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Never the Twain Shall Meet

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Cincinnati? Isn’t That Part of the Confederacy?

Cincinnati? Isn’t That Part of the Confederacy?

I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and spent the first seventeen years of my life there. During that whole time, and even since then, I have never known a Clevelander who has been to Cincinnati. By air, the two cities are a mere 217 miles (or 349 km) apart. That really isn’t very far, considering that there is a good deal greater distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco. And yet Angelenos travel to San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver (and vice versa) a good deal more than Clevelanders travel to Cincinnati.

Why do you suppose that is? I thought about it for a while and came to the conclusion that Ohio is somewhat like Iraq or Syria, where two or more cultures co-exist (when they are not killing one another). Northeastern Ohio, where Cleveland lies, is pretty much a blue state kind of area, heavily into unions and the Democratic Party; whereas Southern Ohio is solidly Republican.

For instance, Ohio’s 8th Congressional District, currently represented by John Boehner, has not sent a Democrat to Congress since 1937.

Yesterday, while Martine and I were eating lunch at Jerry’s Deli in Marina Del Rey, the TV monitors were televising a game between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Baltimore Ravens. I’d be willing to bet there are more Bengal fans in Los Angeles than there are in Cleveland. It’s almost as if the inhabitants of “The Mistake on the Lake” (as Cleveland is known to those who, ulp, love her) think they are part of the Confederate States of America. And, in a way, they are….

Rocking with the Hungarians

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Members of the Kárpátok Hungarian Folk Enesemble

Members of the Kárpátok Hungarian Folk Ensemble

Last Sunday, Martine and I went to the First Hungarian Reformed Church of Los Angeles in Hawthorne for their annual harvest festival. It was a good opportunity to catch up with L.A.’s Hungarians, who are all spread across the landscape of Southern California. And it was a great opportunity to have some home-cooked Magyar dishes (kolbasz and hurka) and enjoy the energetic dancing of the Kárpátok Hungarian Folk Ensemble (pictured above).

I am always pleasantly surprised to find out how musically talented my people are. (And me with a tin ear!) In addition to the dancing, there are always several musicians playing musical instruments from the accordion to the violin. The small church hall fairly rocked with all the musical acts.

Although I do not belong to the Hungarian Reformed church, my mother did. My Mom and Dad had an agreement between themselves that any sons in the family would be brought up as Catholics, and any daughters as Protestants. Well, it turned out there were only my brother Dan and me. We were both were baptized Catholic and attended Catholic elementary and secondary schools. For some reason, the Hungarian Catholics in L.A. don’t seem to have any festivals—at least, none of which I am aware. As a result, Martine and I usually hang out with the Protestants.

Martine may have been born in France, but she loves Hungarian food and music. And she loves Hungarian pastries. So these few local church events are high points in our year.

She Makes Her Uncle Proud

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Hilary Paris at her Graduation from Cal State Long Beach in 2008

Hilary Paris at her Graduation from Cal State Long Beach in 2008

Time passes quickly. Just five years ago, I was attending her graduation from California State University at Long Beach. Today, I find she is engaged to be married. Hilary Paris has always done her father and me proud. She is a yoga instructor in the Seattle area, speaks fluent Spanish and Portuguese (that was her college major), and is in general an attractive young woman with  more poise and good judgment than most of her peers. You can find out more about her from her Yoga Blaze website.

 

I Am a Jonah

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No, It’s Not Me ... But It Could Be!

No, It’s Not Me … But It Could Be!

I usually take lunch by myself at 11:45 am, just before the rush begins. I like to find myself virtually alone in a restaurant, deeply buried in my copy of The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books, with a glass of plain, unsweetened iced tea in front of me. Sometimes, I think that I am something of a Jonah to the dining establishments I frequent: Not for me the gay, bubbling crowds. I like it quiet so that I can read. What restaurant can long survive an influx of diners such as me?

Today, I read reviews of books about Hugh Trevor-Roper and Simon Leys, wondering to myself whether I could craft a blog out of these articles. Not without difficulty, because I have read nothing by the former and only one novel by the latter. I thought instead I would write about my lone wolf lunches during the work week. They give me a chance to catch up on the two magazines that mean the most to me, and they preserve my freedom of choice to eat at a place which would not send my glucose reading soaring skyward. ( Anyway the rest of the staff usually takes lunch about an hour after I do.)

Because I am a sort of back-room character at the accounting firm where I work, I rarely have “business lunches,” which is fine with me. I don’t like having to explain a diabetic meal regimen to strangers if I can help it.

Diabetes really doesn’t have much to do with it. Even forty years ago, I liked to lunch alone. It was around then that I discovered The New York Review of Books, which was on sale at the drugstore next to Marshall’s Coffee Shop at the corner of Olympic and Barrington. That building has since collapsed in the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. It was mostly a medical building. I remember reading in the L.A. Times that the doctors were unable to evacuate their medical records because the building was likely to pancake without notice. I wonder what happened to those records….

