Wedding Guest Dress Found!

Polish wedding attire

Trigger Warning: Post almost entirely about women's apparel.

“We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality,” said Oscar Wilde, who was wicked but nevertheless would have been fun to go shopping with. 

That said, I am not so sure finding a nice dress for Polish Pretend Son's wedding is so trivial anyway. 

First of all, I have only one Polish Pretend Son (so far). Second, there will be photographs. Third, Poles are very blunt, so there is always the danger that some other wedding guest might say "Who is that frightfully frumpy lady?", meaning me, and in my anguish I will once again forget how to speak Polish. 

So as devoted readers know, I have been popping in and out of Edinburgh shops looking for a splendid wedding guest dress. Until today I had only got as far as buying a navy blue Jacques Vert hat on sale. In the UK, Jacques Vert is the tried-and-true label for the aunts-mothers-and-grandmothers set, but his line-up this spring does not thrill me. There is also the problem of British women's wedding clothes looking a bit odd on the Continent. If you've ever happened upon an English destination wedding in an Italian church, you may know what I mean. 

That said, Polish Pretend Son and his Narzeczona are romantic about the UK--or Poland's glorious, hat-wearing, pre-Communist past--so the N. has asked her female friends to wear hats, and I snapped up the JV number. The £ to $ calculation would have made my frugal mother and grandmother (great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother et alia) blink, but I inwardly argued that the hat was large, tipped at a jaunty angle, and half-price. Also, I told my roiling Scottish-Canadian conscience, it is navy blue, and therefore highly practical, as navy is basically a neutral, my dear.  

Its purchase meant that I would have to find a dress to go with it, which was a worry because the shops are full of on-sale navy blue shift dresses and white dresses with navy blue large floral prints, and the wedding is in June. Does one want to wear a navy shift dress (or large floral prints) to a June wedding in rural Poland? No, one does not.

To improve my chances of finding something more exciting, I went to the charity and consignment shops of Morningside. Alas, I found nothing. I also looked online (and thank you to Alias Clio for suggestions) and scrolled through images of bright bohemian maxi-dresses. They did not suit. This morning Benedict Ambrose and I went to a very modish ladies' tailor shop and examined an azure tweed suit. Although value for money (£500, cough), it was totally inappropriate for a Polish wedding.

But then B.A. and I went to that Mecca of high-end charity shops, Stockbridge, and BEHOLD, we found a delightfully embroidered pale blue gown at the Red Cross emporium. As a denouement, we also found a beaded midnight-blue-lace-over-"nude"-slip shift dress at Oxfam. It was only £15, and B.A. said I ought to get it, so we went back to the Historical Shelter with two wedding dresses.

To my surprise, the navy JV hat goes better with the pale blue gown than with the midnight blue lace, so the pale blue gown wins. I will wear the midnight blue to the second, non-hat, Polish wedding I'm attending in June.

B.A. will be wearing a kilt to PPS's wedding. My sartorial drama is over, but B.A.'s continues because he has only a Prince Charlie jacket for the evening and still needs a jacket for the day wedding. B.A. has literally skipped a wedding ceremony because he does not own a day jacket. (Wearing an evening jacket before 4 PM is apparently akin to stabbing your own mother and dancing on her corpse.)  But he is not allowed to skip Polish Pretend Son's wedding ceremony, and so the hunt is on.

On Reporting News about the Pope

When I wrote for the Toronto Catholic Register, I was always conscious that it was a family newspaper that was read by people who knew my parents. It was available in the library of my nephew's elementary school and in the libraries of the two colleges I call my almas matrae. My favourite professors did not read my column, but the late janitor of the theologate did, bless him.

Therefore, I knew that the vast majority of my readers were "simple faithful", which is not an insult but praise. Most faithful Catholics do not bother their heads with church politics or theology but try to love God and their neighbour and do the right thing instead. Simple, in this context, means honest, straightforward, humble. And I did my best not to disturb my readers' simple faith

After the Star of Bethlehem episode, that is. I once wrote an article about how there might not have been a Star of Bethlehem, and a distressed member of the simple faithful, a friend in her late twenties, asked me how the Three Wise Men had found Baby Jesus then. After a second, during which a smarty-pants answer  trembled on my tongue, I said instead, "That's a very good question."

