Dziadek Mikolaj

I've seen a number of childhood photos floating about on blip lately, so I am adding mine to the mix.

Meet my maternal grandfather, Dziadek Mikolaj. He is the one with the glasses ;-) This may be the only photo of the two of us in existence, so it is priceless to me. Dziadek Mikolaj was born on October 24, 1910. He was a judge, and spent his professional career fighting against death penalty.

He loved me to bits. Spent endless hours with me at various parks, taught me to play chess (which I have since forgotten), and could talk to me about life for hours. He found a baby bird once which had fallen out of its nest, and brought it to the house for me to see. I don't remember what happened to the baby bird, I hope it ended up all right. Dziadek ate oatmeal for breakfast almost every day, and Polish specialty, dried Hunter's Sausage, for lunch. He used to buy cheap apples, all wrinkled and spotted, he then cut away the spots, peeled and seeded the apples, and we sat together and ate them, solving all worlds problems. His son (my uncle) emigrated to Germany, and Dziadek (a WW2 survivor) never really came to peace with that.

I remember him as a gentle and soft-spoken man, full of love and curiosity. He read a lot, thought a lot, and wrote his articles and a book on an old type writer. To correct his manuscripts, he used the good ole cut-and-paste method. He made his own glue with flour and water, which he used to position the revised bits over the old ones. I still remember the smell of this sticky boiling paste.

He was always sorry my Mom stopped at Master's degree and never did her doctorate (even though she still teaches at the university level). My Mom tells me that my PhD proclivities are without a doubt his genes in my blood as he was the only true academic in my family, on both sides. I am glad it's so obvious. I am proud to be his grand-daughter, and have never stopped regretting the fact that cancer (presumably) took him away from me much before I was ready.