If I have not been posting much lately, it is because I have been ill. The month started with an Addisonian Crisis (lack of adrenaline). No sooner did I get discharged from UCLA Ronald Reagan Hospital than Los Angeles damned near burned down. Then I started feeling week with a severe pain around my sternum. That turned out to be acid reflux.
As a result, I lost nineteen pounds because it was just to painful to eat. Even when I put myself on the BRAT diet (Bananas, Rice, Applesauce, Toast), any food make my stomach hurt for hours.
Finally, my doctor put be on a drug that relieved the pain. Now I have to be able to build up my strength after lying on the couch for weeks.
Hopefully, I’ve seen the worst and am on the mend. Wish me luck!
As my drivers license expires in three weeks, I thought it would be a good idea to renew it before it was too late. I used to go to the Santa Monica DMV on Colorado Avenue. The last few times I went there, however, I felt as if I were in a Soviet bread line. Last time, I renewed my license in Torrance, which wasn’t bad. This time, I went to Culver City, which is much closer.
Everything went like clockwork. I was delighted that I no longer had to take the multiple choice “Knowledge Test” with its gotcha questions about blood alcohol, child seats, and obscure legal penalties—none of which is relevant to my driving experience. I was in and out in less than thirty minutes—a record for me. And I walked out with an Interim Driver License until the permanent one with my photo arrives after the holidays.
People tend to be very negative about the Department of Motor Vehicles. Probably, they all went to the Santa Monica branch.
I spent four years at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire while suffering from a brain tumor that caused severe frontal headaches that lasted until midnight. It was then that I started my homework, not going to sleep until three or four in the morning. It was truly horrible when I had classes scheduled for 8:00 AM.
Worst of all were the morning swimming classes that I had to attend the first two years. At the time, the college had a requirement that all students be able to swim fifty yards in one minute. I was, of course, handicapped by my pituitary tumor; but I eventually passed the test. If MRIs and CAT Scans existed back in the mid-1960s, I would have been excused. But they didn’t. The doctors all thought that I was just being a pussy. It was not until I graduated in 1966 that I collapsed at home in Cleveland, just prior to leaving for graduate school at UCLA.
Still, I loved going to Dartmouth. It was everything I wanted. It was far from home at a time when my parents were undergoing a rough patch in their marriage. It was a college that challenged students to excel intellectually. And, situated in the upper Connecticut River Valley, it was a place of beauty. Most of the majestic elm trees are long gone, having succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease; but while I was there, the campus was strikingly beautiful.
When I went with Martine to re-visit the campus in 2005, I was appalled by the campus building program that was putting multi-story buildings in all the green spaces where I tossed a frisbee with my classmates. But then, I guess that that is a problem common to many campuses. It wasn’t the buildings that educated me: it was the caliber of the faculty and the students.
Let’s see, the celebrations this last week have come fast and furious:
Halloween (October 31)
All Saints’ Day (November 1)
All Souls’ Day (November 2)
And now:
My Mother’s Birthday (November 3)
It was Sophie Paris’s goal to make it to her 80th birthday. She admired her grandmother, my great-grandmother Lidia Toth, who made it into her mid-eighties. Unfortunately, she died several months short of her 80th birthday in the summer of 1998.
I don’t write often enough about my mother, although I owe my life and much of my happiness to her. She was abandoned by her own parents, so her grandmother and grandfather raised her. Although she was born in the United States, Daniel and Lidia Toth took her and raised her on a farm near Felcsut, Hungary in the Province of Fehérmegye. She returned to the U.S. with them in 1937 as the Nazi menace began to loom throughout Central Europe.
She met my father in Cleveland around 1943 and married him shortly thereafter. I was born in 1945, and Daniel Toth died in that year. Lidia never really liked my father, Alex Paris, and told my mother that, being his son, I should be allowed to die in my crib. In time, my brother and I developed a strong relationship with Lidia, who helped bring us up. With my father, however, it was war from start to finish.
Sophie was about 5 feet (1.525 meters) tall in her stocking feet. To compensate for her short stature, she had an oversized heart and loved my brother and me. That love has been very instrumental in Dan’s happiness and certainly mine.
