my friends that know my parents usually ask them, ”how did the two of you create him?” they usually answer by starting a sentence with, “well, when a man and a woman fall in love…” which causes a large uproar.
see, i’m fairly straight laced. my parents on the other hand, are much much much cooler than me. i’ll safely admit it. some of the things (they call them stupidities) that they’ve done in their life are activities or ideas that i would just never consider doing.
lets do some background.
ludwik is my father. he came to the united states in 1980. he had $500 to his name and bought a fiat spyder with a hole in the roof and the floor for $100. my dad had been to the united states each summer while he was in college, and his english was enough to get by, but not the greatest.
barbara is my mother. she came to the united states in 1981. she had $20 when she came to the united states. my father actually sent her $800 to buy a ticket to come to the united states, after buying the ticket, getting a visa, and buying presents for her family, she left poland 3 days before martial law was enacted in ’81. my mom boarded the plane, only praying that my dad would be at the airport. this was before cell phones for everyone, so they arranged their lives together using hand written letters that had took 3 weeks to get to and from the u.s.
my dad worked as a cook in the sears tower, cooking 400+ eggs a day for the hundreds of employees in the sears tower. he made $3.50 an hour.
my mom worked as an assembler on a factory line making automatic transmissions. she made $100 a week.
i don’t want to spoil their wonderful story, as my mom is writing a novel about our lives in the states. its intended for my future wife and my future children, so they can understand their in-laws and grandparents.
my first part of the series will be about my parents recreation when i was a child.
when i was 6, my dad bought a harley-davidson speedster 883 in candy red. he loved that bike, but my mom hated it. he always loved motorcycles, and his old home in poland still has two of his old motorcycles (one partially disassembled) from his childhood that he’s considered shipping to the u.s. eventually, my mother didn’t think it was safe for me to be around a father who rode motorcycles.
so my dad sold his bike, only to replace it with a bigger one a few years later, a fatboy, also candy red. 6 months later, my MOM bought her first motorcycle, a sportster 883 in candy red, just like my dad’s bike. she ended up customizing it to have drag pipes that ran nearly 110 db’s on wide open throttle. she had me and my dad disassemble the bike, get everything chromed, had a custom green paint job with a hummingbird and the words, “midlife crisis” on the fuel tank. a few years later, my dad upgraded to an ultraglide in candy red, which had more lights than a typical christmas tree. my mom, too, ended up buying a heritiage softtail classic, and between the two of them, before i left for college, they owned 5 harleys. i have leather jackets, vests, the works. my dad and mom have multiple pairs of custom-made chaps. they were featured in the newspaper and harley magazine (mainly because my mom would write stories for the magazine, and she’d always win)
my dad also took up skydiving when i was 15. his dream was always to fly. his proudest moment was during his training on his 13th jump, he failed to get control after executing a loop in the air, and fell 9,000 feet in 45 seconds. the instructor he jumped with, caught this all on film, and caught up with my dad, stabilized him, and got ludwik to open his chute at 2400 feet (a dangerously low opening, considering it takes nearly 1000-1500 feet to fully open your chute.) he was so proud of that video. i nearly puked thinking he could have died. my mom wanted him to stop jumping. he ended up jumping nearly 200 times. his worst injury was a sprained ankle.
as is customary, instead of my dad following my mom’s recommendation, she ended up ignoring her own advice and did 5 tandem jumps herself.
since going to college and entering the real world, my mom has tamed, resorting just to oil painting and writing her book.
my dad gave up skydiving, but instead became a weight-shift trike pilot.
he is a sport pilot instructor, a weight shift instructor, can fly using instrumentation-only conditions, and is a certified rotax 912 engine inspector. his call number for his trike is nine-twelve-lima-mike. (912LM)
on my last visit with him, we flew to 9,000 feet. made me remember the time he used to fall out of planes. i prefer him flying.
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