Polka Till You Puke

Polka is the law in Wisconsin. Or so they tell you in Pulaski, home of Polka Days, a weekend celebration of the Wisconsin state dance near Green Bay. It draws a serious polka crowd, both young and old, as well as some of the country's most popular polka bands.

Polka pride is evident on the many funny t-shirts worn by attendees

Polka began as a Czech peasant dance in the early 19th century. It spread to ballrooms in Prague and then Paris in the 1830s and 1840s. The French loved to polka and their enthusiasm for the dance helped increase its popularity. Polka soon spread to England and then to the United States where Polish-Americans adopted it as their national dance in the early 20th century. The name 'polka' is derived from the Czech phrase for 'half-step' in reference to the dance pattern of lightly stepping from one foot to the other.

Polka emerged at roughly the same time as its signature instruments: the accordion and concertina. These squeeze boxes became the 19th century's most popular mechanical musical innovation because one person could play the part of an entire musical ensemble, playing melodies and harmonies with one hand and chords and bass in the other hand. These instruments became prized possessions that many immigrants brought with them to the United States.

A variety of polka styles developed in different sections of the country, particularly the Midwest. The styles became associated with particular ethnic groups, such as Polish, Slovenian, and Dutchman, based on the ethnic heritage of the musicians or composers.

Radio brought polka to an even wider audience in the 20th century. After World War II, polka joined, for a brief time, popular culture, in large measure due to the accordion stylings of Frankie Yankovic of Cleveland, Ohio. Rock 'n roll eclipsed polka in the 1960s but polka has remained popular in many communities throughout the Midwest.

Polka is clearly still big in Pulaski judging from the huge, cheering, and dancing crowds. It's an impressive sight--two tents with wood dance floors packed with people, polka-ing with abandon, and not a little skill.

Eavesdropping

Sometimes I think it might be fun to start recording everything I hear while walking around town or waiting in line at the store. At the farmer's market this morning, I heard a man tell his friends: "I think I slept on my kidney wrong. It's really sore this morning." I'm pretty sure that's not possible.

Sleep is a common prescription for good health today. Getting enough of it, that is. In the 19th century, many alternative health movements promoted things we now think of as common sense: eating a heathy diet, drinking water, getting fresh air, and exercising. But few health reformers actively promote sleep. It seems that sleep wasn't the same issue that it is today. Scientists and doctors speculated on what sleep was for and what happened while you slept (especially what you were dreaming) but didn't seem to worry so much about the amount of sleep people were getting.

In part, this may be due to technology. Electricity wasn't widespread until the 20th century so working late into the night or before dawn wasn't an issue in many cases. There were certainly many other things to keep people up at night, however, from lice and other bed bugs to stinky chamber pots.

Or maybe it was, as historian Roger Ekirch suggests, that sleeping through the night wasn't expected. He proposes that interrupted sleep was the norm and that it's only now that we equate a good night's rest with uninterrupted sleep. He says--and many others seem to agree--that artificial lighting has changed us. Harvard chronobiologist Charles A. Czeisler has compared artificial lighting to a drug in its physiological effects. Among other things, it alters our levels of melatonin, the hormone that regulates our circadian clock. In the past, we may have slept in segments, sleeping for a few hours, waking and doing something, and sleeping some more.

It's certainly always been possible to sleep in an awkward position and wake up with sore muscles. I'm just not sure that extends to body organs.

Defining Home and Region

Where's home? Is it where you live now or where you're from? And if you've moved, when does your new place transition to "home?"

I'm staring down nearly nine years in Madison, Wisconsin, this summer. I came for school but stayed for... work and friends and then love. And even though I've never felt more connected to a place than I do Madison, I still feel surprise when people refer to me as a "Wisconsinite" or a "Madisonian." Obviously, I've made the cut in their minds but for some reason I'm not sure I've made it in mine. What I think of as my "formative years" happened somewhere else even if I'm not all that different from the people in my new home.

My husband and I have been talking about the Midwest as a region a lot lately. Where is it? What is it? Who considers themselves part of it, Midwesterners, and who doesn't? Midwest Living magazine includes Oklahoma in the Midwest but I'd venture to say that many people in Wisconsin wouldn't consider Oklahoma Midwestern (no offense to those Oklahomans who do). And what about Ohio? It kind of is and isn't, straddling the line between the Midwest and the East but firmly in the eastern time zone.

