Poland and the Culture of Life

It's Friday night, and I am officially done for the week, although I didn't get much done yesterday after B.A.'s hospital visit, so I think I'll be working on a story or two tomorrow.

Here is one of two long pieces I worked on today. This is the Polish-comes-in-handy piece. The second piece (Update: now up) is the Italian-comes-in-handy piece. Toddle over to LSN and keep an eye out for it.

I read something very interesting the other day--an interview with Saint John Paul 2's great friend Cardinal Dziwisz. Cardinal Dziwisz observed that Poles send lots of money to charities helping refugees abroad (i.e. not in Poland), which is not something the Western press has thought fit to mention. Dziwisz was not in favour of Open Borders, which shows that he is sane. As we know, Poland's borders have been pretty vulnerable over the past 250 years.

The reason I didn't get much done after B.A.'s hospital visit is that we were both wiped out from the efforts of getting to the hospital and back again, especially as B.A. can't walk very much or see very well. At the hospital we were told that he wasn't going to lose the sight in his left eye after all. We didn't know his eye had been quite that bad, but apparently five weeks ago the back if it was a terrible mess of inflammation, haemorrhage and general nastiness.

Anyway, I think I was felled by the shock of the opthamologist's after-the-fact plain speaking. When we got home I whipped up a comforting pot of "stovies" (a kind of Scottish stew) made according to B.A.'s mother's recipe and cooked real custard and baked a real cake for a real strawberry trifle I assembled this morning for B.A.s' breakfast.

Marriage can be really hard. Have I mentioned? Marriage can be really hard because life can be really hard. Still, I am hoping we both come out of this brain-tumour misfortune better people.