many temptations in Polish bookstores to which I have succumbed and my reading backlog, as the result, is very impressive. Or overwhelming, if you like. The Goldfinch made me put all the other books aside and I finished it in a record time six or seven days. The book has over 800 pages. Big part of my days and sometimes nights was dedicated to reading. I was totally immersed in the book. Nice feeling, really. I experienced it often in my young years so I felt rejuvenated in spirit. 

Various people classify the book as a bildungsroman, a type of novel concerned with development and maturing of a person. This is a story about Theo who is thirteen years old when the story starts with a very dramatic event of explosion in the Metropolitan Museum. He is in the museum with his mother when the tragedy strikes. His mother is killed in the explosion and the boy escapes from the place with his life, a ring and the small painting of the goldfinch painted by Fabritius  in 1654. I do not intend to write about the story, just my major impressions and observations resulting from reading the book.

I must have seen the painting a long time ago, maybe even twice as I have been twice in the gallery of Mauritshuis in the Hage. That’s where the painting is on display. Mauritshuis is my most favourite gallery in the world. Of course, I have seen rather limited number of galleries, but this one is to me very special. Maybe because I like the Dutch paintings or maybe because it is not too big and one can enjoy the paintings without being overwhelmed. 

                                  

I must confess that there were other paintings in the Maurithuis that made bigger impression on me than The Goldfinch.  I can hardly remember the little painting of the little bird from those times, but there is a vague recollection in me.

                                                   

The story is gripping and this is one of the reasons why it reads so well and captures one’s attention. For me it was much more, though. I have been always pondering over questions: “how to live Prime minister?” or “what it is all about?”. Maybe the book has not given me definite answers but it gave me some pointers. Or maybe it was me who came to my own conclusions? I feel, however, that improved clarity of thought was inspired by the book. This is, I think, one of the many strength of the book. It triggers off readers’ reflection over their own lives.

The book is concerned with love of beauty and particularly with preservation of antique objects or even only their fragments. Antiques have been my interest since many years, so I responded to the book in a particular way. There were times when I thought that I pay too much attention to objects, to “stuff” as I sometimes dismissively called my treasures. The book made me think of attachment to possessions as more noble than I saw it before. I look at it now as a love of beauty rather than possessiveness. Nice feeling.

Friendship, one of my core values, is a very strong part of the book. The friendship that is accepting, understanding, accepting without understanding, blind because it is based on trust that underlines the relationship. Friendship I would like to experience but I am not sure if I could master that much trust as Theo has for Boris. I find Boris’ character absolutely fascinating. He is Russian who is thrown into various countries and he assimilates well there. However, to me deep down he is Russian, he has Russian soul and Russian complexities of the character. It is very difficult to understand the Russian soul.  Donna Tartt does. This is colourful and fascinating part of the book.

If I was rating the book, I would give it 10 out of 10.