Today, as Martine and I ate lunch at the Siam Chan in West L.A., we overheard two tattooed and pierced young men talking about getting up enough energy to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) meeting. The streets in our neighborhood are full of bums who suffering from various stages of mental illness and dependency on drugs and alcohol. I realize how lucky we are because of the love of our parents, Alex and Sophie Paris.
So Happy Birthday, Mom. You are not forgotten and never will be.
At first, Martine and I liked visiting the Grier Musser Museum because of the of the interesting holiday related displays. We still like the displays, but in the meantime, we have become friends with the owners, Rey and Susan Tejada. Re-visiting the museum and chatting with the Tejadas has become part of the fun surrounding holidays.
Speaking of holidays, it is becoming ever clearer to me that celebrating Halloween is becoming more of a thing, and that celebrating Christmas is becoming less of a thing. Perhaps because it is so associated with guilt trips: so many things that have to be done, some many unrealized goals that remain unrealized, so much expenditure of cash and effort.
Halloween, on the other hand, is cheaper and more fun. And it is not tinged with guilt. It involves pretending that you’re a ghastly monster (no difficulty for most people), attending fun events, and eating a ton of candy.
So even if we don’t get any trick-or-treaters this year (they don’t like climbing stairs), Martine and I feel good about Halloween. Martine got her annual pumpkin pie from Marie Callender’s, we stockpiled candy in case some trick-or-treaters do ascend the stairs, and I’ve read some good scary books this month.
Of course, coming up is my least favorite holiday. I really dislike Thanksgiving. And I’m not overly fond of the traditional food items associated with it.
I’ve only been to Hungary once, back in 1977. One of my happiest times alone with my father was the two of us visiting Budapest’s Széchenyi (SAY-chen-yee) baths and chatting for hours in the thermal pools. Of course, an opportunity gained can also be an opportunity lost. During that time, my mother went back to Felcsut in the Fehérmegye countryside, where she was raised as a young girl on a farm by her grandparents. I never did get to see Felcsut.
Although I spent so little time in Hungary, I am proud to say that I still somehow bear inside of me the seed of the Magyar culture and language. When I was a little boy in Cleveland, television was just coming in; so, living in a Hungarian neighborhood, I was blissfully unaware that the English language even existed. Until I showed up for kindergarten classes at Harvey Rice Elementary School.
That set off a whole chain of events, from moving to the suburbs, even though my father always yearned to be back in the old Buckeye Road neighborhood, to my majoring in English at an Ivy League school. But that is another story.
I am viewed by some of my acquaintances as something of a cave man, mainly because I do not own a smart phone. When I looked at the technology, I saw several major disadvantages right off:
Tiny screens and bad eyesight don’t go well together. I usually wear distance glasses, and I would have to do a quick switch to reading glasses to be able to discern the images and text clearly.
I actually have a flip phone which I use for special occasions, but I was disturbed by suddenly being inundated by calls in Mandarin Chinese.
Thanks mostly to the 2024 election, I am inundated with text messages begging for donations—with the result that my cell phone is mostly off and rarely travels with me. I find it onerous to manage a whole lot of text messages.
Driving around Los Angeles, I am disturbed by drivers who are still texting when traffic signals change to green.
At my supermarket, the parking lot is 30% occupied by men and women who are fingering their smart phones, making it hard for legitimate shoppers to park.
Several years ago, my friend Mohan offered to present me with a free smart phone and was shocked that I refused on the grounds that it would make my everyday life more stressed and worrisome in every way.
I might be a cave man, but if so, I am a happy one. There are too many things that I love and that do not require so radical a change of life as the care and feeding of a smart phone.
They’re no longer called the Cleveland Indians. Now they’re called the Guardians, Guardians of what, I don’t know. I guess because you’re not supposed to call your team the Indians because of cultural appropriation, whatever that is.. But they’ll always be the Indians to me. My fraught relationship with them continued from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, when I left Cleveland to go to college.
The Cleveland Press, the cities Hearst-owned afternoon newspaper, got the bright idea of giving all straight-A students in the city seven pairs of baseball tickets, mostly to ill-attended afternoon games. As I could reliably get top grades every year after fourth grade, I got a lot of chances to see the Indians lose to a lot of teams. Except for 1959, when they almost won the American League pennant, but lost out to the Al Lopez’s Chicago White Sox,
On the team were such players as Rocky Colavito, Jim Piersall, Minnie Minoso, George Strickland, and Woody Held. Pitchers included Herb Score (before his career stumbled after he got hit in the face with a baseball), Jim “Mudcat” Grant, and Cal McLish.
