We were sitting around the table in the Architecture Department’s meeting room, waiting for the customarily late meeting to begin. Mike Joroff told us about a recent event at MIT, where an old hand was explaining to a novice that the Institute took a long while to fathom: “It’s like an onion—you remove one layer only to discover the next.” We all chuckled and offered a number of vegetable, fruit, and nut models of MIT. I think Eric Dluhosch came up with watermelon, Leon Groisser proposed walnut, but I do not remember what my offering was. Waclaw Zalewski finally chimed in, straight-faced as ever: “It’s like a lemon, yes?” There was much merriment before the meeting could finally begin.

Addendum (February 28, 2015)

I just searched through my Residua on the World Wide Web for Waclaw Zalewski’s name, and I was amazed to find only one piece dedicated to him. My then colleague from the Building Technology Group in the Architecture Department of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT was quite a character. Coming straight from Poland, he never lost his heavy accent. In fact, English was not among his strengths, but he was still famous for his witty one-liners. He was exceedingly bright, though. An engineer from head to toe, he could spot an error in a calculation or a system of equations in a jiffy. Whence the lemon story, no doubt. In his mind, the Institute would do much better with more people like him. And this included the Architecture Department, which was rife with nincompoops, at least in his own mind. At any rate, I cannot but wonder about his near absence from my magnum opus. Back then, I was quite fond of him, too.