At the time I was not a trad; like many Lonerganians, I thought I was in Lonergan's "not numerous center." It was not until I went to Boston College that I knew I was perceived to be a ultraconservative, that rival factions of the American Catholic Church hated each other with a white-hot hate, and that I was now in left-wing Catholic HQ.

One target of left-wing Catholic hate at the time was Cardinal Ratzinger, whom many feared, and the hate blazed up into a fiery furnace when he was elected Pope. When the haters discovered that none of them had been fired, hatred simmered down to contempt. The contempt for "Rome" was like a poison gas floating through the halls. The paranoia, too, was contagious. One of my fellow PhD students broke out in a welter of fear because disgruntled conservative undergrads had written a letter protesting some inter-religious event or other.

Having been a Catholic tribalist and triumphalist all my life, that was all very hellish for me. And hating the hate with all my heart, I never imagined that twelve years later I would be in the thick of the Catholic civil war.  But just the other day I wrote a summary of a dozen articles reacting to the news that Benedict's successor had allegedly told a journalist pal that hell did not exist and that, instead of denying this with guns blazing, the Vatican had politely asked the world to discount the journalist pal's punctuation.

Yesterday morning I discovered that the Drudge Report had linked to this article. Yesterday evening I discovered that my parents may have read it. At any rate, they had heard the "Pope says there's no hell" story, and that made me very sad. It's only now that I realise that they must have heard about it from the Canadian television news last weekend.

It seems that the simple faithful cannot help but be scandalised after all. Only the really obtuse (or, to be charitable, the really frightened) can keep yelling "Fake News" at this point. We have a crisis on our hands, and it's not because there's a big anti-Francis plot that began the day he was elected. It's because there was a big anti-Doctrine plot hatched long before Francis was elected.

Crises often have good theological and doctrinal outcomes. In the first centuries of Church life, Christians battled each other in an attempt to get at the truths of faith. The truths were unchanging, but we didn't understand them right from Pentecost Day onward. The exact relationship of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost was a problem that had to be worked out. The role of the Son's human mother is salvation history had also to be worked out, and this was only finally pronounced upon in 1950.

A good that may come out of the present crisis would be a better understanding of what a pope is and what the papacy is. The star power of Saint John Paul II  blinded many of us to the dangers of overemphasising the person of the pope, and I see now that my convert mother was right to hold the papacy a little at arm's length.

We simple faithful were very proud of JP2 as a world figure, as an intellectual, and as a defender of deeply unfashionable Catholic sexual and reproductive ethics, that most of us weren't interested in discussing any theological defects he might have had. Had the internet been born 20 years earlier, there would have been a lot more screaming about his take on inter-religious dialogue, not to mention the excommunication of Archbishop Lefebvre.

It is probable that Pope Francis does not believe the Catholic faith the way that Benedict XVI believes, and Saint John Paul II believed, the Catholic faith. That's a problem. However, the bright side is that this is an opportunity for Catholics to prove to other Christians that we don't, actually, worship the Pope.

Almost twenty years ago, on my first visit to Rome, I overheard a Protestant tourist tell a nonbeliever that the difference between Catholics and Protestants was that Protestants believed the Bible but Catholics just did whatever the Pope told them to do. I was so utterly furious, I didn't know what to say. Besides, it is quite true that we expect the Pope---in communion with all the other Popes, with all the saints, doctors and Fathers of the Church---to mediate Scripture to us and help us understand how to be faithful to it through every age.

But just because we expect the Pope to do that doesn't mean he will. We have had atrocious Popes before, as historians are happy to point out, and we may have atrocious Popes again. We may have an atrocious Pope now, but it generally doesn't do to call living Popes names.

So that is more-or-less what I would say to the simple faithful. The Pope doesn't matter as much as Doctrine matters. The Pope is supposed to protect Doctrine, not Doctrine the Pope's relationship with his family, his friends and The New York Times. Therefore, one should listen to the Pope when he tells  the mafia that they're in danger of hell, and one should not listen to the Pope when he tells Eugenio Scalfari that hell does not exist.

"One Month": My Polish Tutor Weighs In

I may be becoming a language bore, but too bad. I spent the day writing about what the media thought of Hellgate and then about the epistolary correspondence of various bishops, so now I want to write about Polish. I could write about the fact that the actor playing TV-Jughead was seen canoodling with the actor playing TV-Betty in Paris, but I'm above such an inordinate desire to discuss  the private lives of thespians.

