Waiting and Hiding in Grandma Klimek's Dining Room

Inside Grandma's Dining Room

Last time I talked with Sandy she mentioned the stained glass in Grandma Klimek's Dining Room. Where in the world could it be? How awful if it were broken. Better had it been stolen. Hopefully someone, somewhere still enjoyed it--but most likely it had been stored underneath a cabin, or in the big garage, or even under the lodge itself before the wrecking crew came in to tear the old building apart. Probably it had been there, dirty, unrecognizable, and ground to bits under the treads of the bulldozer or the heavy boots of men. Things get lost when taken from their proper place, even precious things.

There were two windows, with a clock between--remember? Where Mary Jane sat waiting for her mama to return from town. The clock ticked and tocked the minutes by like heartbeats that became more lonesome as time passed. She couldn't move, that little girl, so bound as she was to the waiting, as though she could work magic by her stillness and the listening to the heartbeats of the clock and of the rain, and gazing through the window down the road. But I've told you that before. Writing it didn't take it from me, though, and here it is again. Seventy years have passed, and here it still exists. The child cannot rise from her little chair underneath the clock and walk into the living room. Even more could she not take herself outside. Something that makes the magic of return might snap. Some silver cord. Might. Snap.

The Clock, Grandma, and Some Mid-day Guests

The clock is clear, but I can't see Grandma Klimek's face because of the blur. She must have turned her head, and back then in the time of analog and shutters and film, nothing moved so very fast. She managed to hide whatever might otherwise be clear about her. I've found no pictures taken in the kitchen. Maybe she could be more clear there. It's odd, though, because I think she enjoyed being noticed. But that doesn't mean something isn't also hidden, does it? I warm to her when I imagine she is hiding something so important to herself she would quickly turn her head to blur our seeing it.

Mary Jane was a silver cord, a circle 8 in and out of this room. (Maybe this room is a metaphor--I hadn't thought of that)  Maybe the child both kept and broke the spell, the way she brought the outside in and kept the inside out.

Outside

See the sign "REFRESHMENTS"? That's the outside of where you were a moment ago. From outside you cannot see the little girl underneath the clock, nor the woman who turned her face, nor the light through the stained glass, nor the linen-covered tables and chairs. You cannot see the buffet that held the ice-cream wafers with their soft cream filling. You cannot see the big Lake of the Woods Muskie on the wall, nor the elegant but unfortunate deer. You cannot see the fishermen. You cannot see the flowers. You cannot see the ice in the water glasses--ice that the winter before was taken from the lake and stored in the ice-house. You cannot hear the waitress argue with the cook behind the door to the kitchen. You cannot know about the hiding nor the waiting nor the little chair nor the magical spells.

Does it amaze you how different outside is from in? When you think about the flowers, does it amaze you that the geraniums in the window boxes outside look tattered? When you think about the linen covered tables and chairs, do you wonder about the rutted road and the weeds in the grass? Are you even sure that I'm telling you the truth, and that you've seen the in and out of the very same place?

I don't remember if all this amazed Mary Jane, though I am quite sure she felt and obeyed the magic of it. The be-still-and-wait wound the magic cord around the ticking of the clock, the dripping of the rain, the vision of an old, old car twisting down the gravel road and taking time with it--taking Mama out. The child held that place inside, underneath the ticking clock, keeping the magic cord, watching the raindrops on the gravel road. Splashing. (I've told you this before. Remember. But it doesn't disappear. And it is different this time. Do you see?) She stayed in. She held the cord. She kept the outside in. The rain slowed and ceased. The car twisted up the road. It parked underneath the stained glass windows. And the spell did not break.

