Babcia

One year she flew up from Miami with a suitcase full of mangos.

No clothes. Just mangos.

Another year she brought some clothes, but also a jar of pickled pig pancreas. (She was offended when we all at first thought it was brains.)

When we think of grandmothers, many recall revered matriarchs who have been there, done that, and are perfectly content spending their twilight years as mother hens nurturing and spoiling the next generations in their family trees.

At least that’s my connotation.

That might be because that’s not what I had.

It was a lot easier calling my grandmother “Babcia,” which means “grandmother” in Polish, than to call her “grandma” or any other sentimental variation. To ascribe to her an appellation more applicable to those matching the aforementioned qualities is to misrepresent her and nurturing, spoiling grandmothers everywhere.

She would spend much of whatever Social Security money she had (which wasn’t much) on tchotchkes and other items most would have discarded: plastic necklaces, clip-on neckties, unidentifiable figurines of dubious origin, t-shirts either too small for the dog or too big for a 300-pound weightlifter, polychromatic sweaters (still too small), packages of stale wheat crackers, licorice, books about rock gardens. Once she sent me — specifically me — a double-cassette of Mario Lanza music.

I had no idea who Mario Lanza was.

There are the dietary memories too.

Babcia was obsessed with “natural” remedies.

Now, there is nothing wrong with natural remedies. I, for example, lean more toward holistic approaches to ailments and haven’t eaten beef or pork in several years.

But when one is harvesting poisonous berries from juniper bushes and steeping them in tea, it might be time to pump the breaks.

She would have had my brother and me drink it if my mother hadn’t found out.

I don’t think her intentions were nefarious, but still…

She also thought eating loofah sponges was an acceptable dietary supplement.

I never discovered that first hand.

After my children were born, mysterious packages began showing up at our home addressed in barely legible black magic marker. “Don’t worry,” I told my wife. “It’s from Babcia.”

Cloth belts, silk bathrobes, broken toys, more stale wheat crackers, sometimes stale cookies, occasionally a blank postcard, now went to the kids.

None of this made up for decades of absence.

When I was seven or eight, my childhood friend Brian’s father came up from Coral Gables, Florida to New York on business and stayed with us a few days. He and my parents arranged for him to bring me back down to Florida for ten days or so to visit Brian when the business trip was over.

Babcia had been living in North Miami since the 1970s, so there was an understanding she would take time to visit me at some point during my trip.

Brian’s mother had arranged for Babcia to make the half-hour trip down.

The day came.

I waited.

I waited some more.

The day got later.

Dinnertime.

8:00.

9:00.

Although I don’t recall, Brian’s mother remembers me crying.

Sometime after I had fallen asleep, I felt someone touch the top of my head and a soft kiss on my cheek.

During breakfast the next morning, Brian’s mother asked if I woke up when Babcia had arrived.

“She was here?” I asked.

I never saw her that entire trip.

Engaging my father about his childhood is about as satisfying as eating a single potato chip.

Yet if we catch him at the right time, some truths will peer out from behind decades of frustration and pain.

Babcia was born in Poland in 1927, which means she was my daughter’s current age, 12, when Nazi forces invaded, kicking off World War Two.

What she had to endure and how she endured it I would love to know.

After a family trip to Poland in 1998, I attempted to interview her about those days. Between her accent and creaking voice, though, I could barely make out any details. My father later told me she was probably making most of it up anyway.

Babcia and my grandfather divorced when my father was two, at which point my father’s childhood consisted of living sporadically on Babcia’s parents’ farm and being dragged all over Poland whenever Babcia’s wanderlust kicked in, leaving my father to dwell with strangers until his mother came back to escort him somewhere else.

Dad rarely saw his father.

I know for certain, however, Dad made a point of seeing his father before hopping on a plane to the United States to where Babcia had spontaneously immigrated a few years before.

My grandfather, now remarried with other children, offered Dad everything, being the first born, if he agreed to stay.

Dad refused.

So in 1967, age 19, he boarded a flight to New York’s JFK Airport, expecting his mother to be there to greet him at the gate.

She wasn’t.

Dad had five dollars in his pocket and no English in his vocabulary.

He managed to communicate sufficiently with someone generous enough to give him $20 and call a cab.

First settling in a Polish community in Connecticut, Dad worked at the Vought-Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation assembling airplane engines.

At some point he made it back to New York, to Westchester County, where he met my mother.

He also subsidized his mother’s education, delaying his own, when she decided to get her nursing degree.

