My wife Gosia and I enjoyed two Thanksgiving meals this week. Only a few days remain before our community theater Christmas comedy opens. So, the cast members came over to our kitchen last Sunday to run lines and scarf Gosia’s turkey with all the fixings.
Thursday, if all went as planned (print deadline was on Tuesday), my wife Gosia and I had a traditional, intimate dinner for two at home, and then celebrated over evening coffee and dessert with Polish-American expatriates now living in Fairbanks.
This was the 10th consecutive Thanksgiving together for my wife and me. The first was in 2015.
We had met in Warsaw, Poland in June ‘15. My reason for coming was my need to explore the birthplace of my paternal grandfather who, 115 years ago, escaped the army of the Russian emperor Nicholas II, and settled in America as a farmer.
I somehow mustered the courage to ask Gosia, a total stranger, if she would give me a tour of Warsaw.
She showed me every street in Old Town. We went to three museums, enjoyed meals in Polish restaurants, and climbed many steps in Old Town’s tallest building to enjoy the view.
We talked and talked. I learned about her family’s hardships under the wretched German dictator Adolf Hitler’s occupation and burning of Warsaw.
I returned to the States.
We talked every day by computer connection.
In the late Fall of ’15, I invited Gosia for a Thanksgiving buffet at the Drake Hotel in Chicago.
I booked us two rooms. We spent a lovely few days touring Chicago and hiking in a state park. She flew back to her accountant job in Warsaw.
On a whim, two weeks later, we left Indiana and Poland respectively for a romantic week in Sofia, Bulgaria, during my Christmas break from teaching. There, we wore out our shoes walking the city.
Before she went back to Poland, I asked her to join me in Alaska for the start of the next Iditarod. I told her I owned 15 acres in remote Tanacross and dreamed of settling here.
After she met me at the Anchorage airport March 5, 2016, she learned that the airline lost her luggage.
“No problem,” I assured her.
We went on a shopping spree at Fred’s for replacement duds and then attended the Iditarod start. We then drove all over the state in a rental car, avoiding cities in favor of enjoying nature.
There was a tense evening when Gosia learned the lovely cabin I rented near Chatanika came with an outhouse. Me, a farm kid as a boy, was used to outhouses.
What was I thinking?
Nonetheless, the city girl survived – even when coyotes or wolves bayed quite close to her in that outhouse.
In short, Gosia fell victim to Alaska’s beauty and culture. She learned that I really did know how to cook. I made every meal.
Now established after that Alaska trip as a couple, although she lived in Warsaw, and I taught college classes in Indiana, we met in 2016 in Chicago for a second Thanksgiving buffet at the Drake.
By Thanksgiving 2017, we were married six months and drove together from Indiana to Chicago for the Drake’s annual buffet.
We indulged in the same buffet in 2018 and 2019. But in 2020, the Drake Hotel cancelled our holiday buffet reservations because of the pandemic.
In January 2023, my dream came true. Gosia and I settled in Alaska.
Gosia now insists that she wants us to fly from Fairbanks to Chicago in 2025 for a sentimental, sweetheart trip down Memory Lane for a Thanksgiving feast at the Drake.
“It’s a date, Gosia, dear!
Hank Nuwer writes books and enjoys acting in community theater. This January, he returns to the classroom after a two-year “retirement,” teaching a journalism class at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