What Passed Me By

Lately I've been digging old files out of my closet. It's what many of us do at my age when in a cleaning and organizing frenzy. The important stuff of a lifetime needs separating from the trash. I'm finding letters and photos and Christmas cards from way, way back. Invitations to weddings and graduations. Yellowed news clippings. A sketch of me done by an artist friend back in 1961 when I still wore a veil. Sometimes I come across a long affectionate letter from a person I cannot recall at all. How do I not know this person? We had to have been close when the letter was written. I Google the name. Sometimes I find the person. Yesterday I contacted one of them by email. He wrote back; can you believe it?? Space and time are closing in...or opening up! I'm haunted by all that passed me by.

The summer of 1945 when I was four years old I saw a living skeleton. If I'd had the daring I would have run to hide behind a tree at Klimek's Lodge, but he terrified me into paralysis. His clothes hung on him like laundry on a stick. "It's cousin Anthony," I was told, but I was pretty sure that a cousin of my grandpa could not really be a cousin of mine. They'd both been named Anthony, though my grandfather used the German/Polish form of Anton. Their parents were brother and sister--Anthony's mother and Anton's father. They'd grown up together in Poland until their families emigrated to the United States in the mid-eighteen hundreds. Those details passed me by back in 1945 when I was probably led forward by my mother to be introduced and shake this cousin's bony hand.

Rev. Anthony Kolodziej, SVD

His picture, which didn't look a bit like him, occupied a place of honor in Grandma Klimek's living room in Baudette. In fact, there were two framed pictures, this one and one I no longer have in which he is wearing academic robes. This man was quite an intellectual who helped found seminaries in both Poland and in the Philippines where he went as a missionary in 1933. All this passed me by.

What didn't pass me by even then was that he'd been captured along with the young men who were his seminary students and spent from December, 1940, until February 23, 1945, as a prisoner of the Japanese Army. During the last two years of his imprisonment he was in what he called "the Starvation Camp Los Banos. At the end I had only 75 pounds left." I found this information in a letter written to my Aunt Eva Klimek Mapes in 1972.

So what would you do? Right. I Googled Los Banos. Liberation of Los Banos The description of the terrors there confirm an image that had haunted me since I was four. In the evenings, at the Lodge, cousin Anthony told stories of his time at the prison. These details took root in the memory of who I was as such a small child:

--Cousin Anthony was given a small bowl of rice, often wormy, each day and ordered to eat it in front of the other men who were given nothing. If he ate it, he would live. If he gave it to anyone else, he would be shot. Day after day Fr. Anthony give his bowl of rice away. Day after day he would be taken to the yard of execution, tied to a pole, and blindfolded. The guards pointed their rifles at him. He prepared himself for death. And day after day they released him. But he never knew if he would survive that ordeal. 

Even a child can grasp terror such as that. I think cousin Anthony's stories introduced me to a kind of waking nightmare that surpassed what could be called the normal terrors of a child's daily life, explicable terrors. Here is a terror inexplicable. I read Wikipedia on "The Liberation of Los Banos" and realize that he was there on February 23, 1945 when the paratroopers landed. I see the prisoners who'd become too fractured, too wounded, too reduced (I had only 75 pounds left) to rise to their feet and leave. And I know that such terror continues all around the world, still today. I want to fall to my knees and scream a broken high C! Why?

But I know why, don't I? Do I? 

Cousin Anthony went back to the Philippines; that's what the card he sent my grandfather tells us. He went back when summer was over and the beautiful Lake of the Woods and Klimek's Lodge had provided a peaceful space for healing. Grandma Klimek must have cooked her amazing comfort foods, and Grandpa took his cousin fishing in his launch. What must it have cost Anthony Kolodziej to return to the place where he must have, many times, nearly lost his faith? What would he remember? Did he wonder that? What would haunt him, and would it matter? Or was he by then so refined by the fire of suffering that his whole soul was pure gold? Had he reached the state in which life and death are an unending circle and it mattered little or not at all where he might be in that unending and universal spiral?

All that passed me by. The child was haunted by the worms crawling through the rice. She shuddered. She was haunted by the "Ready. Aim. Fire." Haunted by the breath that didn't cease. Haunted by eyes opening once again to the sunlight. Haunted by his bony hands.