CELEBRATING THE 4TH POLISH-STYLE

The party at the Ambassador's Residence ended pretty soon for the group that I was with. We just didn’t speak Polish, and we could only participate in the glory of this day for the Poles from a distance, since we did not share their recent history. But we made long, fast friends, and our friends did not want to give us up too easily. So we all took taxi’s back to the Marriott.

Kuba, Andrjez and Dr. Janick all wanted to continue the celebration of the 4^th, but Martha, Craig, Alan, Brian and Scott were suffering mightily from jet-lag. I did not want the evening to end, myself. Here were young men, in their early 30’s, who founded a new nation and who wanted to spend time with some dopey Americans on the 4^th of July to celebrate the fact that they had something to celebrate. Being with these three men caused me to reflect on how our Founding Fathers must have felt when they won the Revolutionary War, even though it was impossible. I began to appreciate the awesome feeling that must have come over them when they came to the realization that their IDEAs came into the world as a reality. How impossible . . . How unbelievable ... How "Fantastic" (a favorite English word of the Poles). So I gleefully went with them to the bar at the top of the hotel, the Panorama bar.

I bought the drinks – now I don’t drink, thank goodness – because the amount of drinking that went on would have surely put me in a coma and I would not have been able to remember anything we talked about or did.

We managed to confiscate the balloons that decorated the bar, and proceeded to play volleyball around the table with them. This caused loud laughter, and opened the door for them to talk about what it was like to live under Communism – About how they would never have been allowed to drink, laugh and play volleyball in a bar/restaurant as this would have been deemed abnormal behavior, and they could be imprisoned for that. I just stared at them as they told me a million stories like this. I just couldn’t imagine what the quality of life in a place like this would have been like.

Then I remembered Walter Whipple telling me that when he lived in Poland under communism, it was always safe to walk the streets – whether in the middle of the day, 3 in the morning – it didn’t matter. The jails were over-flowing, and there was no crime to speak of. I guess it makes perfect sense (and perhaps it would work here), that if you were hauled off to the poky for acting “funny” how would anyone ever dare to commit an actual crime? What would the punishment be for say, stealing: Death? Torture? Siberia?

We stayed up until 3 in the morning. I had to catch a train with the rest of the gang to Gdansk at 7:00A – so I finally broke up the party. We had really become fast friends. We were forever bonded from this day forward. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for these men if it were in my power – and I knew that there was nothing they wouldn’t do for me if it was within their power also.