My Father and his Polish Roots

 Marianne Szlyk 

 

 

 By Marianne Szlyk

My father, Paul R. Szlyk, was born at home in Worcester, MA on February 5, 1931. Even at the end of his life, he always remembered his birthplace and birthday. He and his family (his parents, two sisters, his maternal grandparents, and, eventually, his brother) lived in an apartment above his father’s grocery store. After my father graduated from Tufts Dental School in Boston, Grampy closed the store and converted it into a dental office. If my mother hadn’t put her foot down before she and my dad married on July 4, 1961, they, too, might have lived above the store!

My father was a dentist by profession, and he always signed his name “Paul R. Szlyk, DMD” even long after he had retired, Surprisingly, I haven’t written any poems about him as a dentist yet. I think the closest I’ve come was writing about working in the back of his office, filing charts, and listening to a rock station from Providence, RI. However, I plan to write more poems, and some of them will take place in “the office,” as we called it. 

 

 

In 1997, my parents retired to their home in York Beach, ME. "Seaweed on the Beach" was Dad's favorite poem of mine. It was published in the anthology Of Sun and Sand. The poem itself is set at York Beach’s Short Sands Beach, a pleasant walk from my parents’ home. At the time I wrote the poem, my parents had moved to Rockville, MD where my husband and I live. Of course, they both missed being up in Maine.

Seaweed on the Beach

Reds, greens, browns, and mustard yellow
add earthy undertones,
the taste of miso,
to the neons, the overexposed
blues and whites and yellows,
the painted plaques and t-shirts,
the stick candies and salt-water taffy
sold at the gift store.

The rusty Irish moss
on this beach
will not turn into
anemones or coral
or even amber sea glass.
Like the seagull accents
wheeling in the wind
past summer,
the moss remains.

“Farmer's Cheese, 1971" was a featured poem in Poetry Catalog, and it was read at my dad's funeral Mass. Although we lived in the country, my parents liked to shop at our cousin Joe’s store in Worcester. With two small kids, my mom preferred shopping at a little store. My father liked buying foods my mother didn’t care for.


Farmer’s Cheese, 1971

Saturdays my father brought out his hoard
of forbidden foods from his cousin’s store.

Sometimes we had kielbasa with sauerkraut,
hot brown mustard, and bottles of Pepsi.

One day he brought out farmer’s cheese.
Not kielbasa. I hated cheese.

Cheese was rubbery, the bright color
of trucks that crowded my brother’s room.

The white cube stood on the plate. Alone.
It was solid, not wrapped in sticky plastic.

My father cut chunks of white cheese,
Polish cheese from his cousin’s store. It tasted

much better than Mother’ skim milk, 
a little sharp, but not too sharp, 

not plastic, not a toy.

These poems all show different sides of my father and his family. Often, on a Sunday evening, Dad would show us his home movies from his time in the Army Dental Corps (Ft. Sam Houston and Thule in Greenland).

Our Own Countries

Old, old songs Dad listened to on eight-track
nights as he drove home to the almost-country: 

Hank Williams, music from barroom juke boxes, 
Fifties’ peacetime at Fort Sam Houston.

Texas was far away from the neighborhood
in the New England city where he grew up. 

There everyone he knew spoke mostly Polish,
as if his church, his school, his father’s store,

and Friday-night polkas at “Dorrity” Pond
were not in our country. 

                                         But they were. 

Just like the stone walls Frost rode past--
and the Texas bars where Hank Williams once sang.


The Family I Just Met

Having seen only old country portraits
in the parlor, graduation pictures
without smiles, hectic-colored prints of saints
and martyrs, eyes rolling, hands clasped in prayer,

I thought that Dad’s side of the family
was grim. They came from behind the Curtain,
iron folds falling, about to slam shut.
Left behind, Dad’s uncle Alex was shot.

In the boxes of snapshots to unpack,
I found my grandfather’s laughter. He sat
in his low armchair, roaring at the show
Mom’s card-playing, movie-going folks loved.

It was Christmas. The war was long over.
He didn’t have to open his market,
butcher meat still in short supply, sweep floors
until you could have eaten off of them.

He could sit by the radio and snort
at the show my friends’ families in the Bronx
loved, laugh at the snapshots his children took:
Bobby throwing snowballs, my dad leaning,

taking a smoke break, dark sunglasses on,
Bobby a cowboy on the horsehair couch
while his sister Irene rolls her eyes, smokes,
and Rita sits close to Henry, her beau,

the young Polish man just home from the war.

Ancestors in Katowice

Man and wife, my ancestors,
stand in front of the leafless hedge.
I almost see the couple’s breath.

She whose name I don’t recall wraps
a white shawl around her narrow
shoulders. She wears a wool jacket.

He dresses for warmer weather;
his coat opens to a white shirt.
My father was named for him.

This picture hung in the parlor,
near where the upright piano 
used to be, as if my father

could have played Paderewski’s 
Menuet in G for them,
for their picture, for their ghosts.

I don’t remember the stories
my grandfather told of Poland,
just the story of him walking

across barren, not yet bloody
fields, eating slices of raw turnip 
that to him were so sweet. 

I am going to finish with a poem that I wrote while Dad was living at Sunrise of Rockville. He had just come back from a longish hospital stay and six weeks at a rehab facility during the pandemic. Fortunately, he was able to bounce back for a while. 
 
The Nurses Welcome My Father Home by Marianne Szlyk

For him, though, that is Worcester,
city of single-serving Table Talk pies
bought at my cousin’s grocery store;
city of coffee ice cream, of scrambled eggs
with kielbasa served at the all-night diner
downtown, served with a can of Moxie;

city of old factories where friends’ parents worked
turned into cannabis dispensaries, shops
that sell hemp clothing; city of pharmacies
turned into vape shops and sushi bars;

city of old schools that look like factories,
coal-soaked stone hulking on the hillside;
city of dirt roads, rough trails retreating
into groves of ailanthus, boxy houses,
and boulders twice their size;

city of the paper he still reads, 
amid the politics, looking for funny stories 
about marijuana-infused ice cream
available in tomato sorbet or squash
or the wedding at Northboro’s cemetery
where only the minister wore a mask;

city of the accent he is losing
as the nurses welcome him home.

"Ancestors in Katowice" was published in Mad Swirl.
"The Family I Just Met" was published in One Art.
“The Nurses Welcome My Father Home” was published in Beltway Poetry Quarterly.