The Capable Essay

I was a fat child. No, seriously. Though I may look good in a pair of spandex shorts now, were you to have gone looking for me in junior high PE class, you’d have easily found me at the back of the pack, panting and huffing as I jiggled around the soccer field. I spent years with a stash of chocolate bars covertly placed between my diary and Barbie collection and hours arguing with my parents over whether or not it was appropriate for me to have seven cookies for snack. And despite my best and loudest efforts, those bastards dragged me out to soccer practice twice a week, with my round little body over their shoulders screaming, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”

Fortunately, my parents were not only more stubborn than I was, but well aware of just how good of an incentive an ass-whopping, wooden spoon can be. So I went to soccer practices scowling. And swim meets pouting. Then basketball tryouts, where I knew I wasn’t going home anytime soon so, fine, I’d shuffle towards the net and I’d try jogging to defence. Hell, the other girls were doing it and they looked like they were having fun. Then I scored a couple of baskets, dribbled around a few girls and wrestled a ball or two away from the other team and I began lumbering out of the gymnasium like I owned it.

“Dad, did you see that? That girl swung around when I grabbed the ball! Did you see my break-away? There was, like, no one there.”

At practice the next week, I bounced out of Dad’s car, through the gym doors, and tied my laces super tight for extra speed during scrimmages that night. I was running faster and dropping weight, but not everyone is as lucky as I was to have a father willing to confiscate anything that kept me in the house and a mother able to prod my butt out the door with her wooden spoon.


In 2004, right around the time I was getting into basketball and off the couch, almost ten percent of kids between the ages of two and 17 were obese, according to Statistics Canada. If I’d had a Body Mass Index of 30 or higher – BMIs comparing height to weight ratio – I would have been considered obese, and might have been part of that statistic. These results, on the other hand, do assume that the excess mass is fatty and not muscular, but considering how long I’d spent lolling in front of the TV, I doubt I had much muscle mass to go on.

That same year, CBC reports that 23.1 percent of all Canadian adults had BMIs over 30 and later, in 2008, a staggering 26.7 percent of adults in the United States were considered obese. Not just overweight; obese. If I remember anything from grade five, that’s approximately a quarter of all adults in North America. A quarter! That means every fourth adult getting on the bus in the morning is statistically likely to be about one thirds straight body fat, and I could have easily been one of them.


I was fifteen and playing for my high school basketball team when the math teacher across the hall started dropping hints that I aught to come out for rugby practice. I would shake my head and tell her that I was a baller not some “rugby” player and, besides, I was just getting good at sprinting my way down the court. But then she told me that I was of a build that would be advantageous on the field, that she knew I wasn’t unfit, and besides, didn’t I regularly get kicked out of games for being too hands-on? Was she recruiting me? Shit, did she just say she thought I was fit?

I decided a tryout or two would be worth my time, tackled a few girls, made the team and fell in love with the game. Even at that age, I would get off the field and vibrate happily for hours. This is not surprising, though, considering that the endorphins produced from a match’s hard running or heavy hitting are about the same as what get released during orgasm and actually act on the same neural receptors as narcotics like heroin or cocaine. Any rugby player will tell you that the adrenaline thrill that comes from a tackle which lays out the opponent is the sort worth banging your head for. That season, three of the most devoted players ended up with concussions.


These days I could probably get away with saying that I work my ass off at the gym; realistically though, strength training hasn’t done a thing to diminish its veritable size since I started seriously hitting the weight room three years ago. I had let a couple of months of cafeteria food and then a determined coach get to me and – Poof! – there I was, doing weighted squats and dumbbell curls for an hour-and-a-half three days a week. With every push up I counted and every weight I added to the barbell, I could feel my body strengthen, my muscles grow and my overall health improve.

After spending rugby practice running horseshoe-sprints (don’t ask), I came home to lie on my couch, revel in the glory of sore muscles and gloat in front of my roommates – just a little bit. I put a granola bar between my teeth, picked up my Women’s Health magazine and flipped straight to one of those articles that tells me how awesome I am.

“Dude!” I yell to my roomies in the kitchen around the oats in my mouth. “I burn an extra 120 calories a day for every three pounds of muscle. Did you know that? God, that’s awesome.”

