2014: In Appreciation of the Past, Present and Future
We hope this finds you well and looking forward to celebrating the holiday season with family and friends.
As you know we turned 3 score and 10 this autumn! Looking forward we have been greatly taken by research suggesting that there are immense benefits to be had from immersing ourselves in everything associated with still being our younger selves. So we are now working intensively on thinking 35 in every possible way. We’ll report back on the results in future years! So far so good; we are still very active and fortunately enjoy excellent health.
Here are some brief highlights and pictures from our adventures during 2014 that we have sent to relatives and friends. You won’t be surprised to see who figures most in the pictures.
During almost 50 years of decorating our Christmas trees we have accumulated a bizarre and memorable collection of items beyond the usual lights, baubles and angel hair. In just the section shown above there are pieces acquired during trips to France, Mexico, Peru and Poland. A couple were made in Vancouver by kids in Plu’s kindergarten class and one by a parent. At 12 o’clock you can see one of the decorations that has little connection with traditional Christmases, a trinket consisting of a strange mix of black magic and Roman Catholic symbols, cast in lead, that Tony found in a Peruvian market place when he was working there in the early ’80s. At 7 o’clock there is a silver wine tasting dish bought just last year at a vineyard near where we keep the boat in the south of France. Stories attach to each of these oddities and it is a delight to recall them each year as they are un-packed and our holiday visitors ask: “What on earth is this?”
Newly added this year are the two wooden figurines of a boy and a girl dressed in the traditional costumes of the Krakow region of Poland (centre above). They trigger a once-in-a-life time story. Although brought-up in a Cambridge household of exiles speaking Polish and not learning English until she was 8, Plu had never visited Poland before we went for a 3-week visit last summer. Our idea was not just to see her homeland but also to visit a small village, Nowosielce, a few hours by car SE of Krakow, where her step-father, Kazio Michalski, had been born in 1908 and where many of his descendants still live. Plu’s sister, Bozena, and her family joined us from New Zealand where they now have their homes, making the trip all the more meaningful. Meeting the descendant families, being greeted by over thirty relatives for a dinner reception upon arrival and, in following days, welcomed into their homes was a remarkable and deeply emotional experience for all involved. Before that weekend Plu had only met two of the relatives before, when they came to Kazio’s funeral in Cambridge in 2000.
A particularly meaningful time during our 3-day visit was the afternoon we walked around the village cemetery and saw the graves of relatives known to us by name only and listened to stories about their lives and deaths recounted by our hosts. The Christmas cards that we have already received in Vancouver from people we met in Nowosielce, speak about how much our visit meant to them and urge us to return with Zosia, Jeff and Sequoia. There is no doubt we will.
The trip to Poland also enabled us to follow-up on information we had already found on Plu’s father, Stach Plucinski, and mother, Janka Sielicka. Earlier in the year we had learned that the British Department of Defence still held the war-time service files of members of the Polish forces because they had officially been units within the British military during WWII. We were very excited when we received copies of their files and discovered that they not only gave us details on the activities of each of them during the war but also some information about their lives from when they were born in the early 1900s. Plu was thrilled to find in her father’s file a resume of his life from 1905 to 1946 written in his own hand. To fully appreciate what this means to her you have to know that she had almost no information about him and that he died when she was only three as a result of the terrible punishment he received during imprisonment by the Russians (1939-42).
After visiting Krakow and Nowosielce we went on to Warsaw. To experience this beautiful city with its magnificent historical and modern buildings and streets full of bustling and friendly people from before the dawn to way past midnight, it is hard to believe it was 85% destroyed at the end of WWII and that the communist regime imposed by the Russians was only removed by Solidarity in 1989. In the short time we were there Plu and I tried to do as much as we could to build on the information we had obtained so far about her family. One major break through came from a visit to the Museum of the Polish Army where we struck lucky and got a meeting on the spot with the Director of Exhibits. She and a couple of her colleagues went through the Military files for each of Plu’s parents and explained what all the abbreviations and terse entries littering and obscuring the records meant and implied. This information together with four military history books, telling the story of relevant Polish units during WWII that we were shown and bought copies of, have been of immense help to us in discovering the story we now know we can tell and previously never dreamt of being able to do.
When we got back to Vancouver in October and reviewed all that we had collected we decided that we needed to write summaries of it that would advance our understanding and indicate what further research would best be pursued next. We had found this strategy to be very effective when we were working on the story of Tony’s English and Irish family in 2013 but at the time we did not go further than short summaries. For the Polish ancestors we decided it was time to be more ambitious and try drafting material as chapters for a book(s).
