Chance Encounters…

…of the first kind go unnoticed; no memory mechanism is stimulated enough to distinguish the event from a non-event.   Chance encounters of the 2nd kind are ephemeral too—an unexpected do-si-do with a partner who, after brushing shoulders, retreats immediately into the mist—but leaves an image firmly entrenched in some special synapse nebula.  There are higher order chance encounters as well—the best-buddies of yore and on up the ladder to lifetime soul mates—however, it is that chance encounter of the second kind that is occupying my thoughts today.

On a morning train out of Warsaw, Poland, bound for Krakow a few weeks ago, my wife and I shared a 2nd class cabin with an elderly, Polish-American-Polish gentleman.  The double hyphen is necessary because this senior citizen emigrated twice; once to the U.S, and then back to Poland.  He was dressed in a charcoal-grey suit, white shirt, no tie, and topped with one of those Lenin-style felt caps on a 90ish summer day (yes, the train was air-conditioned).  He had a great smile and his English was decidedly American mid-west, which is what sparked the conversation.

His first name was Florjan (I’m guessing at the spelling—it might have been Floryn) and he told me his surname, but alas it has evaporated in a cloud of consonants.  It turned out we shared the same birthday.  Birth anniversary actually, he has a ten year head start in this race, and although his face was weathered by 75 years of sun & wind, his body was lithe & trim and I suspect he’ll have a few laps left when I drop out.

Florjan was 4 when the Blitzkrieg overwhelmed Poland and his father, a farmer, took up arms with the Resistance.   Since his family were known to the occupiers as “insurgents,” Florjan and his mother were shuttled from place to place by his father and his compatriots during the war.  A series of farms and stints of “camping” marked his adolescence, yet somehow he learned to read, write & cipher in this home-school-on-the-run.  Towards the end of the war, his father became attached to a Russian army unit as an NCO of sorts.  He (Florjan’s father) thought he would soon return to his family farm and regain his agrarian life.

The end of the war however was just a transfer of tyrannies.  His father’s land was confiscated and his mother died of natural causes—pneumonia as a result of a 5 year nomadic sub-existence being “natural” in some perverse biological way.  While becoming a thorn in the side of the new occupiers, Florjan’s father still managed to secure passage in 1947 for his 12 year old son’s evacuation to “cousins” in America.  The Illinois family farm where Florjan then found himself residing actually belonged to some distant cousins of loose acquaintances of many times removed actual cousins.  He never heard from his father again.  He got word that he had been arrested in the early ‘50’s, then released, then disappeared.

Initially he was little more than an indentured servant.  He worked the farm and found he had a natural talent as a mechanic.  Eventually he became a genuine member of his adoptive (not sure whether he was legally adopted) family, finished high school at age 19 and even attended some technical institute (vocational or academic, I do not know).  He worked briefly for International Harvester and went into business for himself repairing farm machinery, buying junk and refurbishing same for sale and/or rent.  If he married, he never said.

Florjan returned to Poland in the mid 80’s amidst the turmoil surrounding the spread of the Solidarity movement from the shipyard in Gdansk to the factories across Poland.  He was determined to recoup his father’s farm, but that never happened.  He did manage to organize farming co-operatives where extended neighborhoods of farms shared agricultural, mechanical & labor resources.  “Sounds socialistic,” I said.  “Well, I’m a socialist,” he said.

He also reconvened his farm machinery business, repairing & renting/selling overhauled machinery to the co-operatives.  “Sounds capitalistic,” I said.  “Well, I’m a capitalist,” he said.

I inquired as to just how he could be both; a time-share thing—socialist/capitalist as the moment presents the existential opportunity—or some hybrid? He indicated that such a conflict was an artificial barrier erected by control freaks.  You could be a Lutheran and a Mets fan (my analogy, if you haven’t guessed) without compromising the principles of either realm.

His socialism was about interpersonal relationships and the cooperation needed among the wider community to sustain those relationships.  He listed education, health and public safety as obvious examples in this area.  A transportation infrastructure too he deemed worthy of community effort and administration—everybody can’t build their own private road to grandma’s house.  And we were, after all, riding in a state train.

But, we agreed, it is a lousy economic engine.  The mustering of resources and the ingenuity & initiative necessary to provide the physical stuff of community needs, the evolution of technology, and the opportunity to synthesize vocation & avocation is the forte of capitalism.  When the needs of community and freedom of entrepreneurism collide—and they do & will in myriad circumstance—it is not a conflict of systems per se.  It is a challenge that both are robust enough, and flexible enough, to meet.

We talked of the calculus of the conflict inherent in the goals of freedom & equality—where optimum solutions have been contested in America since the Hamiltonian Federalists & the Jeffersonian Republicans engaged in their 1790’s shouting matches.  The same arguments, parsed and rearranged into fresh and sometimes bizarre combinations have been with us ever since.  Liberalism & conservatism have long lost any rational meaning and reside today as labels for collections of hot-button political (in the pejorative sense) issues devoid of any real philosophic consistency.

Communism, Florjan insisted, is (was?) the most fouled up structure of all—essentially fouled up.  Florjan used the more potent f-adjective in his pronouncement and I was not in the least surprised or offended.  It struck me that I’ve never witnessed a more appropriate use of that invective.  Florjan’s view of communism was that it extracted the worst of both systems and applied them in some black comedy to precisely the wrong activity.  Socialism as a top-down economic wine press uniquely drained the creative juices that make any society viable.  And the social parts of socialism—the freedom and the equality--were neglected, or more probably rendered impossible by endless 5-, 7- or 10-year plans of uninspired bureaucrats bent on preserving their own aristocratic life-style.

And then he was gone—bid adieu and stepped off the train at some whistle stop an hour north of Krakow.  The vacuum in his wake was palpable, but I had no evidence—no name, no address snail- nor e-mail, not even the name of the station where he exited—that he was ever there.  So much more I wanted to know: the details of how he got to America and how did he return?  Siblings, biological or step?  What is he doing now (I’m sure something)?  Only the vapor of the encounter contained in some neural web was left—and I’m not sure how trustworthy that image, of what now seems like a character conjured up by some Polish Dickens, really is.  Did I make the whole thing up? Chance encounters of the second kind do this kind of thing to you.

 

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