A blonde head sticks out around the corner with the sort of “duh” expression the girls I live with have come to reserve for me. “I’ve seen your pipes, T. All you fucking do is eat.”

It’s true. Between the gym, rugby practices and kickboxing classes, I get hungry. And when I get hungry, I get weak, tired, indecisive and – worst of all – I became a straight-up raging bitch. Getting enough of the right type of nutrition all the time is not only necessary, but unfortunately complicated for any athlete. Do I get enough protein? What about my complex carbs? Does that triple-decker sandwich have enough vitamins, acids and fats to keep me going? Or was half a block of cheese not the right choice? High-intensity athletes can need up to twice the amount of nutrients as a non-athlete – like the football player who needs 150g of protein daily as opposed to the average 75g – and are put at risk of micronutrient deficiency (which results from restricting diets) and the female athlete triad (disordered eating, amenorrhea, and osteoporosis). And let’s not even get into just how much of my paycheque goes directly to food.

I pop a piece of bread in the toaster, grab myself a banana to munch on while I wait and flip back to my magazine. On the next page, I’m told that weight training not only has me eating more, but I get the added benefit of more stable joints. Sweet. Curious, I asked the physiotherapists who work with the varsity teams at UVic what they thought when I went to the Athletic Training Room later that week before practice.

“Oh I am a massive advocate of weight training,” says the girl wrapping tape around my finger. Nodding at the stretch cords and balance boards that litter half of the room, she tells me that the more you prepare your muscles for unexpected movement, the less likely you’ll be to injure yourself.

“Why do you think we get so many first years in here?” one of the trainers pipes up as he massages a calf. “They haven’t had enough time in the weight room yet.”


Thinking back to high school, I did spend a lot more time on the bench – and it had nothing to do with how slowly I made my way down the court. I remember rolled ankles, cramped muscles and pulled groins. When I was off-season too, I can recall a few times that my back spasmed on me in the pool or that I nearly popped a knee skiing. Granted, as a kid I was hardly strong enough to pick myself up off the ground if I fell on the slope and often had to get my frowning father to pull me up.

These sorts of injuries translate into the home for everyone, not just athletes and Colorado State University recently ran a one-year study comparing injury rates and BMI. They concluded that the higher the mass-to-height ratio, the more injuries were reported by the 2,575 adults who participated; the most (26 percent of men injured and 21 percent of women) being reported by the extremely obese. An entire half of these injuries, such as falls or acute overexertion, happened inside the home.

Take my mom, for example. Though she has never been obese, she let a few years at home with the kids get to her until she herniated a disc in her back. The doctors only shook their heads and told her, “Lady, there is essentially nothing wrong with you, but your back muscles are so weak they can’t hold themselves together. Get your fat ass to the gym!” (Or something along those lines.) Twelve years later she’s still working out religiously and now is so fit she not only looks 15 years her junior but could beat up most women that young anyway.


Of course, I would be lying if I said that exercise is the trump-all prevention for injury. Quite the opposite, in fact. The very point of athletics is to push the body to its limits and do it better than the competition. Runners end up with athlete’s foot for spending too much time in their shoes, tennis players dislocate shoulders swinging rackets for hours a day and basketball players develop shin splints just sprinting up and down on solid wood floors.

These injuries are not just normal consequences either. Every single woman I have ever played beside, regardless of the sport, has continued to play through an injury to “tough it out” and win and has often caused more damage for doing so. I have to admit, I’ve done it myself. I once dislocated a finger during a rugby game, popped it back in, and continued playing. I had to spend a month and a half punching without my left hand at kickboxing classes, but that didn’t stop me from trying. When I complained to my trainer about how bloody long it was taking to recover she looked at me, raised an eyebrow and said, “Honey, you play rugby.” Oh yeah.


At home for Christmas holidays shortly after I’d made a lightning bolt out of my finger, I spent the better part of the first hour in my parent’s kitchen with my mother clucking over my tape-covered hand.

“Nishy, you really should be careful. What if it doesn’t get better? We’ll have to chop it off.”