We are using PressBooks which is an online company that recently began offering web-based software for writing books that is very user-friendly and cost-effective. You might be interested in it for your own writing projects. It offers more than fifty options for chapter designs with varying fonts, layouts, footnoting etc. You can view a drafted chapter in a different format option with the click of a link. Whenever you want you can convert files so as to produce a file in different formats for distribution including PDF for printing hard copies; MOBI for Kindle e-books and EPUB for Apple’s iBooks. When you reach the point of wanting to produce a bound book, you simply send it electronically in PDF format to any of a number of print-on-demand companies locally or in North America; you can choose whether you simply want a paperback version or at the other extreme a leather bound volume with high quality paper and reproduction of photographs. You can print one copy or as many as you like. So far we have drafted eight chapters but there is still much much more to do before we have anything like what might make a book(s). We have experimentally produced e-chapters for Kindle and iBooks, each of which offers different options and we have been greatly impressed by the ease of doing this and the quality of the product.
Having said all that we do not have any ambitions to ultimately produce anything more than life stories to share with interested family and friends. As you can probably gather we are having lots of fun. This is the first time that the two of us have worked on this kind of research and writing project together and it is proving to be a surprisingly engaging and deeply satisfying endeavour, although revealing habits, good and bad, that each of us never previously knew the other had!
Watching my seagulls from my 11th floor apartment in Kitsilano, only 10 minutes walk from Grannie Plu and Grand Daddio.
The main rival for our attention is always Sequoia. Watching and playing with her as she grows and develops is a blast. She has changed in so many ways during her second year; there’s something novel every time we see her. The progression from crawling to clambering to climbing to tottering to walking to sprinting has necessitated continuing life-saving renovations in Zosia and Jeff’s apartment. Watching Ms. S’s delight in learning to feed herself was a riot and finding she was willing to try almost any food a huge relief after her mother’s notorious pernickety finickiness. Hearing her suddenly say “Ma” and “Dada”, thrilled them and us; now new words are popping out steadily. “Hi” became an early favourite once she saw the delight-full reaction it elicited from people on the streets and buses and in the shops and cafes. Her endless curiosity creates splendid opportunities to explore the latest idea in her world. Seeing her use what she has “read” with her parents in one of her books startles us into awareness of her leaping-frogging comprehension; just last week she was discovered feeding a plastic wedge of cheddar from her play kitchen to the mouse riding toy she had just received. Neat!
Sequoia has become an avid bird watcher. Living on the top floor of their apartment tower, birds are to be seen flying by and landing on the balconies all the time. Their antics caught her interest very early in her life as you can see in the above photo. She goes down to the park or beach with someone almost every day and as soon as she spots a bird, she draws attention to it. Among her collection of stuffed animals there are all kinds of different birds including some whose cry is produced when she squeezes it. The Tui that we brought back from our spring trip to New Zealand is her biggest favourite. And her second is definitely the owl.
When Zosia returned to teaching half-time last January, Sequoia spent those days with her little friend Maja and her mother Mami in their nearby home. On the days when Zosia did not work, the mothers swapped roles. The two girls played together most happily and became very fond of each other. This autumn, with Mami expecting another baby, Vanessa became Sequoia’s nanny on the days Zosia worked. To everyone’s delight another wonderfully happy relationship has blossomed.
Zosia and Jeff were ecstatic when Sequoia slowly slipped into sleeping through the night. Each of them has a demanding job and by nature is extremely conscientious, doing more than their fair share and going the extra mile. They love their work. Zosia is just back from a 3-day conference in PEI on new approaches to teaching history. This past spring Jeff was very excited to be involved in bringing the innovative annual TED Conference to Vancouver, where it will be held from now on. We continue to marvel at the loving care and attention they reserve for Sequoia as a priority no matter the job pressures. We are indeed very fortunate grandparents.
We’ll be in Vancouver until mid-May when we will return to Europe until October. This year we are hoping to do much less traveling and enjoy life in and around Gruissan including working on the superstructure and deck of Tempus Fugit.
Having a young grandchild around is a wondrous thing and takes one’s mind back to previous times. Zosia would have been the same age as Sequoia in 1977. In some ways it seems a very long time ago but in others it is like just yesterday. The times have been extraordinarily good to the two of us. All that we are learning about our parents times, in particular the horrendous experiences of Plu’s during WWII, are having a profound impact on our perspectives on life on this planet. We have been so extraordinarily fortunate, while so many have not.
Our love and best wishes to you and your families for the holidays and new year. Hopefully our paths will cross again before too long.
Plu and Tony