I’ve been back from Poland for over a week now, but most of the time has been spent in bed with the bronchitis I picked up in Krakow. I started coughing the day the Olympics opened in Paris, which meant that for the first two weeks of my illness I was able to watch the greatest athletes in the world compete in the most beautiful city in the world. (It was interesting, also, seeing the games from another country’s perspective – lots of brave interviews with people heading home without medals.) Since returning to Florida, I have been watching tennis (now on hiatus until the U.S. Open next week), the Little League World Series, and – starting last night – the Democratic National Convention. Last week, in another instance of good timing, the New Yorker’s special humor issue arrived. Meanwhile, I’m hearing that some types of bronchitis last six to eight weeks, which would take me past the U.S. Open finals and well into the start of football season.
A standard question in the New York Times Book Review’s weekly author interview is: “You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?”
Most writers play along; a few dodge the question by claiming they don’t cook or like to socialize. Yesterday, Joy Williams wrote: “This is not a time for dinner parties! Serene consumption, self-treasuring and holding forth will not heal our stricken earth.” She went on for another couple sentences.
Now I’m awaiting the writer who, when asked by the Times which three writers they’d invite to a literary dinner party, responds, “Not Joy Williams.”
I’m off to Poland tonight – will be back here the middle of August.
October is Polish American Heritage Month and I have been using that peg to try to set up readings of my memoir at bookstores, a few of which boast of their support of the marginalized and the underrepresented. In American publishing, few groups are as poorly represented as the Poles. Yet I am finding that not all marginalized groups are equal; some, in fact, are not even regarded as marginalized.
A friend recently sent me one of those surveys of countries, this one ranking them in order of kindness to strangers. Japan came in last, just below Poland. The countries where I’ve felt the most welcome – Vietnam and Turkey – were not on the list, nor was China. There’s a word in Chinese, which I don’t remember, for the circle of family and friends who are important to you; anyone who falls outside it is not worth your attention, let alone concern. You can understand it, sort of, in a country with such a huge population. Poland has a little of that – a leftover, ironically, from Communism perhaps; Poles don’t generally talk to strangers, which I find infuriating. But they should get some points for taking in over a million Ukrainians.
I went to the Panthers victory parade on Sunday because I wanted a photo to post along with yesterday’s blog post and, like the man in the John Malcolm Brinnin essay “Travel and the Sense of Wonder,” I “like to see life happening.”
Hania dropped me off at the foot of the Intracoastal bridge on Sunrise, as at that point people on foot, many wearing red Panthers jerseys, were making better progress than those in cars. I walked to Riomar Street, the start of the parade, but at 8:15 not a lot was happening. I headed to El Vez and found a seat outside where I ate a plate of huevos rancheros. I figured I’d need some nourishment for the morning’s ordeal.
Back at Riomar, a bagpiper in a green plaid kilt and a black-and-green Panthers jersey was playing a tune by a parked car. Two drummers stood nearby; they were from the Coral Springs Fire & Rescue. More musicians, and people, gathered at the intersection, and then everyone dispersed as the heavens opened up. Many of us took shelter in the driveway of the Hilton, including a female drummer who told me several bands were marching. Hers, she said, had come up from Miami.
The rain let up and we wandered back to the intersection. Then more sheets were unleashed, and we raced back to the driveway. I charged my phone near a group of musicians whose armbands carried the name Palm Beach.
Eventually I worked my way, under cover, toward the front of the hotel, squeezing past a large potted plant whose purpose, clearly, was to keep me out. Outside Le Marché, I was told that I had entered a private party area, and politely asked to leave. I walked a few steps, in growing puddles, to a larger crowd waiting out the rain. Here I took pictures of two young men, in soaked Panthers jerseys, standing on the sea wall like sentinels. That, I thought would have to do.
But eventually the rain let up, and slowly, very slowly, buses rolled down A1A – first black-windowed coaches and then the big red double-deckers. I stood on the steps of the hotel portico, surrounded by a damp but cheerful crowd. On the step behind me, two Black teenage girls, in braces and cool wire-rim glasses, looked like they were getting a glimpse of Beyonce. A new bus appeared and the woman next to me yelled “Nick! Nick! Nick! Nick Cousins! He's our neighbor!” A few minutes later her husband appeared, his glasses speckled with raindrops. “I saw him look at you!” the woman shouted. “This is the happiest day of my life since we got married!”
Players threw beach balls into the crowd, which were then batted back. Some spectators tossed their cellphones up for players to take their pictures on. After obliging, the players let the phones drop back down.
Finally, the bus carrying the Stanley Cup appeared. Three players stood at the front in red “Conquered the Hunt” T-shirts: the one in the middle held the Cup high, the one on his left, Aleksander Barkov, help up his shoe (backdropped by the Finnish flag), the one on his right drank from his shoe. The blond woman standing next to Cousins’ neighbor asked, “Is that a thing in Finland?”
The other people on the bus had their cameras and smartphones pointed at the trio, creating a giddy Washington-crossing-the-Delaware tableau.
I wasn’t sure yet, but I figured I had my photo. And, even with the rain – heck, partly because of it – I had seen life happening.
South Florida’s sports teams, like its bad drivers, are shared by three counties – but there are degrees of affiliation. The Heat are Miami’s team, playing downtown on Biscayne Blvd. The Panthers, on the other hand, play in Sunrise and practice in Holiday Park, in a beautiful facility that on playoff nights became a surrogate arena, its restaurant and rink awash with fans – some homegrown, others nostalgic northern transplants. Broward is, inarguably, South Florida’s hockey heartland (as incongruous as that title may sound). So it was entirely fitting – in an even greater height-of-absurdity way – that the team whose home ice is next to the Everglades paraded the Stanley Cup on Fort Lauderdale Beach.