Before adding to the headaches of the Secretariat for Communications of the Holy See, I went to my favourite hipster cafe to chat with my Polish tutor and eat avocado toast. There was a bearded chap at the table next to us, writing in a notebook. At the table next to him there was another bearded chap. Really, it was all very hipster, and I hope we did not disturb the atmosphere of literary endeavour with our Polish chatter. I am inclined to think not, for the Polish language is very hipster in itself, if the speaker is not actually Polish and is wearing cat's-eye frames. 

I complained to my tutor at some length about the stupidity of Kobieta Sukcesu and my inability to understand its dialogue, thanks to the subtitles vying for my brain's attention and the psychological impossibility of becoming fluent in Polish in a non-Polish environment. 

My Polish tutor (or MPT as she will now be named) agreed that it is impossible to become fluent in Polish in a non-Polish environment but that linguistically gifted individuals do not need to spend a whole year in a total immersion context. For example, I would need only a month. 

I looked at MPT with myopic eyes of doubt. Nobody has ever suggested that your humble correspondent is linguistically gifted in anything but English, and I am not ready to return to the myth of giftedness anyway. Years of pondering the topic have led me to believe that adult language-learning is all a matter of rewiring one's brain and retraining one's tongue through years of toil. 

The MPT pointed out that she is graduate of linguistic science--at least, I think that's what she said--and therefore knew what she was talking about.  It occurs to me know that she also tutors other people in Polish, and I am her star pupil, so she probably does know what she is talking about. 

So that was rather cheering, even though I cannot imagine spending an entire month in Poland with--or even without--B.A. At least, no month soon, and I would have to be nestled in the bosom of a Polish family because I have learned that lodging in a Polish rectory is a recipe for loneliness and eye infections. 

Overcoming Yet Another Temptation To Quit

On Easter Monday I popped by the Odeon and saw that a Polish film is playing. This cinema often carries Polish films, not because it is artsy (it isn't), but because of the large Polish minority that lives in Edinburgh. Although I knew nothing about Kobieta sukcesu ("Successful Woman"), it had been a long time since I saw a Polish film, and I thought it would be a fruitful use of 90 minutes of my time.

I walked out well before the 90 minutes were up. 

Every nation has the right to make lousy films to entertain the less reflective and more easily entertained of its countrymen, I told myself later. Hollywood produces stupid movies all the time. Possibly Canada does, too. 

On the other hand, neither Canada nor Hollywood produces films that suggest that belief in premarital chastity is only for shamefully stupid bumpkins from the countryside, and only shamefully stupid bumpkins would believe that an engaged couple wouldn't be living together, having sex before marriage, etc., etc.  When the heroine's loving uncle and aunt turn up in Warsaw and utter these stupidities, I finally walked out. And I had had much to bear before then, believe me. 

I hate the idea that virtuous behaviour is laughable. I really, really hate it. I hate it because such an attitude is demonstrably bad for society, especially for the children of that society.  The children, the poor--everyone vulnerable. 

Besides that, I was disappointed that I had a hard time understanding the dialogue of the film at all. Ironically enough, this was partly because of the English subtitles. I find it very hard to hear what people are ACTUALLY saying in film when English subtitles pop up on a screen. It's not quite as bad in Italian, but Polish sentence structure is significantly different from English sentence structure, and I find it very hard to think in English and Polish simultaneously. However, I assume also that I had a general defect in understanding, which is terribly frustrating after six years of trying to learn this stuff. 

On Sunday I asked a European scientist who has been living in Edinburgh for some years now, how long it took her to stop having to think about English actively and just be able to understand and speak without thinking it all out. She said that it was sometime in her second year here. That was very crushing for me, for that meant it took over a year of immersion in an English-speaking city for a well-educated woman to get to that point. 

This is in part why I went to see this stupid film: to get a little extra immersion. However, I see that this was a big mistake in terms of morale. 

One thing the "Fluent in Three Months" school of thought advises is to pick your vocabulary.  This is because it is actually impossible to be fluent in three months unless you are a child in an immersion environment. It takes the native anglophone who is doing nothing but study for eight hours a day approximately 11 months to become fluent in a Slavic language. Therefore, if you want to start having proper conversations in your target language sooner rather than later, you have to think out what you are most likely to want to talk about.

