Polish Joke

My carpenter, Tony, my stolarz; my plumber, my hydraulik, Geno; and my elektryk, Scott, have worked their magic—the bathroom almost gemlike, white as a lucky stone, gleaming like a wet one. And the painters, the malarze pokojowe, have stripped and primed and double-glossed my eaves in creamy beige. The maples, klony, and the ash, jesion, have been pruned high, like Pan Zagloba’s haircut—the Pan Zagloba of Ogniem i mieczim—their leaves raked and hauled to the city compost. My house, a charming cozy dom, approaches not perfection, but the neighborhood of almost perfection, of really quite good enough. Yes, the damned wiewiorki have gnawed through the shakes in too many places, and the woodpeckers, dziecioly, less infernal, have poked tight little messages onto my outside walls. And the gutter remains gutted. I might yet get to the west dining room window. Still, such a basically tidy domicile—it will be hard, now harder, to leave. Perhaps I should postpone entry into the market until February.

Geno—I’ve come to like my artisans—shared with me a Polish joke. He said he has this Polish friend, from Poland, and this friend says to Geno, “Hey, Geno, want to hear a really good Polish joke?” And Geno, a little suspicious says, “Okayyy.” And his friend says, “Tak, no to, ci dwaj panowie…” Good one, I say. Then I recount my favorite Polish joke, courtesy of my brother Alex, courtesy of his friend, courtesy of the internet:

A Polish immigrant went to the DMV to apply for a driver's license. First, of course, he had to take an eye test. The optician showed him a card with the letters

C Z W I K S N O S T A C Z.

'Can you read this?' the optician asked. 'Read it?' the Pole replied, 'I know that guy.'

I had to edit this joke; Aleks, dear brother, there is no X in the Polish alphabet.

Anyway, as the domestic infrastructure improves and with it my Polish vocabulary, I become all the more aware of the time, approaching, when I will take leave of my life here.

Pazdziernik

The vocabulary multiplies, the sound shifts proliferate, and the grammar rules increase and interconnect each week to the point of mute exasperation, but not yet to despair. Not that Polish isn’t orderly, but given its complexity, and the fact that all order has core elements of arbitrariness and historical whim, Polish order is not as strictly logical as common sense might expect. (And my sense is nothing but common.) I have noted before a class of masculine noun with the feminine ending –a, kolega, sluzbista, artysta, mezczyzna. The word declines as a feminine noun, but takes masculine adjectives and their declinations—fair enough—but now we discover only in the singular. Because? Yes, because. Because that is the way it is. If Polish verbs agree in number in the present tense, but in number and gender in the past and future tenses, so be it. I try to be reasonable. Why is this necessary? (I have yet to encounter a sentence or a rhetorical situation in which these fine grammatical distinctions communicate any significance proportional to the intellectual effort it takes to remember them.) After over a year of study, my classmates and I still offer answers to the most seemingly straightforward exercises as educated guesses with the intonation of questions. Strangely, Professor Polakiewicz endures that intonation with greater patience and even sympathy now, as he warns us about verbs of motion and the further nuances of the number system. I soldier forward, chin high, up to my moustache tips in grammar and usage.

The carpenter comes on Tuesday, we wtorek, the plumber on Wednesday, w srode, and the painters later this month, pazdziernik. A step here, a step there.