Usually I went to the games alone or with a school friend, because my father was working as a machine tool builder at Lees-Bradner and Company. I would hop on the 56A bus at East 177th and Harvard and get off at Proispect and Ontario downtown. From there, it was a five or six block walk to Cleveland Municipal Stadium, which, as I understand it, is no more.
Just like my grade school (Saint Henry) and high school (Chanel High), which also are no more. Much of my history has been effectively wiped clean in the evil days that befell Cleveland around that time.
It was difficult as a child to follow a baseball team that usually lagged in the standings. But then, who has a 100% winning record? No one.
I came to Southern California to become a graduate student in film at UCLA. After my first year as a student, I needed an income, as my parents weren’t able to foot the bill for me much longer. In March 1968, I visited the job counseling center on campus and applied for a job at a Santa Monica tech company called System Development Corporation, or SDC.
The job was for an interesting project. The Air Force’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) had funded SDC’s Lexicography and Discourse project. The work done previously was to key in the complete contents of two dictionaries—the Merriam-Webster Seventh Collegiate Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary—onto paper tape. Included were definitions, pronunciations, and etymologies. The paper tape had been converted to IBM punch cards, which were printed out. The printouts of the two dictionaries was in two piles that ran floor to ceiling of the office I was to use.
Interestingly, my predecessor in the position was murdered by a UCLA graduate student from the film department. I never was to find out who did it.
For the next couple of years, I proofread the transcriptions of both dictionaries and made corrections to the data files, which resided on a military AN/FSQ-32 computer whose parts were encased in epoxy so as to be able to survive a nuclear attack. Unfortunately, it had a single I/O channel, so that if a large number of users were logged in, as was the usual case, simple transactions took forever on the computer’s primitive time-sharing system.
If you are interested in finding out more about the project, you can see the document that described the project: Two Dictionary Transcripts and Programs for Parsing Them. Volume I. The Encoding Scheme, PARSENT and CONIX by Richard Reichert, John Olney, and James Paris (that’s me). It is still available from the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC).
Incidentally, ARPA also created the Internet. It was originally designed to allow for uninterrupted communications between two points when certain key cities in between were destroyed by nuclear bombs.
It was hardly a city. When I was attending Dartmouth College between 1962 and 1966, there were no traffic lights at any of the intersections. There were a few thousand people, most of whom were directly or indirectly connected with the college.
When my parents drove back to Cleveland, I found myself alone for the first time in my life. Actually, it didn’t bother me as I thought it would. It was probably because my father and mother were going through a rough patch in their marriage, and I didn’t want to be back home for that. And I wasn’t really alone, because my roommate Frank Opaskar was a classmate from my high school.
In the end, we didn’t get along too well—for a strange reason. He slathered Noxzema on his face every night before going to bed, and I had the top bunk over him. Every night I drifted off to sleep in a noisome chemical fog. After two years, we parted company and I got a solo room.
Winters in Hanover were long and cold. The snow, once it fell, lasted all winter. (I wonder if it still does, what with global warming.) By the time March came along, you could see where every dog in Hanover had urinated. Spring was the worst time, because all that snow turned to slush. It was not until May that we could walk on the grass without our shoes making a sucking sound.
The town itself had a much loved grocery store called Tanzi’s and a number of restaurants. Early on, I gave up on the college dining hall and patronized only the restaurants. Farther down the street were the Dartmouth Bookstore and the Nugget Movie Theater, where I spent great gobs of time.
I remember the meatballs and spaghetti at Lou’s Restaurant, those few times he offered it as a special. And I had a lot of pizzas at Minichiello’s. I remember the Mom and Pop cooks there trying to get me to give their cute but clearly wild daughter sage advice about life, when what I really wanted was to be wild with her. Nothing came of it because, alas, I had not yet reached the age of puberty because my pituitary gland was being eaten up by a tumor which was operated on three months after I graduated.
Tarnmoor 
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