When it comes time for me to retire, I will probably eat almost all of my lunches with Martine, as I do now with my suppers. That would be fine with me: The quiet reading time won’t be necessary for me then as it is now in the crazed atmosphere of a Westwood accounting firm.

 

 

At Oak Glen

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Martine Feeding the Goats the the Oak Tree Village Petting Farm

Martine Feeding the Goats at the Oak Tree Village Petting Farm

Although she had not been feeling well the last couple of days, Martine insisted that today was a good day to drive the hundred miles to Oak Glen in the foothills around Mount San Gorgonio, not far from Palm Springs. For me, the main attraction were the Honeycrisp apples from Snow-Line Orchard. For Martine, it was a chance to have some of the best apple pie (and accompanying American comfort food) on this planet, and a chance to spend time at the little petting zoo in Oak Tree Village, feeding the goats, pigs, llamas, alpacas, zebus, emus, and other exotic and no-to-exotic animals. Except for the three hours of solid freeway driving, it was a win/win situation all round.

At the petting zoo, Martine returns to her childhood. She feeds the animals, admonishes the goats from butting into each other, urging the animals to pick up the corn kernels she is feeding them from the ground (she is afraid of putting her hands to their mouths). When she ran out of corn, she picked up pieces from the ground that other people—mostly children—had dropped, and tossing them into the cages for the animals to eat.

When she does this, I fade into the background, find a bench in the shade, and watch her enjoy herself—all the while imagining what she must have been like as a child. Martine has had a miserable year: Ever since January, she has been bedeviled by a combination of roaming muscular back aches and a lack of sleep. It has been variously diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, or one of several related ailments. Her doctor is not quite sure what it is, and none of the medications prescribed have done much but result in a regular orgy of bad drug reactions. She was unable to go to Iceland with me in June, and is afraid of going anywhere where she has to sleep in a soft bed. At home, with have an extra firm mattress and an extra firm sofa in the living room.

So I like to indulge Martine whenever possible, and Oak Glen is close to being a plenary indulgence.

The Stamp Collector

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a Stamp Collector

Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a Stamp Collector

Until around the age of thirty or so, I was a stamp collector, specializing in the United States, France, and Vatican City. Then I gave up on the hobby around the time several million other collectors did, probably because we’re all more distracted now with all the new electronic media. Although I sold the cream of my 19th century U.S. collection on eBay, I still have most of my albums. Looking back on my collecting days, I realize that the hobby actually contributed a great deal to my development.

From a relatively early age, I learned how to recognize foreign countries by how they identified themselves, not how we identified them. As I Hungarian, I knew that Hungarian stamps said Magyarország, not Hungary. Many countries, such as those in the Arabian Peninsula, Greece, Eastern Europe and the USSR, East Asia, and Armenia did not use the Roman alphabet, so I had to identify them using other means. (Of course, back then, we did not have the Internet to help us.) Just to give an idea of the complexity of identifying stamps by country, here are a few examples:

Bohmen und Mahren: Czechoslovakia under German Nazi occupation
ΕΔΔΑΣ: Greece
Hejaz and Nejd: The two sheikdoms that later made up Saudi Arabia
Island: Yes, an island, but more properly, Iceland
K.U.K: Bosnia and Herzegovina under the Austro-Hungarian Empire
Lietuva: Lithuania

The stamp illustrated below, for example, is from the USSR. But note that Russia was not the only country employing the Cyrillic alphabet: There was also Bulgaria, Serbia, the Ukraine, and other Eastern European stamp-issuing countries.

USSR Stamp Scott #1644

USSR Stamp Scott #1644

Also I learned about the currencies of those countries, such as Hungary’s own fillers, forints, and pengös. The above Russian stamp has a denomination of 1 ruble. Until recently, stamps of all countries adhered to a Universal Postal Union treaty that specified that the stamp bear a denomination in their local currency. Now, with the U.S. Postal Service’s “Forever” stamps, that convention is apparently no longer in force.

In addition, as a collector we had to be aware of fine printing details, such as those that characterized the issues of the American, Continental, and National Bank Note Companies in the 1870s in our own United States. These included secret marks, varieties in the number and spacing of perforations, paper and watermark variations. It was difficult but fun to find a more valuable Bank Note issue that had been wrongly classified by a seller or fellow collector.

No, I do not regret my stamp collecting days.