“Yeah, but look what I can do!” I dropped to the linoleum floor and proceeded to do more full push-ups than most women my age and definitely more than my parents dreamed me ever capable of when I was fourteen. And to be honest, my first basketball practices mostly involved me holding my body off the floor from my knees, trembling slightly at the thought of actually lowering myself to the ground with my own strength. Dad, watching from the kitchen table, asked what sort of work out schedule I was running on these days and nodded along as I rattled off my weekly routine.

“So long as you still have time for school,” he said. “And take a break if your body needs it. Don’t over-exert yourself, sweetie; it can be just as bad for you as no exercise at all.”

He’s right, of course, though I still have a hard time believing it. The problem with exercise is that the hormone release and the resulting “runner’s high” experienced makes it surprisingly easy for a serious athlete to over-train. One of my best friends, for example, has spent the last eight months doing nothing but training to improve his fight statistics and – though he doesn’t see it – is experiencing some considerable symptoms as a result: insomnia, moodiness and a compulsiveness to exercise. And after every two months of hard time at the gym, his body has developed a tendency to crash completely and leave him so sick he can hardly crawl out of bed.


Getting back from the gym over the break, I flopped down on the carpet in my living room and channel-surfed my way to a rerun of The Biggest Loser. I adore the way pitting a bunch of people against each other in a weight-loss competition is ridiculous and extreme, but still manages to showcase the hard work I admire. Plus, you know, I get to feel like a rockstar just watching it. Thirty burpies? Whateeeever. Two hundred crunches? Puh-leeze. Not to mention that the episode that I’d found was one from the beginning of the season, when all of the contestants range from extremely to morbidly obese and simply getting to the show counted as exercise for them.

I watched as they set up a challenge, huddling the players as close to each other as their girths would allow and explaining that they would be walking up a set of slowly rotating escalators to find out who could stay on the longest. Great, I thought, popping baby carrots into my mouth. This is going to be the most exciting show ever. They all waddled up the stairs, took their positions and, once the buzzer sounded, began huffing their way upwards. Two minutes and thirty six seconds later, it was over. Seriously. I just about choked on my carrot. That was it? That was all that an entire quarter of the North American population was capable of?

Fuck the bruises, sore muscles and scars that I am covered in; at least I can move. Thanks to the dogged-asshole insistence of my parents, I never forgot how to run after a ball, or how good sweating feels, or how to bike to school or make my muscles scream. I get to walk down the street knowing I look good doing it and knowing that I can run to catch my bus. I could have been another one of the 5.5 million obese Canadian adults. I could have run the greater risk of premature death, diabetes, heart, stroke, breathing problems, and arthritis. But instead, I feel strong. I feel healthy. And I’m capable of rocking short shorts while kicking some serious ass.

Egyptian Royalty

“Hey Lady! Yeah, where you from? England, Habibti? America?”

In a street the size of my apartment hallway, surrounded by tables of glass hookahs and plastic pyramids, I stand out.

“Lady, very beautiful, very beautiful! Come here, Habibti!”

A heavyset man sweating in the evening heat calls to me from his seat, gesturing at the door of the jewellery shop beside him, his legs tucked away from the tourists filing through the city bazaar. The next vendor jumps into the path my mother and I are exploring, getting close enough to put a hand on my back and for me to smell the day’s work on his skin. Not that the air doesn’t already reek of flavoured smoke and familiar men in close quarters.

“Look, Habibti, I have special price for you, you so beautiful. Where you from? I have special price, look.”

I smile appreciatively, but don’t stop to browse; neither Mom nor I have any need for highlighter yellow t-shirts. I am not the only white woman on vacation, nor am I the only one to warrant a Habibti, or “my darling”, as I wander with my mother, fingering the scarves and nosing the spices. But I am one of the few under fifty, and the only one to stand six feet tall; next to my five-foot-two-and-a-quarter, 51-year-old mother, I might as well be covered in gold.

Walking anywhere through sandy Cairo has earned me a slew of stares, calls and questions. After all, my stature means that I stand a head above most of the men in the Egyptian capital and that there is just that much more ankle to stare at under my long skirts. In the mosques, I’m given gowns for decency (though they hardly covered more than my own clothes did); in the streets, school girls come to touch my hair and tell me their names; in the restaurants, my mother is offered camels for my hand - and with her years of market bartering, she could easily make a fortune. More than a handful of strange locals pull me into embraces only to take out cell phones for pictures and gather around to discuss my dimples in bubbling Arabic as Mom watches, smiling slightly and bobbing her head to the local music. The Egyptian attention has made me into royalty.

