II. Me! Me! Me! Me! Yay, my favorite topic! Me!

“For the most part people are not curious except about themselves.” –John Steinbeck

Now that my half-assed history lesson is over (pun intended: see part I), let’s get back to me. Why am I going to Poland? What will I be doing there? Why should you care (and visit)?

I will answer all these questions through the course of this blog, I promise, but first let me give a personal history lesson. That way, as with Poland, you can understand how I came to be a real girl with a conscience (sometimes).

My Geppetto, Leah Joy Zell, whittled me into creation in Chicago, IL, in 1989. She watched PBS on the TV while getting her spinal tap drugs or whatever happens in hospital births, and apparently Oliver Twist was the Masterpiece Classic of the night. This would make a perfect segue to switch literary allegories—Poland as a puppet Frankensteined into life, and myself as a poor Cockney boy kicked out of the orphanage for being a glutton and subsequently moving to London for a life of crime. But I love my mother and would never insult her by implying at any point I felt remotely underfed in my childhood (#Jewishmothersandfood). If Oliver’s famous tag line was begging “Please, sir, I want some more,” mine would be “No more, mom, I can't eat more.” Thus I will refrain from telling my life story in the form of a Dickens’ novel.

This was never me

So, where was I? Right, birth. From what I can gather, my original birthday was not unlike my twenty-first, in that I looked like shit and was much too loud, but everyone still loved me and I was still the center of attention. Also like my twenty-first, I have no recollection of being present, and therefore hate when people talk about it because it makes me feel left out, even if I was physically present. So let’s move on.

My birth as depicted by Mark Ryden

I grew up kiddie corner to my maternal grandmother, Rochelle Zell. There was only one building between us and no streets whatsoever, which meant I could walk over on my own whenever I felt like hearing an old Jewish lady kvetch and eat best cookies ever. I know you’re thinking, “what a presumptious little shit, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. My grandmother's cookies were the bomb.” I don’t care. I don’t care if you're grandma ran the most successful bakery in the history of baked goods. If you tried one of these cookies you will think you have died and gone to heaven. Which, fittingly, is now the only place you could try these cookies, because my grandmother is dead.

Occasionally other relatives still bake “grandma’s cookies” and I eat them, but they are ersatz wafers that only deeper instill how incomparably perfect grandma’s cookies were. I look forward to heaven for only three reasons, and those cookies are one of them. (The other reasons are, at least according to Nora Ephron, I will be returned all the single socks that have disappeared over the years in a glorious golden hamper of single-pairs, and because I will get to meet Nora Ephron, the only other Jewess I can think of as cynical and erroneously sexual as myself.)

Anyway, so I would walk to grandma’s apartment building, and the elevator man would press the button to her floor because I couldn’t reach it even if I jumped. Then I’d knock on her door, forty-eight floors in the sky, and immediately hear her tiny, old lady footsteps and a slew of accusations: “Why are you here? What do you want? Why didn’t you come yesterday?” It didn’t matter who was on the other side of the door—the tirade came well before unbolting the lock. Whoever knocked was simultaneously a nuissance that should leave her alone and a loved one that didn’t visit enough.

Once she finished her bipolar reprimands, grandma would put her godsend cookies on the table and turn on “Who Wants to Be a Millionare.” We would spend the next three hours at the kitchen table like this. She would yell the answers to Regis Philbin, and I would munch on cookies, and at the end of my visit I would go home and pretend I hadn’t spoiled my appetite for dinner. I couldn’t have asked for anything more in a grandmother.

My grandmother's best friend

I knew grandma Zell was foreign, but I didn’t have a grasp of what that meant. I assumed grandma was a foreigner because she talked funny and refused to spend money, but I didn’t realize that these aspects were supplementary to the definition of foreign rather than the definition itself. I never fully comprehended she grew up in a different county, which, in my defense, is a pretty grand concept for an egomaniacal child to grasp. Grandma never talked about Poland. She was never “bubbie” or “bubeleh” either, Yiddish titles my Jewish friends often called their American-born grandmothers. Grandma Zell was definitively and unambiguously “grandma.” She liked grocery shopping, television game shows, backgammon and complaining, like all grandmothers. Sure, her “w” sounded like a “v” and she rolled her r’s. Sure, she would get angry when we’d give her a gift (I’ll never forget the time I brought her a popsicle-stick box I made in kindergarten, and she responded by snapping “How much did that cost? I don’t need it.”). But other than her voice and extreme frugality, she was your typically grandma.

By the time I was eight, grandma was going to the hospital frequently. She would randomly fall down in her apartment, and wake up in a bright room with an overly chipper medical student trying to hide his secret terror of this foreign, mean-looking old lady. My grandmother proudly became the bane of every med students' rounds:

Med student: “How old are you?”

“Older than your mother.”  
“How tall are you?”

(Bringing her hand up to the top of her head) “This tall. Are you blind as well as dumb?”
“How much do you weigh?”
“Enough.”

“When was the last time you ate?”

“You call that opfal food?!”

“Yes. Now when was the last time you ate?”

“Four days ago.”

“Four days?”

“Yes. That was the last time I ate what I call food.”

“When was your last bowel movement?”

“I don't remember.”

“Do you take any medications?”

“I'm an eighty-nine year old woman. Don't be cute with me.”

“Can you tell me which ones?”

“Pills.”

“What kind of pills?”

“All kinds. Where’s the real doctor?”

Eventually grandma exasperated the staff enough to warrant her release. She walked out of the fluorescent building refusing a wheelchair or walker. (Not cooperating had gotten her this far: why stop now?). She died barely a week later, while walking in the park on a gorgeous September day. The last thing she saw was a blue sky, the kind of color so pure your eyes invent patterns on the surface just to process it. A perfect blue.