Because I am never going to act out the unlikely scenarios of Polish comedies, there is really no point in watching them. My goals are to be able to function linguistically as a tourist, as a wedding guest, and as a reporter on the Polish pro-life movement, and then to be able to read Polish literature written after January 1863. I can already do this to some extent, but naturally I have endless room for improvement. The big question is--is it endless or will I hit a wall? Without immersion, is it psychologically possible to speak and listen with C-level fluency?

Touristic Ground Zero

Someone asked me yesterday if I would like to live permanently in Edinburgh's Old Town.

Hitherto, I thought I would like that very much. The Old Town has much to commend it. It includes the University, my favourite hipster cafe, excellent bakeries, and good shops. It has Blackwell's, probably Edinburgh's best bookshop. Cinemas for discerning grown-ups are within walking distance.

However, it also has clouds of swarming tourists.

To be honest, the tourist traffic is heavily concentrated between the National Museum and Princes Street. Although tourists do occasionally reach the Brew Lab, they are usually outnumbered by students. They are also largely absent from the upper reaches of Blackwell's, too. However, they choke the George IV Bridge and the Bow and other places where I need to walk to buy groceries, visit the post office, and get back to shelter when it rains.

I never realised that there were this many tourists in Edinburgh in March and early April, time of horrible weather. I thought that the city's appeal to tourists was mostly between May and September.  In August the city swells to double its size. In August about half a million tourists--mostly from England, I believe--turn up for the Edinburgh Festival(s), and I avoid the Old Town as much as possible.

Not usually misanthropic, I found myself today wishing the hoards of foreigners to blazes. For the first time I felt a deep sympathy with an ex-pat acquaintance in Italy who screams "Get out of my way!" at tourists blocking her path when she is in Rome. The first time I witnessed her rage, I was shocked. However, I now understand the motivation although not its underlying cause.

Why be angry with tourists? I'm a tourist myself once or twice a year. I was a tourist in Krakow in January, for example, in my foreign tweed coat  accompanied by my similarly tweed-coated foreign husband. Like  all the other foreigners we ambled through the Old Market and down Ulica Grodzka, went to Wawel Castle, and frowned at the restaurant price levied upon a bottle of water. Did some harried housewife hate our guts as we unknowingly impeded her way to the post office? Has she had enough of the endless procession of Brits trudging through her neighbourhood?

Normally I find it comical to fly from one of Europe's tourist hotspots to another: Edinburgh to Rome, Rome to Edinburgh, Edinburgh to Krakow, Krakow to Edinburgh, Edinburgh (once) to Paris, Paris to Edinburgh. The Edinburgh-Krakow flight at least has the honour of taking Polish workers home to see their families. The Edinburgh-Rome-Edinburgh flights are simply packed with tourists, British and Italian, either on holiday or coming back from holidays.

This is undoubtably good for the economies of all the cities involved. It may even be good for the architectural treasures of the cities themselves. Who knows what buildings have been spared the ravages of time and progress because foreign tourists love them and pay money to see them? If you love your town, it is illogical to dislike its tourists--unless, of course, they are prone to getting drunk and using public fountains and other monuments as urinals. And that would be the British abroad, not the relatively pacific crowd from the Iberian peninsula shouting outside my window right now.

Possibly the problem is that human beings don't like being crowded off their pavements by other human beings standing around gawking and exchanging remarks in foreign languages, the reptile brain being unable to distinguish between harmless travellers and occupying armies. Or possibly the problem is envy, as the tourists are obviously on holiday whereas the residents are not.

I recall one elderly Italian lady outside the St. Peter's railway station in Rome watching the steady stream of us foreigners emerging from the station and babbling past her.

"Che stronzi!" she shouted, an expression one was not taught in Mrs Angelini's Grade 10, 11 or even 12 Italian class.

At the time B.A. and I merely giggled and concluded that la signora was not entirely sane. However, it is possible that fifty years of mass tourism had finally got to the old bird, and she simply couldn't take it anymore.

Happy Easter!

Thanks for the sympathetic messages! I was just having a bout of homesickness, really. I cheered up greatly last night during Vigil Mass, especially when the Gloria began and I got to ring a bell. It took the skin off my index finger, but what the heck. Who knew bell-ringing could be so dangerous?

The TLM Easter Vigil done according to the Post-1955 rubrics is absolutely splendid. It lasts two and a half hours, so I highly recommend wearing low heels and dressing for the temperature. For eight months of the year in our little wooden church, that temperature is invariably COLD.