I was born in the Midwest and live there again now so does that make me a Midwesterner? Even though I spent two-thirds of my life in the Northwest?

All of these things--home and region--are really choices we each make about where we choose to identify some part of ourselves. For some, not choosing can be a regional identity, too: rootlessness. And maybe that's my choice right now.

Homeopathy, Alive and Well

Homeopathy is alive and well in its birthplace. On a recent trip to Germany, I was surprised to see so many homeopathic pharmacies and doctors' offices. But maybe I shouldn't have been since Germany (and Austria) seems to have given rise to so many alternative medical theories: hydropathy, phrenology, homeopathy, to name a few. 

One of many homeopathic apothecaries

Premade homeopathic remedies for sale in a store window in Lubeck

The area we visited, northwest Germany, seemed filled with all kinds of "alternative" doctors. There were chiropractors, herbalists, naturopaths, and homeopaths around every corner, a concentration I might expect to find in certain areas of the United States that have a hippie-ish reputation like San Francisco, Austin, and Berkeley. We saw them in Hamburg, Lubeck, and Luneborg, cities of very different sizes and characters. Perhaps the German medical system takes a more broadminded view than mainstream American medicine toward their alternative cousins, and perhaps the German people do, too. Seeing so many of these places, I could almost imagine being in the 19th century United States when such a range of medical options was prominent.

Every Dairy State Needs a Queen

June in Wisconsin means June Dairy Month. That's right, "America's Dairyland" has a special month devoted to dairy. It's perfectly reasonable to think this unnecessary since isn't every month about dairy in a state that has chosen to label itself as such? Well, no, apparently it's not enough. We need to have dairy farm breakfasts all over the state, to put cows up by the state capitol, and to have the opportunity to meet Alice in Dairyland, Wisconsin's dairy royalty.

Alice in Dairyland peddles cheese

I recently recorded an essay for "Wisconsin Life" about Alice, linking these agricultural queens to fertility goddesses of yore (thankfully, I didn't actually use the word "yore" in my story). Sure, she began as a kind of beauty queen but the role has evolved into more of a marketing job. You can't just represent dairy anymore--you actually have to work for it.

Talking about Alice at work, a coworker wondered why there's no male dairy royalty. Perhaps Albert in Dairyland? I wouldn't want to unseat Alice from her absolute reign so perhaps he could be a consort ala Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh?

Genealogy Heist

I shoved a handful of tattered papers and black and white photos in a plastic box. Opening another drawer, I found another stack of papers that I quickly removed and added to my haul. My husband worked the drawers on the other side of the room, quickly and silently unrolling and uncovering treasures lost to time, disinterest, and forgetfulness.

This wasn’t a bank or museum heist. It was a genealogy rescue mission.

It all began innocently enough. I married a man obsessed with his genealogy. We were both soon busily tracing our family’s story, hunting for hints of who we are and where we came from.

I had never known much about my family. Asked to create family trees in elementary school, I managed to produce saplings while my classmates came with sprawling oaks.

Tell me about your grandparents, I’d ask my dad. “I don’t know anything about them. We barely saw them growing up,” he’d say. They were Polish, I knew that, and spoke little, if any English, in their small town south of Chicago. Most of the time, my dad remembered their names.  Sometimes, he forgot that, too.

My mom wasn’t much better. She’d point to an old water-stained photograph in a faded gold frame that used to hang in my grandparents’ garage and now hangs in her dining room and say, “That’s Petronella Wilhelmina Verhoven.” Who’s that? I’d ask. A relative, she’d say, before quickly adding, “but it might not be her and I don’t know how we are related to her.” My mom just liked the photo, whoever she was. Sometimes I would stare into her forlorn eyes under a floppy cap, trying to see a resemblance. Was that my nose, my forehead?

My mom had a habit of finding old photos and proclaiming them relatives. We had an old 1890s velvet album in the living room filled with late 19^th and early 20^th century studio portraits of baby boys and girls in frilly white gowns reclining on tufted chairs and young women encased in corsets and bustles. The best one to my childhood eyes was of a circus company that included a dog-faced girl, a fat lady, and two tiny Tom Thumb-like people on chairs on front. Who wouldn’t want to be related to them?