Arm in arm with my mother, I pull her away from a tobacco shop and it’s greasy, bearded vendor and towards one of the silver-packed windows that line the alleyway. I direct her around a puddle caught in the bricks and we stop in front of a dusty ledge to check out the jewellery.

“Oh, that one looks nice, honey,” she says, patting my hand fondly and nodding at a simple, hoop necklace.

“Hey! Look at you, beautiful! Habibti, come here so I can see you.”

I tug on Mom’s arm again, towards the woven straw sacks a few stalls down and farther from the tobacco vendor. Between the layers of hanging linen and above the humid smoke, the smell of a hundred spices rise like a wall from the sacks. I pause just outside to let Mom don her reading glasses and examine the labels.

“Oh, wow, Habibti, wow. Come to talk to me, Habibti. Where you from?”

She is squinting at a bag of saffron; I ignore the tobacco vendor.

“Oh, the things I can do to your body, Habibti.”

Mom snaps.

“Excu-use me?” She turns face-to-sweaty-chest with the bearded man; glasses perched on her nose, saffron clenched in her fist. “Who do you think you are?” She put a finger up to his face and he sputters. “How dare you talk like that to my daughter?” Every word becomes slower, clearer; she perfected the art of the oral-lashing years ago. “How dare you be so rude? And in front of her mother.”

Staring at my little, bespectacled mother, he backs up. The other salesmen stop pressing in on us and Mom takes full advantage of her stage.

“How dare you say things like that. Did your own mother not raise you right? Who do you think you are?”

The tobacco vendor’s beard waggles and accented apologies begin to tumble out; he means no disrespect, his mother would never have raised him like that, he is very, very sorry. At this point, Mom decides she’s had enough, puts her arm back through mine, and marches towards the crowded exit of the bazaar.

“Wait, Madame, wait! I know people, I will get you good prices! Respect, Madame, respect!” He follows us past the silver stores, around circles of men sipping tea and puffing smoke rings, and under banners of pashmina scarves.

“Madame, please! I want to give you good price. Take my business card.”

Mom pauses, and he shoves an apologetic hand towards her, waving his little card in the air. I stand behind her, watching as he begs her wide-eyed to accept his small paper offering of penitence. She huffs - too good for anything less than gold - turning once again to walk out as I tail her, all eyes on my mother.

“I‘m sorry Madame! Have a good evening, Madame!”

I was really just a lady to the queen.

Stations

Arrivals

Two visible clocks? Check. Grease stained, gum smeared cement floors? Check. Well used vending machine? Check. And – oh, look! – the couple making out. They’re my favourite part. Awkward, I know, but watching kids lock braces somehow beats staring at train station floors for three hours. After all, I’d already named every trampled, grey piece of gum I’d seen and pushed a mountain range of cigarette butts together with my feet (being sure to avoid Lucy, Rex, Godzilla and friends); there was nothing more novel to find here than at any other station.

I was mid-adventure and ready to move on. I’d been waiting on my connection from Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof to my grandmother in Prague since noon and the end of platform 12 had not gotten any more exciting as the sun had come down. I expected the long wait but, this being the sixth time in two weeks that I’d had to sprawl over my luggage for a seat, I’d gotten somewhat bored of naming gum and memorizing train schedules. Though, on the bright side, this station’s schedules were yellow and blue, just like the ones in Switzerland.

**************

I was fifteen when I first remember experiencing a real train station; not the day to day, inner-city, light-rail transit BS I’d grown up with, but one that connected not only cities, but entire countries. My new host mother and I were lugging everything I owned and a pair of skis through the tunnels beneath Zurich airport, dodging people until we found our platform. I hadn’t thought that the first thing I’d be doing off the plane was finding my way to a train, nor had I ever imagined a train station could be so… station like. Ducking our way through crowds determined to get somewhere, all I managed were glances from the back of my host mother’s head to the rows of business yellow schedules and billboards along the halls. The platforms were endless, everything was Swiss standard clean, and I had a million questions to ask the woman I hardly knew in front of me. What on earth was a “Gleis?” Wasn’t I here to learn French? How long was the train ride? Where were we going to be living? Like hell I could have even asked; instead, I swung my 45 pound suitcase into the carriage after her and informed her that, “Le train, c’est grand.”

