FORMER PREZ? BUT I BARELY KNOW HER!

Alright, so I haven’t written a blog post in about a week. Let me try to fill up some space with a mundane event in my life – like meeting a former President at HSBC Bank last week…!

Now, I know what you’re going to say: “Phil X, you’re such a tease. You mean that you met a former president of HSBC Bank, don’t you? Now stop joking around and get back to writing what we really want to read - articles about basketball.”

But I’m not kidding. I really did get to meet an ex-president, and no, he wasn’t an ex-president of HSBC Bank. Okay, he wasn’t a former president of the United States, either. However, he was a one-time democratically-elected ruler of a little country in Europe called Poland! That’s right, I’m talking about Lech Walesa. Mechanic. Soldier. Nobel Prize winner. President.

What was I even doing in the same room as a labor activist who won the Nobel Prize? As you can probably guess, it had something to do with my newspaper. Indeed, HSBC was opening its new branch in Greenpoint – on Manhattan Ave. to be specific – and we heard rumblings Walesa would be attending.

By rumblings, of course, I mean our office received a press release over the fax machine. It must have been the very morning of the event, because my editor “Commie” didn’t contact me about it until roughly 10 a.m., less than two hours before it was set to begin. Now, here in the world of professional journalism, we are used to covering events on the spur of the moment. Most of us don’t even mind when it’s short notice. We prefer to sup on the freshly-squeezed juice from our adrenal glands, and the fresher, the better.

Of course, it’s funny that I mention juice, because what really had me jetting out the door with nary any hesitation were the words “Free food afterward,” which “Commie” helpfully mentioned. I walked to the new HSBC bank as fast as my hungry legs could carry me. I arrived at about eleven-thirty, but it was already a madhouse!

In case you didn’t already know (And heck, I didn’t even know until a couple of months ago), the Greenpoint section of Greenpoint-Williamsburg has a very large Polish contingent. Why this is, I cannot say for certain, but I would assume that the manufacturing businesses that once abounded in Williamsburg drew large numbers of Polish immigrants. Or who knows? Perhaps the Poles are all super-intelligent, and they brilliantly decided to live only a fifteen minute subway ride away from downtown Manhattan. In that case, all those jokes I heard growing up were clearly wrong.

What I’m trying to get at is that Greenpoint contains lots of Polish people, as well as Polish restaurants, lots of meat markets that sell kielbasa, bakeries, etc. I’m sure HSBC knew that when they cordially asked Mr. Walesa to appear. I’d also bet that they made certain all the Polish news outlets got wind of it. And they did. There can be no doubt that they did. Anyone with a clue who Lech Walesa was – and who wasn’t busy working at noontime on a Wednesday – flocked to the new HSBC like Asian teenagers to a canto-pop star in a record store.

Luckily for us all, Walesa is no canto-pop singer. On the contrary, he’s a very distinguished-looking man, but with that healthy dose of proletariat appeal. He definitely looks like he could be your uncle. But believe me, if he was your uncle, he’d be an uncle that you liked.

I should note, however, that I base all my conclusions of Walesa on the classiness of his mustache. Seriously. It’s a good, solid mustache. It’s definitely the mustache of a guy who used to handle a musket, or patrol the Dansk shipyards with his toolbox at his side. But at the same time, I admire the way it spreads out towards his cheekbones without curling back upwards into little circles – like the familiar finger-twirlers of too many clichéd villains from Hollywood westerns. What this said to me was: Here is a man whose whiskers reflect his intellectual openness, who does not fall into the trap of “tail wagging the dog” dogma, as it pertains to follicles or otherwise.

And how neatly trimmed it looked! I got a decent look at it when I shook his hand. I tried to introduce myself as Phil from (Insert Name of Newspaper Here), but he wasn’t able to hear me over the cacophonous din of his adoring public. Almost all of them looked to be in their sixties or seventies. They cheered, clapped, and yelled words that sounded very encouraging. But again, I return to the topic of the mustache, how its uniformly even length seemed like an extension of his highly-disciplined mind and body. Ah! Bless the man whose facial soup strainer acts as a window into his very soul!

Naturally, I don’t know if everyone else in that HSBC had been thinking the exact same thoughts as me. Many of the others seemed busy trying to get as close to Poland’s one-time president as possible, to warm themselves against his emotional and rhetorical sincerity.

How warmly sincere those words! We listened as Lech Walesa espoused the greatness of America, the greatness of freedom and democracy, the greatness of a free market world. True, there are problems facing the world today, just as problems plagued his generation years ago. Now we have wars, political divisions, the environment, globalization, and the unpredictable potential of the Internet. But soothe us, o former president Walesa! Simmer our sauces with your optimistic rhetoric that these challenges can be overcome with patience! Yes, it is sunny and about sixty-something degrees outside this morning, but do not forget that most of these attendees are elderly and may suffer from poor circulation!

Indeed, Walesa spoke words of hope, and as a result, the mood of the room approached something very much like happiness. His speech seemed to put steel into the spines of every person in the audience. Not just tin or iron, but steel – like the steel that the Brooklyn Bridge model presented to Walesa by Borough President Marty Markowitz was made out of. Meanwhile, we could feel the pulse of electricity passing through the room – electricity like the kind coursing through the microphone put in front of Walesa by the Polish cable television station.

And after the red ribbon commemorating the new bank was snipped, the mob began to slowly disperse, lit up inside with happiness like the interior of that brand new HSBC as a result of flashbulbs going off by the dozen, pinballing off metallic support beams and reflected in the shiny glass partitions separating tellers from their customers. There was dancing out front beside the not-as-of-yet functioning ATM’s. Music played from a radio. People stood in line to submit slips to win a free trip to Poland.

But the people, they cried “Vawensa! Vawensa!” I later found out that’s how Walesa’s name is actually pronounced. Trust that if I had known this fact, I might have even joined in. However, when all the chanting was going on, I was clueless, while Walesa – our captain, our charismatic one-term president who somehow lost his re-election bid in 1995 – he tried to recede from the limelight quietly. When stopped for a handshake or photo, he would happily acquiesce. And yet, every time I happened to look back from where I was standing at the buffet line, he was standing closer and closer to the doorway, his wingtips always seemingly pointed to the way out.

I later found out that he had an important press conference scheduled for the early afternoon. So strong was the love for his people, however, that he not only took a detour, but stayed awhile, too. How many former presidents can you think of who would stick around to press the proverbial flesh of us commoners? Only one immediately springs to mind, but we mostly heard about his flesh-pressing from the subsequent scandal and lawsuit.