isoglossia

This post is dedicated to Gaoo whose genuine interest in my Polish diary I found really touching. I’m afraid, though, that once Gaoo learns what my writing is about, she will never, ever, ever, ever want to read anything by me again.

I’m not quite sure if that comes from the emigrant syndrome or it comes with age but I can’t help but thinking that I’ve recently become marginally sentimental. Or, it also came to my mind, is it just that innate Polish-ness that draws me to meticulous reorganizing and cleaning up every time Christmas appears on the horizon. This year the phenomenon crept upon me unexpectedly around mid-November and, just in accordance with my recent tendency to minimize the amount of work that I actually do, I’ve been trying hard to introduce some logic to my photo archives.

Unfortunately, every single picture I come across brings some precious memories or bright thoughts, hence all I do is spend time trying to determine when, or where, or under what circumstances, or - most of all - why a certain picture was taken. Why’s appear every time I see myself doing something awfully embarrassing, or wearing clothes that no one else would wear even if that were to mean showing up naked. The biggest WHY of all, though, is the why that appears every time I’m trying to convince myself that I do belong to the family of S. (Slovenian branch, I mean, Elsa and Gaoo are my sisters no matter what).

Ever since Adam’s and later Alek’s arrival to this world I’ve been frantically trying to find some obvious resemblance between my sons and me. And the more I investigate, the more likely it appears that somebody here is trying to make me believe that these kids are mine as watching them on a daily basis I see no traces of me in either of them whatsoever. Duped? I might have been, yet facing the situation as it is, let’s at least make a humble attempt at placing myself within the family. So here’s my way of thinking.

The likeness of the two below is just uncanny, so there is no need to go into any discussion here.

The search for similarities between Adam and me, though, turned out to be more than challenging. Having found nothing or very little (two legs, two arms, one head analogy, mostly) that we have in common presence-wise I can always use JDS’s argument. Yet since I once choose not to believe what people say, I had no other way but to find some highly twisted sophisticated argumentation.

Which, by the way, I arrived at while browsing through our photo archives.

There is a whole set of pictures taken more than thirty years ago by AWB (respec!) with, probably, an old Smiena which constitutes a very vivid memory of my childhood as one of the treasures hidden in the front room cabinet together with family photographs and other stuff whose preciousness can only speak to an average Pole who experienced the eighties there.

So here are the photographs:

Which might seem familiar to those who read the weblog regularly and remind them of another photograph:

Which photograph depicts Aleksander Julian, brother of Adam Horace whose irrefutable affinity with JDS remains undoubted.
Of course I am aware of the fact that brotherhood between the two needs more evidence. So, let’s consider this:

Oh, no! That’s not the same baby seen from two different angles. Adam on the left, Alek on the right, right?
Both at more or less the same age, precious three months.

Thus…
Since Alek does appear to resemble Adam who, in turn, is undoubtedly JDS’s son and, at the same time, there is all evidence that me as a baby and Alek as a baby bear some common traces, I can quite safely assume that there are some elements of me in Adam, right?

Luckily, I can always go beyond physical resemblance and remember the heart-warming fact that Adam’s character, at least, resembles mine. He shows more or less the same amount of misanthropy as I do.

That, though, calls for another post.