**************

Stepping off the train and into the dry, orange heat of Barcelona’s Estación de Tren years later, I walked into my next adventure. Here, I was alone and eager to test the limits of my Spanish vocabulary. Voices echoed from floor to three story ceiling, chattering at me in bits and pieces as I made my way down the long platform, clutching my purse to my chest and staring at the dark women around me. God, I hoped I was well enough dressed. Jesus, what if the job was a scam and that 6 hour train ride a waste? Not like wasting any more time to panic in front of a cracked girls’ room mirror would do me any good at this point, anyway. I paused in the main hall to reorganize my bags, took a deep breath, and continued through the evening crowds, past a graffitied vending machine, until I found the Salido and street beyond.

Connections

One of the first times I ever got right hammered, I ended my glorious evening hugging the rim of a public toilet as a friend shoved french-fries down my throat. We were killing another Friday night and all thirteen of us had congregated to hang out in the middle of the local train station, sitting on the wooden benches in front of the McDonald’s and doing what teenaged exchange students do best. We were spilling cheap vodka by 9 and drunk by 9:30. Our group got rambunctious, throwing made-up French and bad grammar at each other until we echoed between the tire-sized clock and the arrivals board at the end of the fluorescent hall. This being Switzerland though, nobody said a damned thing until I ran to the garbage can, sticking my head sideways through the open slots, and tried to vomit inside unsuccessfully.

**************

I’d been fanning myself with a folded piece of my itinerary for the last twenty minutes, staring out the window to watch an older madame leaning on the sandy brick ledge and dragging at her smoke. Why had they even bothered with the “No Smoking” sign? By the time I got off the train, not a single one of the dozen smoking passengers prowling the platform could care less about the palm-sized sign, nor the announcement reminding them that smoking in train stations was no longer legal in France. I had abandoned my bags on the train and, wiping at the sweat sitting beneath my hairline, decided to abandon the heat too. Glass doors parted as I entered the air conditioned building, revealing a giant board of arrivals and departures with more empty slots than there were platforms outside. Apparently there had been an “accident of persons” ahead of us that needed to be scraped off the tracks and we all would be waiting for hours thanks to the inconsiderate asshole. I had people to meet and places to discover – just not very quickly. So I wandered into the dusty streets of town but, seeing nothing save a few sandy, crooked buildings and a bank machine, I went back to my platform. Leaning into a corner shaded from the midday sun, I lit a smoke to kill time.

**************

We were supposed to be traveling from the pyramids in Cairo to the temples in Luxor and the train was late. The air smelled like garbage. The people were too pushy. And what did he mean there were no bathrooms? I had come with a tour group and was doing everything I could to make it look as though I hadn’t. I had dragged my bags across the stained floors to the far wall of the crowded platform and sat on top of them, arranging my purse underneath me and my sweater across every open piece of skin I had to avoid foreign scrutiny. Even from here, my shorts-clad group was just as conspicuous against the robes and full suits of the local Muslims as a herd of cattle in a grocery store. I sighed, leaning back against the cement to watch the group buddy up with our tour guide. It was the only way I was going to see Egypt, so be damned if I had to be seen in public places moo-ing sweetly at whatever was put in front of me. I just hoped that no one would start vocally craving McDonald’s in the middle of the local station crowd before we managed to get onto the train and out of sight. I glanced at my watch again and turned to the nearest billboard, decidedly examining Arabic advertising.

