I still use the wallet I bought in Gdansk back in 1991. Doesn't fit Canadian dollars properly. I used it to carry the notes worth about 0.03 of a dollar, zloty, that I used to buy zapjakanky, The Warsaw Voice and piwo, piva as well as piv. At least I think that was what it was. I better check at the Deli. In Polish, there's a singular noun, a small plural (2-5) and big plural (over 5) and sometimes I bought more than five Gdanskie so needed to appreciate these particular fine points of grammar.

It wasn't my favorite beer but it was number 2 and my favorite label from those days. It wasn't Okocim or Żywiec for one thing. Well, there was one rare Okocim brand that I liked better but it never came to my town... or at least the shop on my street. I taught the owner's child English and was still pleased he never avoided an opportunity to cheat me out of 8 cents or so when I shopped there. I knew I was in. You could drink beer in the shop as most of the customers did of an evening. I taught their kids as well. After calling my now wife a bitch or whore (assuming we did not know the words their teen aged kids already used behind our backs in class) for buying beer rather than vodka, they used to call me "not human" until I realized that was Polish for German so I corrected them by saying "nei Neimenski, Canadaski" at which point all the drunk fathers of children in my English classes got weepy. One really cried. Really. I was surprised how easy it was to get a Pole to cry in emotional solidarity. Lovely people. They never got over seeing a woman buy beer, though. Real women in that part of Poland back then drank vodka. Straight. Or that weird locally made fruit juice vodka that we assumed was 5% but was really 40% even with the juice from Angola or Cuba added.

This month's edition of The Session is hosted by Hop Head Said …