So I had little to start with when I began my research, but I made headway quickly thanks to the wonders of the internet. I discovered for the first time that I was fairly equal parts Polish, German, Norwegian, and Swedish. I’ve even managed to find some of the towns where many of my great-greats came from in Europe.

My parents even proved to be helpful in their own way. Once, I found an article in a small Indiana newspaper describing a bicycle accident my great-grandfather Stanley Janik got in when he was 74 years old. It turns out my dad knew more than he had let on all these years about his Polish grandparents. “Oh yeah, that was a big deal. He had to have his leg amputated,” he said when I told him about it.

But despite these kernels of information, my parents were tightfisted with any photos and documents that might aid my research. I’d ask them for any birth certificates or marriage certificates they might have, even their own, and received only vague promises to look. I’m pretty sure I only got my own birth certificate because I needed it to get married. It wasn’t that my parents were interested in genealogy themselves or even knew what they had squirreled away. My offers to scan everything and store it in archival boxes for protection were met with hard stares and vague promises to scan everything and send it to me.

Which is what led us to thievery. Visiting my parents one weekend, my husband and I took advantage of their absence to take as many photos and documents as we could and ship them to our home in Wisconsin. I knew my parents would probably never notice they were gone.  Even so, I felt a little guilty.

But it somehow didn’t seem so bad when I considered that these things belonged to me, too. This was my family and my history, the place where I come from and the people that made my life possible. I wasn’t just stealing; I was reclaiming my history and honoring the lives of my ancestors by choosing to remember them rather than purchasing members of other people’s families.

Maybe it’s just an excuse, a concocted justification for my actions, but all I know is that it sure feels good to finally have a family tree with spreading limbs rather than a stunted sapling.

Medical Poetry

A few months ago, I published my first poem. Co-authored, I should say, with my creative husband. It was a medical poem, and it was published not in some literary magazine but in the journal Neurology. That's right, a medical journal with a humanities section.

Medical poetry has a long history, it turns out (and I'm not talking about the poetic musings of patients on their illnesses and suffering, though that probably has an even longer history). In the 19th century, a botanical medical movement known as Thomsonianism, after its founder Samuel Thomson, created a vast library of medical poetry related to their beliefs. Unlike most 19th century poetry which was penned by women, the majority of Thomsonian poems were composed by men for medical purposes rather than for any moral or ethical objectives. Some poems provided medical instruction, teaching people how to monitor sickness and to administer medicines.

Samuel Thomson himself, the movement's founder, wrote many poems decrying the professionalization of medicine and the pretensions of the university educated. Thomson believed that every man could be his own physician and sought to demystify medicine by making it easy to understand and use. He advocated for natural remedies made of plants, roots, and barks, rather than the mineral and chemical-based medicines used by regular doctors. Disease for Thomson was caused by a lack of heat that needed to be restored through scrubbing and warming agents. Thomson's poems reflected his democratic leanings, carrying anti-elitist messages and simplified explanations of his medical system.

Thomson and his followers wrote poems that stretched from the epic to the patriotic, satirical, and romantic. Most contained some element of ridicule aimed at regular doctors, gaining friends and followers through wit and calculated reason.

Here's an 1840 poem written by Thomson that captures the significance of heat and the numbered system in his course of remedies.

ODE ON HEALTH
If you desire a length of days, Then follow Wisdom's pleasant ways: Beware you shun the tempting lures Of poisonous bait and death. Health is a blessing all must prize, True wealth in it, tho' hidden lies, We must beware of quack'ry's cries, Or else resign our breath. Our nature's may be understood,-- The wise, the blest, the truly good, Have all combined to ease life's load Of poisons, kin to earth.	Shall laws make inroads on our peace? Shall crafty Doctors never cease? Shall stern oppression mar our ease? Oh, no! we've rights by birth. Is heat the friend of life in man?-- Then Thomson's is the wisest plan To lengthen out life's feeble span, And walk in nature's truth. If numbers, one to six be used, Nor natural sent'nels be abused; Then health with you shall ne'er be loos'd, While heat you hold enough.

I'm not sure our poem was witty or as mission-driven as the Thomsonian works. But it's still nice to know that poetry has long had a place at the bedside.