Missing The Homeland I've Never Met

My stomach hurts and I don't know why. Don't you just hate it when that happens? I decided to take care of myself and get a ginger ale... and fig newtons. They're fruit, they've gotta be good for me, right? I'm still not sure if that was a great decision, since the stomach still hurts (10 fig newtons later). Sleep would probably help, but I've been doing too much of that lately. I've currently settled for water sugared up on instant tea mix... why is it that I think the cure for a stomachache is to eat something? That's probably not always the best option, come to think of it.

Oh well, thinking about eating... dinner tomorrow night is pierogies, which is my ABSOLUTE favorite dinner here. Of all the things to love, it's a pretty weird choice - most people get excited about chicken parm, taco night or steak and cheese subs. Nope, I'll take potato and cheese pierogies with carmelized onions any day. They remind me of home because they're 110% Polish, like my mom's whole side of the family. For some reason they aren't served with sour cream here, which doesn't make any sense since my mom's always called sour cream "Polish Ketchup" because it goes on everything. They're also super greasy here because they're basically cooked in butter and then rolled in some more. Altogether pretty poor nutritionally, but no one loves them more than me, hands down. Even better - though no sour cream, they ARE served with kielbasa and sauerkraut (neither of which I usually eat, but they just top off the Polish fiesta going down in the dining hall). Having written that, I wish I knew the Polish word for "party" so that I didn't have to resort to Spanglish.

Why don't I know more Polish, actually? My mom's never made it a priority - she claims to be awful at languages and pretends to not remember a thing, despite whipping certain Polish phrases out at unexpected times and then blaming it on the fact that her mother "said that all the time," and I've never heard my grandmother say that before? I kind of get the impression that she was all Polished out in her childhood, coming from such a patriotically Polish family. You'd think that she'd embrace it more than she does, right? It's not that there's any spite between her and her heritage - she just seems to prefer to keep it quiet. It's one of those things that I think she's really proud of, but chooses not to flaunt it because she doesn't see how it's all that relevant to everyday life. I wonder what she thinks about the fact that her children therefore identify more with their Irish background than their Polish one, even though all three of us are twice as Polish genetically than we are Irish.

There are certain things she's held onto, though - Opuatec, or however you spell it, is always at the Christmas table. It's basically the same unleavened bread used to make the hosts at church, except this consists of two pieces of bread, cut out similarly to the paper snowflakes hanging on my windows at this very moment. These two rectangles of cardboardy bread are joined by a thick layer of honey, so that they basically make a honey sandwich (!). The tradition is that before enjoying Christmas dinner, each guest at the table breaks off a piece of the Opuatec, so that figuratively everyone is sharing the same meal. I think there's a blessing beforehand - I wish this tradition happened more than once a year so that I could remember it better than this.

I guess Christmas is the one time of the year where we really do Polish stuff - pierogies are inevitable on Christmas day, as breakfast or lunch (or whatever you call it when you eat all day, take a two hour break and then eat dinner). The pierogies have to be fresh, a requirement which can be met with the most diligent efforts to find somewhere in New England that makes them. The secret source for the freshest pierogies happens to be a church somewhere in Bridgeport, where little old Polish ladies get together a few days preceding Christmas to crank out several thousand slices of Polish potato and cheese heaven...

I CANNOT forget to put my Polish heritage on my Christmas list...