16.02.2008

Stanisław Maciej Cegłowski, 1913-2008

I would like to write a few words about my grandpa, who died on Tuesday, depending on which document you believe the day before or after his 95th birthday.

In earlier life I think my grandfather was a fearsome man. He ran a large state model orchard an hour's drive east of Warsaw; in a sense he was both sole employer and mayor for the little country that came up around it. Like so many stern men he had mellowed into a gentle and lovable grandfather by the time I met him. Unusually for Poland he was neither a Catholic nor a communist, a rare middle ground, but he was adept enough at placating Church and Party to run a state enterprise in a deeply religious community for forty years. He read and wrote English well, and paid visits to the United States and to China in the sixties when such exchanges were also unusual.

There are pictures of him looking stern and dapper in Yellowstone Park; to this day I still have not been to all the places he visited. In America he toured apple orchards, and in Washington state learned about a radical new approach to planting in which growers kept their trees trimmed to about the height of a man rather than letting them grow to full size, having found that the dwarf trees were both easier to pick and more productive. My grandfather mentioned this later while visiting an orchard in Michigan; this type of cultivation became known as the "Polish method". He had a section of orchard planted when I was born and I used to enjoy going there to see row after row of trees that were my exact age. I believe they have now been cut down.

It was never fully clear what my grandfather did during the war. He served in the army as an officer and was taken prisoner in Lithuania. By some miracle he obtained a prison furlough and escaped; the remaining prisoners, being officers, were almost certainly shot. He spent the rest of the war living under an assumed name; I believe he also forged documents. He told stories of living in an empty farm building during a winter so severe that he had to walk in the same set of bootprints every day to get to and from town. At night he would light a fire in a metal barrel which by morning would be glowing a dull cherry red. His one roommate was a mouse, with whom he grew close.

My grandparents were married for sixty years. I did not expect my grandfather to outlive my grandma, but after a hard year of mourning he rallied and spent his last years still ambulatory, still taking care of his flowerbeds and the various animals that exploited him for bits of bread or salt pork. He lost a lot of his capacity for input and output, but his mind never seemed to dull. Most of his days he spent listening to the television at an incredible volume - I believe he heard it through his bones - or reading magazines and newspapers through an arrangement of magnifying lenses worthy of Mt. Whitney. He would go out for walks in all seasons, leaving us apprehensive that he might slip and break a hip on the slick wooden steps. When the weather was too inclement he walked a measured kilometer around the dining room table.

Many years ago my grandfather wrote an authoritative book on pomology, and it always gave me pleasure to keep it on my shelf, since we shared the same name. I enjoyed looking like an expert on grafting, musts, rusts, cankers, and varietals. Whenever I came to visit, he would dress up in a gorgeous wool suit that must have dated from before the war; I would see him in his snappy bow tie, waiting to greet me on the patio. On the way home, and against my protests, the car trunk was be filled with many boxes of apples; it got to the point where my friends in Warsaw refused to see me after I had been out to the orchard, for fear of being overwhelmed in turn.

Dziękuję Ci, dziadku, za tyle miłych wspomnień. Żałuję, że już nigdy się nie zobaczymy.