Departures

She wasn’t quite sure I would make the train on time; even once we were there thirty five minutes early, coffee in hand, and seated on the very platform I was to depart from. There were maybe two other people, a Czech guard and an accepted silence hanging on the open-air cement. Save, of course, my grandmother’s hopes that I work hard in school, wishes that my brothers and parents were doing well, and occasional speculations as to whether the train was even coming that morning. Though that was quickly answered as a shaking carriage pulled up in front of the wooden bench my grandma and I had gotten comfortable on. We’d been up late last night, drinking that last bottle of wine and wondering where we might like to go next, if either of us made it there. Her soft arm in mine, I walked her to my door and once she’d confirmed my cabin with the guard and watched me put away my luggage, I stepped down from the carriage to say goodbye to her and Prague for what I hoped would not be the last time. Cheeks red with her lipstick, I left to sit at the next window from the door, and waved until I couldn’t see her standing on the concrete ledge anymore.

**************

He tottered towards us down the platform, hollering back to his friends before stopping to lean on the bright red vending machine beside us and ask us where we were from. A bottle popped out of his bag, open and far from full. I looked him over and raised an eyebrow; he was way too fucking scrawny to be able to drink that much. He had appeared just as me and my girlfriends were getting off the train, on our way to raise hell and lower expectations, and admitted he’d overheard our English on the train in to town. Then I told him I was Canadian and he got excited, smashing a hand against the plastic window of the machine with a “noo way.” He was too and he was determined to show a fellow countryman a good time, so we exchanged numbers in the glowing, late night lights of the station hall before heading our separate ways.

He stayed with his family in Switzerland after I went back to mine; graduating high school, working his way through law school, and perfecting the art of lighting a joint with a full glass in hand. A few scattered reunions later, we stood lounging against the grey railings of a different station, my bags between us, as we worked out just where and when we would meet next. It would have to be somewhere, sometime, for some sort of awesome adventure; who gave a shit about the specifics. The train rolled in, cutting us off from a billboard of Venice we’d just been contemplating, and he heaved my bags to me once I’d gotten inside. Dangling out of the train door into the morning air, I gave him a peck as he stood in front of a blue and yellow schedule to thank him for his hospitality, only to be yelled at.

“No, no! We’ve got to do this properly!” he said, kissing my right, left, and then right cheek again before jumping back onto the smudged concrete. I stood with my face pressed between blurred handprints as the train pulled out and mouthed another à bientôt !

Hunting Lost Causes

Fuck. Fuckity fuck fuck. I’m on my hands and knees, throwing dirty jeans and grey socks over my back, stopping only to paw at every sweater pocket I come across. Goddamn son of a bitch. I sit back on my heels, sigh and smack my thighs; it’s a lost cause and I know it. What is this, number fucking thirteen? This one cost me a fortune too; camera, mp3s and flat as a credit card. The first one, at least, had been just black and white.

****

We were on a mission and as wild as supervised, suburban fourteen-year-olds could want to be. No sprints, no push ups, no defensive drills; just dead balloons, yellow sunglasses and four and a half oranges. There I was, scavenging with the basketball girls, and my mom had let me borrow her cell phone. Jesus, was I ever freakin’ cool. I called the dollar store, touched base with the other girls and wouldn’t let the phone out of my hand. Coach wanted to find out where the rest of the team was? I was on it. We needed a twist tie? I’d call dad! I was in the zone and ready for anything.

Suddenly, a need to make dinner plans arose and my hand shot into my pocket, already imagining the smooth flick with which I would open my cellular device and the resulting marvel of my team mates. My hand hit cloth, and I panicked, scrambling to grasp at both empty pockets three or four times before I even got that the phone wasn’t there. Nor was it on the seat, on the floor, or in the snow bank under the back tire. Oh God. That piece of luxury had been entrusted to me by my very own mother and it was gone. I was going to be in a whole lot of shit.

I still remember the lecture I got once I dragged my feet through the front door, up one side and down the other, until my “lack of responsibility” sunk into my “thick skull.” She then shoved me into the car to take me wading through ankle-high snow at each one of the seventeen different locations me and my team mates had gone scavenging. It wasn’t anywhere to be found, of course, and I spent the next two weeks staring at the ceiling in my room, knowing I would never lose a phone again.

****

I get back to my feet and shuffle towards the bedroom door, kicking at my backpack one last time in a vain hope to see the little black thing come tumbling out of its pouches. Fuuuck; nothing. I’ve done this so many times now that I know the drill by heart. I lean into the hallway and ask loudly to borrow a phone from someone; I’ve got to make sure the local shop has my model – their cheapest – in stock so I can pick it up ASAP. Once I get it, I’ll call Mom and tell her I’ve been busy for the last couple of days.

