When Frank Bronkowski, my father, was alive, he’d read and reread his Polish newspapers, the Gwiazda Polarna, the Nowy Dziennik. He’d speak no English on Sundays and drink a Polish beer. His pocket watch—brought from the old country—stands in its place of honor on the dining-room table. Next to it, Ma has fresh peonies in...
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Your Hit Parade: A Story
“If Mel Torme is ‘The Velvet Fog,’ shouldn’t I at least be ‘The Elegant Mist’? Surveys indicate that even during station identification, which this is, you enjoy hearing my radio voice. From the studio at the antenna farm, I, Luther Craft (formerly Larry Krabenhoff), read your news, weather, commercials. I take requests, introduce singers, bands. ...
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A Bowl of Stew: A Story
I can’t forget the sorrow of my lodge brothers when the doors closed to our beloved home. We had to pay a bill for a new roof, then the ice machine in the bar went on us. When the jukebox broke, we couldn’t play “Poland Shall Not Perish While We Live to Love Her.” Neighbors around...
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The Wand of Youth: A Story
When Francis Majewski escorts my sister to our back porch, he bows to her like a Polish nobleman, then hobbles home on walking crutches with hard leather cuffs that circle his forearms. Lesczyk Iwanowski, Gerald Bluebird, and I, Antek, stare at him, scratch our heads, call him “the Noble Pole.” He’s older than us. If...
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Dreams of Old Places
Wisconsin Highways 2 and 53 converge in the uplands east of Superior. From here, you see Duluth climb a hillside of 1.1-billion-year-old rock that geologists call “the Duluth Gabbro Complex.” Nearer still, Superior, Wisconsin, my hometown, sprawls back from Lake Superior, the Great Sweetwater Sea, as though, like the author of this reminiscence, unsure of...
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Leokadia and Fireflies
Named Stefanie Karawinski, I’m seventeen years old. The woman in the title of the story, Sister Mary Leokadia, is perhaps fifty. Because the nuns at my grade school here in Superior wear black habits and white, scarf-like wimples covering their hair and ears, I can’t tell their ages. They belong to an order founded for...
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A Geography of Snow: A Story
My father has to go out in a storm. An eight-hour shift at the gasworks, then two or three hours tomorrow morning, All Soul’s Day morning, in a bar where “Happy Hour” starts at 7:30 A.M. and ends at noon, and he’ll walk home through the snow stinking of beer and CH4, the chemical composition...