Little Princesses

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Possibly the Wrong Paradigm

Possibly the Wrong Paradigm

Today, Martine and I spent the afternoon at the L.A. Greek Fest near downtown. Because the temperature was well into the Nineties, we spent most of our time in the school gym, which was air-conditioned and supplied with large tables. Around the edges of the room were merchants selling various gift items, including tiaras and shiny accessories to make little girls’ dresses resemble the costumes of fairy princesses. One even resembled an Egyptian headdress with a snake like the crown we imagine Cleopatra as sporting. Several little girls were prancing around the room with the sense of entitlement that a princess costume bestows on its wearers.

Really, what is a princess if not a girl who is entitled from birth? What does one do to become a princess? Simple: One is born to royal parents. And when a little girl grows up thinking she is a princess, what are her chances of happiness in a world in which a sense of entitlement will only carry one so far? Really, what is a true-life princess born into except the dynastic pursuit of a [preferably] male heir? In Westwood, near the UCLA campus, there are legions of little princesses who are now in their twenties. In lieu of fairy wands, they carry smart phones , but they still dress fancifully in other ways. Not a pretty sight.

And then I wonder: Am I carrying this too far? After all, little boys are drawn to violent fantasies of battle which are carried forward into the teen years with video games. Even I played cops and robbers and [shudder] cowboys and Indians. But what I really loved more than anything else were my plastic bricks. I would not only use my toy soldiers for going into battle: I actually created little cities for them, with more officers’ titles to go around than I had toy soldiers. Then, too, there was my Lionel O-Gauge electric train, which I played with for over a decade. Again, as with my toy soldiers, I made up series of towns connected by the railroad, complete with schedules. I remember that was a great deal of fun, and constructive, too, in the long run, because it gave play to my imagination.

But thank God I never wanted to be a little princess. Maybe a prince… I had dreams of being visited by people from Hungary who declared I was to be the new monarch of the ex-Communist satellite. That would have been dicey, because my father and my uncle were identical twins.

The Joys of Friendship

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Mona and Wilder

Mona and Wilder

This evening, I got together with old friend Mona, with whom I used to work more than ten years ago. At the time, her little son Wilder was still an infant. No more, it seems. (It must be those Wheaties.)

Although my friends and I are all growing older, it is good to see their children thriving.

Because I lack a pituitary gland, I could never have children of my own. (And no, I was never very positive in my replies to people who said I could “just adopt,” as if all I had to do was put in a deposit at the neighborhood baby store.) So I take particular pleasure in seeing the children of my friends.

Martine was unable to join us, because her back was hurting her; so she was lying flat on her back wearing a brace when I returned from the Marina after seeing Mona.

 

Slowing Down Your Racing Mind

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Twisting and Turning at Night?

Twisting and Turning at Night?

Last night I went to sleep quickly enough, but I awoke around 1 am worrying about, of all things, a spreadsheet I was working on to reconcile UBS brokerage statements with the General Ledger based on them. One brokerage account in particular was a mess, with the broker going wild buying and selling bits and pieces of stock and mutual funds to the point of wretched excess.

I have learned, however, that it is not possible to solve problems by worrying about them. Sometimes my mind at night goes racing around and around until I come up with endless permutations, but no solutions. I am not saying that you can’t solve problems in your sleep, but if a solution arises, it always arises suddenly.

So what I do to stop my mind from racing is to get up and watch some television—the only time I ever watch it—until I find something that engages my interest and stops me from thinking about work. It usually takes about thirty minutes before I’m ready to hit the sack again, usually successfully.

Sure enough, I produced the spreadsheet this morning with no particular difficulties. The account was indeed messed up, but now we have something to use to correct it.

Everyone has his or her own solution to this,  but I also find that taking some melatonin half an hour before bedtime also helps keep me deep in the arms of Morpheus.

 

Dental Brinkmanship

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I Was Taking a Big Chance

I Was Taking a Big Chance

Just before I was about to leave for Iceland, I noticed that I not only had a cavity, but that it felt big enough to park a Chevy Suburban with room to spare. Moreover, when I ran my tongue over the spot, it felt sharp. I knew there wasn’t time to get the problem fixed before liftoff on June 19, so I took a big chance. After all, the worst that could happen was that I would have to see an Icelandic dentist.

On Saturday and today, I saw my own dentist; and he confirmed what happened. My crown on the second last top molar was breached both from the top and from the side. What I was feeling with my tongue was the sharp edge of what remained of the crown. There was a 50/50 chance that I would have to see a consulting dentist on an emergency basis for a quick root canal. Fortunately, Dr. Sun informed me that there were a few molecules of tooth tissue separating the cavity from the molar’s nerves. I lucked out.

This morning, he built up what was for all intents and purposes a new tooth on top of the foundation rubble that remained of my molar. First, he put in some insulating material called dycal to prevent the nerve from being irritated by the reinforced concrete with rebar that formed my repaired tooth. Later, he will replace the broken crown with a new one made with industrial diamonds.

All in all, I think I got off rather cheaply.