Through these years, Dad maintained what could best be characterized as a “professional” relationship with Babcia.

There was no affection.

He never even called her “Mom,” “Ma,” “Mama” — only “Mother”.

And they couldn’t be in the same room with each other for more than twenty minutes before arguing.

Sometimes those arguments were downright funny.

During the 1998 Poland trip, Dad and Babcia started sniping at each other about something or other right at my uncle Edward’s dinner table. Not speaking Polish, I have no idea what it was about; I only remember laughing my ass off since they were both fluent in English yet proceeded to air this particular grievance in Polish so everyone— except my mother, brother, and me — understood it.

Also during that trip, Babcia informed Dad her area code had changed. When he asked what it would be, she rattled off six digits.

“Mother, there is no six-digit area code anywhere in the world.”

Understanding her was a challenge, even in English, but she fired back, “I’m not stupid! I know what the letter from the phone company said!”

Dad whipped out his cell phone and dialed her number back in the United States. When it started ringing, he held it up so she could hear it. Then he hung up and called again with the new area code. He held it up again.

“You’re probably able to use both area codes for a while,” he explained. “Eventually only the new one will work.”

She shrugged off in a huff.

Two or three years later, Dad paid for Babcia to travel back to Poland alone, ostensibly to do some genealogical research on our supposed relation to German Kaiser Wilhelm I. How much research she did, though, I will never know. I do know, however, she so thoroughly pissed off her brothers they asked her never to return.

She had been out of their lives for two decades, returning twice briefly, only to end up persona non grata.

Then there was the argument over my fortieth birthday present, an Ancestry.com DNA kit from my brother.

A year or two later, Babcia was up in New York with us for my brother’s wedding. Sitting around in his living room, Dad told his mother about the DNA kit and asked me to access the results on my phone and read them to Babcia.

When I finished, she asked, “How much Indian does it say you are?”

“Indian?” I asked. “You mean, like Native American? None. We’re not Native American.”

She shook her head, “No, INDIAN.”

I looked at Dad, who had that look of confusion crossed with consternation-laced frustration I came to recognize when he interacted with her.

“Mother,” Dad replied. “Why would it say Ted is Indian? Are we Indian?”

She nodded. “My doctor told me I’m Indian.”

Dad spat back, “Well, if I’m your son and you’re Indian, that must make me Indian too. And nothing in Ted’s DNA says anything about being Indian, so does that mean Ted is not my son?”

“My doctor said I’m Indian!” she exclaimed.

“Your Indian doctor, Mother? Isn’t your doctor Indian? Just because you want to identify as Indian does not make you biologically Indian. We are not Indian.”

She shrugged off in a huff — again.

After she died last January at age 93, I came across a Netflix documentary series titled Surviving Death.

Normally I have no interest in the paranormal and would have skipped over it; instead, I found myself binging (which I never do) the entire six-episode series.

It was also around this time I read a childhood friend’s Facebook post about training to be a medium, someone who studies to communicate with entities from the spirit realm.

Appreciating the irony, I messaged him to inform him about the series in case he might have been interested in it.

After expressing his condolences over Babcia’s passing, he informed me she was “having fun” and to “pay attention”.

“To what?” I asked.

“To coincidences,” he said.

“Like what?” I said.

“If you see something out of the corner of your eye, for example,” he replied, “or you feel like someone is there in the room with you.”

“Those aren’t coincidences.”

“Some spirits will make their presence known if you’re talking about them. They’ve been known to place objects in obvious places, or remove them,” he explained.

He then offered a free consultation and bid me peace and comfort.

I never took him up on his consultation, but I have been “paying attention,” mostly to the unorthodox and misunderstood ways she expressed her love for us through the years.

While most of my life it seemed as though she wasn’t putting much thought into us, as I approach 50 with two kids of my own, I have come to appreciate the myriad ways love manifests.

Just as there is no right way to live, there is no right way to love.

Even though she didn’t fit the conventional mold, I know she loved us.

She may not have always been receptive to others’ feelings, nor would it be a stretch to say she was a bit too self-absorbed for her own good, she died at peace, knowing her family was complete.

Despite leaving him without a father, she lived long enough to see my father raise two sons and become a doting grandfather.

Last week, my father disbursed our shares of the inheritance from the sale of Babcia’s North Miami house.

Due to resentment and confusion over where I fit in in her life, I was never used to thinking much about her.

Now I think about her every day.

My friend the medium was right: Some spirits will make their presence known.

She still does.