Americaa

By Tad Kosewicz

"Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country" – John F. Kennedy, Ted Sorensen.

Yeah, I met this Ted Sorensen. His brother Bob invited me to live in his family’s brownstone on the Upper East Side when I landed in New York. Bob was a Princeton professor at the time, but the person who recommended me to him and whose husband worked with him for the Radio Free Europe back in Western Germany, told me that they thought he worked for the CIA. Could be, because Ted himself was a shoo-in for a CIA director under Carter, until Chappaquiddick came up.

John F. I didn’t meet, because he was shot dead before I came. But later on, when I got bored with a library gig at Pace University and hired out as a busboy for the Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel, there was an old waiter there, Fred. Donald Trump, who bought The Plaza for a while for his then-wife paying her one dollar a year and for all the dresses she’d pick, would put up a plaque in the Oak Room right next to George M. Cohan’s on Fred’s 50th anniversary with the joint, pure Don.

Fred came from Italy as a kid and became a busboy, like me. One day he said to me, I like how you work, you have gusto. I didn’t know the word but looked it up and it was good. And Fred told me that when he served John F. that John F. had pea soup and a Heineken. Pea soup and a Heineken, it felt like I got to know John F. too, just a little bit.

Anyway, I better start on the story because you ought to know that this way for you is out there too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tad Kosewicz
• Release date: Nov 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005891787

Tad Kosewicz

Tad Kosewicz is the pen name of Tadeusz Korzeniewski. He has lived in Poland and then in America half a life in each. He won the Kościelski Prize for writing in Polish, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for writing in English. He lives in Seattle.He was born in the family of a WWII Home Army fighter. He studied electronics and philosophy, then joined the pre-Solidarity anti-Communist movement as an occasionally arrested underground writer and printer. His book "W Polsce" [In Poland] was published in the underground in 1981, and in England by an émigré publishing house. In 1984 it was awarded the Koscielski Prize. In 2005 Newsweek Polska ranked it as one of the Polish Books of the Century. In 2010 it was republished in post-Communist Poland, with prominent voices calling for including it in the school curriculum.In 1981 he moved from Poland to France and then on to New York (1983), Montana (1992), and Seattle (1998), where he lives today. In New York he worked as a busboy at the Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel. In Montana he worked on the Flathead Reservation in a burger joint. His first job in Seattle was as an office furniture installer on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. Of the many gigs he has done for a living in America, he most values his job as a security guard, guarding the Lansdowne portrait on its cross-country tour.He began writing in English around 1990. Generous America responded right off with a string of fellowships: from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and more. At first, he wrote about his country of origin. The trouble started when he turned to the American stuff and hit the third-rail issues, his game. He was still fairly naive about the country, he thought that now since he was in America he could publicize the truth as he pleased. The contemporary American publishing world was just itching for it to be dropped on their desks, he imagined. Boy was he in for a surprise. To get ready to flatten that check, and like many before him, he hit the roads West. The year was 1992.In 2014, already on the other side of the country in Seattle, he published the paperback in English "To Wyoming" (in Polish "Do Wyoming," 2013). In 2018 he hardened it as "Americaa," the first in a series of ebooks on Europe, America, and Europeans worldwide. In 2022 came "Seattle." Substack's "Aurora Bridge" is set for 2024.Starting in 2022 (which also applies to all previous writings) Tadeusz Korzeniewski uses the pen name Tad Kosewicz.The photo: in Seattle 2004

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Tad Kosewicz

AMERICAA

Copyright © 2022 Tad Kosewicz

All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

The Hudson

West Point

Palmyra

Detroit

Iowa

Wyoming

Childhood

Montana

Acacia Street

The Komsomolets

A Skirmish

A Blast

Megan

A House

A Dream

The Sun

The Author

I am on 9W rolling north along the Hudson.

The good thing about country driving is that your body drives and your mind can beat the bushes. Back in ancient Greece our folks who liked to beat the bushes went out for long walks. They gave their bodies something to do, like parents to their kids, and had the brains for themselves. A whole school of peripatetic philosophy came out of that, peripatetikos meaning walking in Greek. But country driving is no slim picking either, especially if you don’t have to turn home. I don’t, a half-hour ago I left New York.

Before the Euros came here the locals had called the Hudson the river-that-flows-two-ways. Because it’s an estuary, the ocean tides move some hundred miles inland. The mind leaps to Crazy Horse next and starts cerebrating how the native fighters’ visions compare with the visions of our Christian saints.

Because when we think about visions in Christianity we often assume that they came to the elect spontaneously, as if of themselves. A subject of such a phenom would be doing something mundane, walking, shopping, cutting nails, and suddenly, like a love attack, slam, a vision! We somehow tend to forget that even the most charged visions, the ones that have started the major religions, came to the subjects after they had undergone periods of intense purifying, fasting, setting themselves apart. Drop the extreme sports part from these pursuits and we probably wouldn’t have any serious religion come our way, ever.

Even the first migrants here. By sitting in steam baths, squatting out in solitary retreats, especially their favorite plateaus, they were helping the bigger stuff break through the mind’s crust. They literally wrested it. Crazy Horse, for example, used to stick sharp-edged rocks between his toes to deprive himself of sleep. Through exhaustion he’d curtail the dominance of the organized mind over the achronologic world and trigger a mix of dreams and hallucinations oriented by the greater set. Like the iron filings on a glass with a magnet beneath, if you tap on the glass long enough they’ll pattern themselves along the lines of the invisible power field.

West Point had this ingenious ceremony of honoring the worst student in the class on the graduation day. A reversed hazing sort of stuff, a rite of socializing upon leaving, not entering a group. Brilliant.

They called such guy a goat. The first goat showed up in the school record some dozen years after its foundation in 1802. The lads needed some time to exude such sublime organicism, understandable. The cadets were crazy about their goats. A huge cry would rise after the winner’s name was announced on the graduation day.

Keep in mind that West Point wasn’t your everyday university org, but the institution of fighting founded by George Washington himself. We’re talking about soldiers here, and soldiers of the top pick. Smart, enterprising, risk-grabbers, in whom that early life force had an almost sacred knack for smashing restraints, any restraints, especially after beverage. But properly formed, it would become a great premium on the battlefields. Liking the goats by the cadets was an indirect way of glorifying these raw values within all of them; a demerit being not far from a badge of honor to their untamed hearts. No wonder that many West Point goats went on to become generals, and even more national heroes. Does General George Pickett ring a bell? You can clank that bell for a while.

Not long ago though I was reading the that the West Point goat ritual has been scratched from the official roster and relegated to a retro rank. The provided reason was that the cadets should compete with the school’s high academic standard, not with each other.

Yeah, and we’re all just wooden doorknobs. The doyens just didn’t want to get themselves into a situation when eight times out of 10 it would be diversity who was the goat. And not necessarily for the reasons detailed above.

Palmyra, NY. Joseph Smith had his revelations here.

The first theophany he scored was at age fourteen, capable son of a gun. Father and Son, our Gods, stepped forth to him from the depths of being. God, formally, but in Smith’s plowboy clasp that subtle dogma had diverged somewhat. In any case, they confirmed to him that none of the existing churches was true, over which dilemma teen Smith was despairing like another lad over pizza face. Three years later the angel Moroni showed him where in America the book of golden plates from the time before Columbus was buried, just around the shack. When he was 22, another angel put him in contact with the plates and hence we have the Book of Mormon.

Those were so-called founding revelations. Afterward, Joe was still getting offshoots. When Emma, for instance, the first wife, had become unmanageable concerning other chicks, Joe at once received the communication that the existing covenant had gotten suspended and from now on a husband could have a pewful of