Babi

“I probably shouldn’t say this to you,” my Czech grandmother tells me in the middle of Prague as we walk through a very busy park, “but I don’t like Czech people. They’re not very… intelligent.” She then goes on to explain, in the true style of a woman both in love with historical details and now slightly senile, how the invasions of the communists and the establishment of the Czech Republic as a worker state ran anyone with any degree of intellect out of the country. And it is exactly for that reason that she likes living in the middle of the old quarter with all the tourists. “At least they’re not Czech.”

This, of course, might be shocking coming from any other 82-year-old, chocolate-toting grandmother, but from my Babi? Never. Not after having received calls from her telling me that having many “friends” as opposed to “one friend” – by which she means boyfriends – is much better at my age (after all, I need to be “free”) and that stupid people are boring. Not when she tells me she would have gone to university earlier but was too proud to spend a year pulling potatoes as the communists dictated, or that she thinks lip rings would get in the way of kissing properly. Not when, at breakfast, she asks me how many bottles of wine we’ll need for the day.

Visiting with my Babi has always been a treat; especially as I got older. The more I grew into myself the clearer it became that my parents would never need a Maury Show DNA test and I was quite obviously my grandma’s own. We’ve always been the “soft science” outcasts of the family – discussing sociology, language, and wine– and neither of us seem to be capable of functioning on our own. During an evening out, one of my cousins told me that he and his parents often had to put my Babi directly into a cab otherwise she would neither leave nor find her way home. Ironically, that same evening I somehow made my way to her apartment only to find myself incapable of actually fitting the key in her door. The next morning, between a couple of Advil, a litre of water and after having declined the offer for more wine, Babi told me that it must have been very difficult to know which key was which at 4.30 in the morning; naturally, it had nothing to do with my blood alcohol percentage.

Living through the Russian occupation, Babi was never permitted to leave the country, let alone travel. My grandfather – an international marketer of communist goods – spent years bringing trinkets home from around the globe until the two of them made a break for Switzerland and travelling liberty. Since then, I doubt there’s a cruise ship they haven’t boarded, a flight they haven’t taken, or a restaurant yet to serve my Babi wine. When I was ten my grandfather passed away, leaving his poor wife to open her own cans, fry her own eggs, and call her own taxis. Since, with an empty house and places to see, none of the family could tell you exactly where at any given moment my Babi can be found – maybe Turkey, France perhaps, or the middle of the Mediterranean – or whether she’ll have time to talk were you to call.

The night before leaving her hundred-year old apartment, we finished one last bottle of wine and plotted our next rendezvous. Maybe La Palma, Paris, or somewhere in Melanesia. We’d have to find the perfect halfway point; somewhere with good restaurants and centuries of history where we can spend the day meandering from cafe to cafe and all night exchanging stories. Only next time, I’ll bring the wine.

Polish Nutrition

“Here, what would you like?” I say, brandishing a can of tuna and some crackers in a friend’s face as he sat patiently waving away my advances. “Popcorn. D’you want popcorn? I might have some. You sure you’re not hungry?” I continue pulling things out of my fridge and cupboards until he agrees to have some of my left over lasagne and I sit across from him, sipping on chocolate milk and completely self satisfied.

Visits with my mother’s (and polish) side of the family has always meant meeting relatives I never knew existed, struggling through conversations in broken English, cheek pinches, ass pats and being fed more than I could possibly have needed as a girl of any age. Wandering in and out of the kitchen, my Babcia would tsk at how “skinny” I was and my aunts were consistently disappointed when I declined a fourth helping of dinner. After all, I was their unfortunate guest and there to be fed, watered and pinched.

As I got older, though, it became clearer that it was not only some odd poor-country impulse but something that simply made them happy. I tried for years to turn down the generous, albeit constant offers for food or drink and my polish family were not only disappointed, but ridiculously persistent. At the very least I would need to eat some fruit and have a drink. It took a couple of years before I learned that I would have to pass from household to household tactfully eating only a small bowl of my Babcia’s homemade chicken soup so that I could manage to eat one of the sandwiches my aunt had made and later the cakes presented to me by a great aunt twice removed, each one of them carefully watching and beaming as I forced my way through the ninth meal of the day.