A remedy for homesickness is, of course, traditional foodstuffs, and I was very happy that when my poor, cold, overworked husband and I returned to our post-deluge flat from Mass, I could give him a big garlicky, marjoramy bowl of biały barszcz (white sausage borscht). Although his understanding of Polish is extremely limited, Benedict Ambrose does enjoy the food.

He was also happy to see the Easter lamb cake which, though yellow, actually looks woolly, for that is how my buttercream icing turned out. This is thanks to the happy accident of not having an electric beater. If you beat up buttercream frosting with a spoon, hey presto, wool. But I have not yet learned how to produce white buttercream icing. Usually I make marshmallow icing (aka "white mountain frosting"), which comes very close to the desired colour, thanks to all the egg whites.

B.A. had to go to work this morning--Easter for Christians is Spring Chocolate Blowout for Scotland, and thus opening weekend for any cultural institution with a field that can be used for "egg" hunts--so we had our Easter Breakfast right after Easter Vigil.  We sat around eating barszcz, bread and chocolate and listening to Easter hymns and organ music on youtube.

B.A. insisted I listen to this rather modern organ piece, and I was edified to hear that it was based on the actual chants of the Easter Vigil Mass, beginning with "Lumen Christi".  Really, it is an impoverishment to be Catholic but not experience the wonderfully rich liturgies of the pre-1963 era.

A Home in Ruins

Yesterday I went back to the Historical House with Benedict Ambrose to pick up a bag of utensils and ingredients for making our traditional Easter Sunday breakfast. He went straight to his office, and I went up the old servants' staircase, as usual, to the attic. The slightly musty smell was discouraging, but at least my slippers were waiting for me under the hall chair, where I left them last time. The slippers are necessary because various carpets have been pulled up and occasional floorboards removed.

I clandestinely straightened up the place while we still lived in a hotel in the neighbourhood, over a month ago, but workmen have gutted the bathroom and moved our furniture out of the way of their operations, which seem not to have taken place for a week--except for the removal of the bathroom sink. It is very odd to see your bathroom without a sink. I think the sink is now on the floor of the guest room, aka my dressing room. My actual dresses are on a coatrack in the front hall--with the exception of my wedding dress, which--thank heavens--was in a wardrobe in my office when the Deluge occurred. 

The air was and cold and dank. Very depressing. 

I have been thinking about what makes a dwelling a home when you or your family don't, in fact, own it. If you're not allowed to alter it in any way, with paint, or wallpaper, or new fixtures, let alone ever light a candle or permit a guest a quiet smoke, how is it a home? 

My conclusions are that what makes a home are the memories that you create in it, which in the case of a family could begin with the first family meal there and perhaps a toast to the new dwelling. The attic of the Historical House teems with memories, from my first visit almost ten years ago to the departure of Polish Pretend Son and Daughter-in-Law-to-Be the day before the Dreadful Event. 

Memories of the Historical House involve a lot of parties and a lot of visits. This may because we don't have any children, and suddenly I am reminded of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Oh dear. Not a good analogy. No wonder B.A. doesn't want me to get a pug. 

Last Easter was utterly splendid because the house was so full of guests I am not sure where I put them all. I am astonished now to recall just how much I cooked and baked. Polish Pretend Son, who is very anti-sugar, nevertheless kept cutting and eating slices of mazurek krolewski with a greed that filled me with cook's pride.

It was an extra-merry Historical House weekend, first because one of our friends got married on Easter Monday, and second because Benedict Ambrose seemed to have cheated death. It is, of course, a great mercy that none of us knew B.A. and I would soon be fighting for his life, through the long and frightened months, and that the following Easter we would be squashed into a tiny flat meant for weekend tourists.

I am not sure what the moral of that story is except to say that it is a good thing to surround yourself with friends and family, when you can, and cook them splendid meals, when you can, because later you might not be quite so lucky.

Another moral is to try to make the best of disaster and salvage what you can from the wreckage, even if that is just a baranek (lamb cake) pan and a jar of marjoram for Easter zurek. This reminds me that I must get off the sofa and buy some butter, so that B.A. and I can at least have a decent Easter Sunday breakfast, poor childless couple that we are.

And while we reminisce about our splendid Easter breakfasts of the past, we will hope for equally splendid Easter breakfasts in the future. Perhaps in time we will even look fondly on our little sojourn in the city centre. In a few years, we won't remember that our stay was cramped and lonely; we will probably think of it as quirky and charming.