“The joy of writing, the power of preserving, revenge of a mortal hand.”
--Wislawa Szymborska
Sometimes those moments that change our life forever are hard to narrow down to an
exact time or place. Do our lives change forever all because of one specific monumental moment or is
more than that? Perhaps the reason for these life changing experiences are because of the changes in us
as people. In my case it was the latter. When I flew across the sea to Europe I was not expecting to come home feeling so different and changed.
I brought when I left, a small black lined notebook with a clasp. This was to serve as my journal and I intended to put it to good use. The first few days kept me busy writing down what I saw and heard. My thoughts about the plane food filled up two pages alone. But it was not long before long my journal entries became fewer and fewer. One of these memories I never actually recorded until now. This memory took place in spring 2009 of last year. It was early July and I stood in a crowded post office halfway across the world.
I was mailing post cards to family and friends back in the states who were eagerly a waiting news of my adventures, or I hoped they were.
This was my first trip out of the states and in spite of the fact that I truly felt like an outsider (I
probably looked like one too) there was a comfortable feeling of familiarity which surrounded this tiny
Polish post office, and I felt at home there.
I stood in line quietly not wanting to draw attention to my American self. I was trying to act as Polish as possible, as if I did this every day and spoke the language fluently. Despite my efforts I don't think many people believed the act. It was a humid summer day and my feet were clad in worn down orange flip-flops which had begun to hurt. Walking over cobblestones and uneven ground for a week will do that, and that day I had done more walking than usual. The never ending humidity had caused my clothes to to cling to my skin like a slightly sticky wipe. I should have felt hot, tired and miserable but instead I felt wonderfully alive.
As the line moved closer to the counter I moved forward a few steps and glanced out of the window. I could the sun beginning to set outside and evening roll in. The few dark rain clouds that had poured rain on us that afternoon were blowing away to dump their contents on some other unsuspecting souls.
The smell of cigarette smoke wafted in through the open door and I took a deep breath. At home
I would have gone out of my way to avoid the smell of cigarettes but here I had grown accustomed to
the smoke and against my will, grown to like it. Polish cigarettes had a sweet vanilla smell that
reminded me of out door patios and the evening rain on a summer night. Unlike the
usual cigarette smoke I was used to which made me want to wash my hair whenever I walked
through a cloud of the harsh smelling stuff.
I was almost to the counter so I pulled out my money and organized the post cards by zip code,
not that it would matter. One thing post offices have in common all over the world is their lack of
organization. I had a feeling that some of my letters would never make it to their destinations.
I finished my mission and headed out into the warm evening. The post office was located in the
towns plaza with little shops and an American McDonald's surrounding it. Off in the distance I could
see the beautiful craftsmanship of another town church. Its steeple silhouetted against the deepening
night sky. The churches bells chimed out the hour. For a brief moment I stood and looked. I savored its inlay, trim and massive oak doors, wishing such history and architecture could be found back home.
All around me the lights of the city were beginning to wake up. Streetlights and Narnian lampposts cast a warm glow on the busy people as the night life of Wroclaw came to life. A fountain in the center of the plaza bubbled over and splashed onto the cobblestones. The restaurant where our group had just eaten dinner was lit up by small fires at the entrance. A small crowd was gathering there, so aided by curiosity I walked over the cobblestones to see what was so interesting and discovered much to my surprise and amazement the combined efforts of some local fire jugglers! .
Later that night as I was walking slowly back to hostel, I began to think about all the books I had ever read that portrayed similar places like this and girls like me walking down streets identical to mine. I was a character in a story. My own story, and I wanted to write it down in such a way so that other people could see what I had seen that evening and hear everything my ears had heard. I finally had something to write about that was real, something I could taste and touch. The distant lands my poor imagination had tried to make tangible were now real. I had always read about places like this, plazas lit by streetlight and accordion music filling the square....
This might be a bit confusing so let me explain. Reading and writing play a big part of who I
am. Actually let me rephrase that, the love of reading and writing plays a big part of who I am.
It all started when I was seven. The year I first learned to read. It wasn't much later I also became acquainted with writing. Learning these two abilities could be called the most important moments in my entire short lifetime.
Why was it so important to me? Perhaps it was because words and their meanings had finally clicked and fallen into place. Those long strings of words called sentences on the page in front of me made sense. And they sounded so beautiful when put together to make a poem or a story! And then to think I could someday write my own!
Letters and words on the page used to be a mess of confusion and jumbled nonsense which
made my head hurt and my heart long to understand. I knew that books held mystery, thoughts, ideas
and stories I wanted to read about. Now this was possible. And once my brain got started it was as if a
roller-coaster was carrying it away in so many different directions and nothing could stop it.
As I grew older a favorite pastime of mine was to sit for hours writing short stories about
fairies, princesses and pink ponies. A few more years pasted and my writing grew smoother and flowed nicer but something still was missing.
It wasn't until years later as I walked along the cobbled stones of Europe when I came to understand that writing isn't just a record of my thoughts and idea's, or an account of my likes and dislikes, descriptively written though it may be. Writing is meant to make people think and ask questions. It can be used to spark emanations and stir our emotions. The written word is a very powerful tool, with more potency then most people realize.
“By speech first, but far more by writing, man has been able to put something of himself beyond death. In tradition and in books an integral part of the individual persists, for it can influence the minds and actions of other people in different places and at different times: a row of black marks on a page can move a man to tears, though the bones of him that wrote it are long ago crumbled to dust.” --Julian Huxley.
My visit to Poland has completely changed what I thought writing was and how I write as a person. Its hard to come back from a country so laden with history where the very cobblestones are worn down from age and still write the way I used to. Even the writing of short poems and and descriptive paragraphs have taken on a new meaning for me. I can still picture in my mind the tall steeples of the old churches in a silhouette against the gray-blue sky. The beautifully sculpted statue in the center of the fountain, chipped and worn in places from both wars and time. How can these not affect a person?
These memories will linger in mind until I am old and gray. I can draw on the feelings and emotions I felt that day, how the sun felt on my back, what the couple in line behind me was talking about. And with the powerful tool of writing, convey these and feelings to other people. This ability might take a while but nevertheless less my writing is slowly progressing into becoming more than a 2 dimensional piece of work.
“All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with and then I can turn the world upside down.”--Friedrich Niezsche
No comments:
Post a Comment