One family-filled month I spent a morning watching my grandmother butter half a loaf for breakfast and pondering how to subtly get rid of the pierogies she would feed me an hour later, directly before an aunt came to pick me up for lunch. My aunt in turn could not figure out why I didn’t finish the pot of rice that she had made alongside my tray of vegetable chicken only to ask “How about dessert, Nishy?” squeezing my face with her hands. Later that evening I would be treated to a reunion barbeque and half a bottle of Zubrowka vodka - to be chased with homemade cherry liqueur, of course. Despite being raised Canadian and lacking what I would see as an old country need to feed, my mother herself will sit me down the instant I get home from a flight, place a beer in front of me and then point inside her fridge asking what, exactly, I might like to eat. At least being Polish generally means I get a few beers or Vodka shots with my indigestion.

I believe my own symptoms surfaced around the time I was graduating high school and started taking on the sole responsibility of entertaining my friends. Before, I would have already microwaved myself a pizza pocket only asking “Oh, you want some too?” once I’d seen my friend eying my plate at the table. But gradually I got into the habit of sitting them down, grabbing them a glass and then running through the list of what was available in the cupboards. Having drinks at my house soon meant that everyone would be standing around the kitchen island while I chopped cheese and salami, occasionally interrupting the flow of conversation to squeal and run to the cupboards when I remembered the crackers.

On my way from the beach one day, leading a troop of drunk guys home for dinner before the bar and in the right frame of mind for some deep self contemplation, it hit me. “I’m fucking polish!” (while smacking my roommate for proper emphasis.) There I was, marching my friends to my kitchen so that I could dice carrots, boil pasta and watch to ensure that every one of them was properly fed and nurtured before a big night on the town. I was the very product of my genetics and bloody well incapable of denying it.

Some weeks later, sitting on a plane after a couple of days spent with my Babcia and doubting I could ever eat again, I found myself wondering if the guy beside me might like a few of the chips I had with me. He did, of course, look kind of undernourished.

Cattles and Wives

Over the course of a trip to Kenya, it came about that I wasn’t only there to crisp my pallid complexion or ooh and ah appreciatively over animals whose names and forms I wasn’t familiar with. It turned out that all along I had been wearing a For Sale sign.

Being female, nubile and whiter than I would like to admit became my own personal advertisement that simply begged the locals to make extravagant offers to the family patriarch. Our first day in the country decidedly lay out the course of the next few weeks for me; one bold shopkeep took it upon himself to bid the entirety of the Masai Mara, animals included. Thankfully, despite his affinity for the bush and the potential for a prime piece of property, my dad declined.

Several days afterwards, a discussion with two younger Masai warriors brought about the question of the going rate for your average wife and I discovered that not only is the concept of a “free” wife baffling to them, but that a man would need to be at least ten cattle rich to even think of asking a girl from her father’s care (further confirmation that I am worth a hell of a lot more than one steak dinner). The conversation finally ended with a declarative offering of fifty cattle for my hand in marriage, much to the delight of my younger, growing and protein voracious brother. Needless to say, my dad spent most of the vacation giggling.

Eventually, Dad even took it upon himself to offer me to the locals we happened to engage in conversation. A particular group of the Masai tribe acting public relations several kilometres and tens of species later ended up, much to their misfortune, conversing with my rather spirited family. After a thorough discussion of Dad’s appreciation of the local birdlife, he began animated, and Tusker beer enthusiastic, gesticulation in my direction while seeking out a proposal in exchange for my hand in marraige. Unfortunately for my pride, partway through some light-hearted negotiations, my mother let slip that I was incapable of cattle milking. My brideprice instantly dropped to the entirety of one chicken. Brilliant.

To this day, my parents claim that our tour through Kenya was not intended as one to settle me with a paying husband; all proposals were, apparently, spontaneous. Whether or not I can believe my parent’s denial that this was premeditated is still up for debate, however. They must be holding out for a better deal with an oil-rich Arab; why else would they have put up with my shit for this long?