Author: Laura Conrad

The family friend (Jan) who drove my mother and sister to the airport
dropped their dog (Monte) off at my place last night.

Monte’s first idea was that Jan had taken him away from his
mommy (Judy) and he could just bring him back. His next idea was
that he would just wait in the hall by the front door until Judy
came back for him.

When I took them both for a walk before bedtime, Monte stopped
to do business, and it was diarrhea, and Sunny started to throw
up.

By bedtime, Monte had decided it made more sense to sit and
look out the window to see if Judy was coming for him. So just as
I was getting to sleep, he decided it was his duty as a watchdog
to tell everybody very loudly what was going on on the street in
front of my house. He normally lives in a single family house on
a quiet residential street, so living in an apartment building on
a busy street in Cambridge is new to him.

When Sunny got up this morning and went downstairs, Monte
growled at him and Sunny came back up.

When I got up, Monte had done both kinds of business on the
kitchen floor.

When I tried to give them a walk, Monte refused to budge, so I
took Sunny on his normal morning walk, then put Monte’s leash on and
dragged him across the street to do his business.

After breakfast, I tried putting some of the stuff they use for
Monte’s dermatological problems on him, and he decided waiting by
the front door was the right idea again. (The dermatological
problems predate his coming to live with the Conrad’s. We haven’t
found a solution yet.)

You might get lots of dog pictures for the next couple of weeks. Here are the two
I took this morning.

My mother and sister are leaving today for a trip to Poland.
They’ll be seeing some of the surviving relatives, and visiting
the town my mother was born in to see if the house she lived in
until she was 4 is still there.

So my sister is trying to collect the information we have about
our Polish connections. She made me scan in the family tree that
my parents wrote into the Bible they gave me for my sixth
birthday. And she’s been transcribing my grandmother’s
autobiography.

We were remembering stories that my grandmother
told us but didn’t put into the autobiography, that should be
put in as footnotes.

For instance, she says about how she met my grandfather:

I met your father, when I came from school in Warsaw 1910 for summer
vacation. He was three years older than I. He finished a “Handboroks”
bussiness school in Włocławek and he was looking for a job. He
answered the add in the newspaper that in Czarnožybi they need a
bookkeeper. Czarnožybi was a large estate owned by Count Zakuski, they
had a large distillery, where they were making alkohal from potatoes
and also were selling lot of grains. They accepted him and he had a
job. They had a special building to house the employees, and he had a
room there. On Sunday in June I went with my parents to church. Inside
was very crowded, the benches were outside in church yard and we sit
there. I noticed a young student still in school uniform coming close
to us, he came with other man, who was working with him. He knew us
and introduced your father to me and my parents. From that day he was
coming quite often to my parents house and always brought me few
roses. Count Załuski had a large mansion and park with beautiful
flowers. He picked them there.

The part of the story my mother remembers that isn’t there is
that the first time he came to visit my great-grandmother said
(probably very loudly), “How small he is!” My mother thinks
that was why he never really liked his mother-in-law.