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Martine Remonstrates with the Geese

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Martine at the L.A. Arboretum

Martine at the L.A. Arboretum

Martine and my father have some interesting things in common. My Dad loved to feed the pigeons and, before he married my mother, had his own pigeon coop. Martine also likes to feed the birds, but she prefers ducks and especially geese.

Geese are not the most cooperative of birds. Years ago, when Martine lived in Twentynine Palms and worked at the U.S. Naval Hospital there, we used to have brunch at the Twentynine Palms Inn. On the premises, there was a little pond and some very obstreperous geese, who used to go after Martine. I would have to run at them shouting “Bo!” until they backed down. (Thus no one would claim that I couldn’t say “Bo!” to a goose.)

The last time we went to the L.A. Arboretum, Martine brought along with her a sack of stale bread which she threw at the resident geese and ducks. Predictably, the ganders were being hyper-aggressive and kept pecking at the females and beta and gamma ganders to monopolize the bread. In return, Martine would remonstrate with those geese and make a special effort to feed the better behaved birds more of the crumbs.

Anyhow, when she does that, I feel a special warmth for my little French girl. There is something so sweet about her criticizing the “bad” geese that my heart warms to her all the more.

The Bus and Train Freak

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At the Bus Station in Trelew, Argentina

At the Bus Station in Trelew, Argentina

Here in the United States, our intercity ground transportation is the pits. Even Mexico has us beat, with buses they manufacture themselves. Of course, neither the U.S. nor Mexico are any good at railroads, with a few minor exceptions.

One thing about me that you may not know is that I am a transportation freak. I think about public transportation a lot. Two weeks ago, I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night remembering the bus company that took me in 2001 from Reykjavík to Akureyri via the Kjölur route across the desolate plateau that forms the center of the island. The bus I took was labelled Seydisfisbilar Akureyrar. (There may be a few diacritical marks missing: The line doesn’t show up on a present day Google search.).

The funny thing is that I could figure out bus and train schedules almost irrespective of what European language they’re written in. Asking questions and understanding the answers is an entirely different issue.

In Argentina, Martine and I rode long-distance buses between Puerto Madryn, Trelew, and Gaiman—mostly on the 28 de Julio line. They were so far and away better than anything Greyhound has in the field that I blush with shame. Even the verbal interface with the ticket agents in the above cities was relatively easy, until I found out that, on some routes, seating is assigned rather than being asiento libre (“sit where you please”).

When I am in Iceland, if I run into Straeto employees that either do not or will not speak English, I may run into a spot of trouble. But since 95% of Icelanders under the age of 70 speak English, that is pretty much a baroque fear.

As for Icelandic train schedules, there are none, primarily because no one ever built a passenger railroad to serve a sparsely populated island in the Arctic.

 

The Storyteller

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How to Raise a Literate Child

How to Raise a Literate Child

This is my mother within a year or two of my birth. When I see her wave at the camera, I almost feel as if it were a cheery wave at me from another world. There are many things that went into the making of a strange person such as myself. What my mother contributed, other than unstinting love over five decades. were all the stories.

First, as I was a little toddler lying in my crib at 2814 East 120th Street were the stories she made up herself. They were wonderful stories, and they were all in Hungarian. They all took place in a sötét erdö (a dark forest) and featured a tündérlány (fairy princess) who helped a little boy overcome all manner of ogres and other baddies.

When Mom was tired or her inventiveness wasn’t sufficient to satisfy my little inquiring mind, she picked up some children’s books at the library on East 116th Street and read them to me, first translating them into Hungarian. One of the first stories was a book that is still available today: The King’s Stilts by Dr. Seuss. I will never forget the picture of the king’s realm surrounded on all sides by tall levees and the encroaching water. (I still have a copy of the book, which I found on eBay and treasure.)

Then, when I started going to school, and my parents realized that Mrs. Idell and her colleagues had no idea how to teach a little Hungarian boy the English language, my parents decided to buy a house on East 176th Street in the Lee-Harvard area of Cleveland. Also, by that time, I had a little brother; and our apartment on East 120th Street just wasn’t big enough any more.

Sophie Paris was gifted with a fertile imagination. When she wanted to get a job as an Occupational Therapy Assistant (O.T.A.), she had to provide the name of the college she attended. Without any hesitation, she declared herself an alumna of the University of Hakapeszik in Budapest. A rough translation of Hakapeszik would be, “If s/he can get his/her hands on any food, he/she’ll eat.”

You see, Hungarian doesn’t have any gender-specific pronouns. Other than context, there is no way of telling whether he, she, or it is intended.

But that is a story for another day.

Full Frontal Nudity

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Yes, That’s Me at the Age of 18 Months

Yep, That’s Me at the Age of 18 Months

This is a picture that has a history in our family. My Mom thought it was ever so cute, so she showed it to all her friends and their good-looking daughters as I was growing up—while I cringed and swore offstage.I think the very existence of this picture postponed the beginning of my sex life by several years.

At the time the picture was taken, we were living in Lake Worth, Florida. In the 1940s and 1950s, it was a separate city; but now it’s more or less merged into the West Palm Beach metro area. While Mom worked as a supermarket checker, Dad had the all-time worst job in the world, especially for one with his delicate stomach: He was part of a crew that removed dead alligators from the waterways around Lake Worth. He didn’t last a year, so we moved right back to Cleveland.

I was a born critic even then. There was a family that I didn’t like that lived on Federal Highway, so I would go there and have my ripest bowel movements right on top of their welcome mat. After all, the sign did say “Welcome.”

 

Not Exactly a Chess Master

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The Young Would-Be Chess Master at Age 9 or 10

The Young Would-Be Chess Master at Age 11

Ever since I first learned the moves at the age of eight, I loved chess; but I had to love it from afar. The fact of the matter is that I was never very good at it.

My high point was about thirty years ago when I was a correspondence chess Class B International player. In the day before e-mail, I played chess—move by move—using special postcards that I purchased from the U.S. Chess Federation. I had up to three days to formulate a response and send a card to my opponent. To avoid making mistakes, it took a lot of time, up to three or four hours per move once we had reached the middle game. Because of computers, I don’t think that correspondence chess exists any more in the snail mail world.

Now, when I have a lot of time on my hands (which is almost never), I like to go over the moves of famous historical chess games. There are some excellent compilations of these games available from Dover Publications at a reasonable price.

The photo above was taken in our kitchen at 3989 East 176th Street in the Lee-Harvard area of Cleveland. You may notice that there is a parakeet perched on my right shoulder, making me feel very much like a pirate. (It bothers me that I cannot remember, after all these years, the name of our parakeet.)

Notice the string tie.It must have been a school day, because we were required to wear ties to our classes at St. Henry School. For convenience, I usually opted for a string tie. You can also seen the bottom of the cord for our rotary wall-mounted telephone.

I could tell that I was eleven when the above picture was taken because that’s when I started to wear glasses. It made me look very intellectual, I thought.

 

I Get Scammed

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Doesn’t Look Like a Crime Scene, Does It?

Doesn’t Look Like a Crime Scene, Does It?

If I haven’t posted the last couple of days, it’s because Martine and I took the weekend off and drove to Santa Barbara. We were staying at the idyllic-looking Marina Beach Motel on Bath Street right near the coast in Santa Barbara. It was an ideal location, midway between the marina and Stearns Wharf with their seafood eateries.

Unfortunately, Martine is still not feeling up to par with the traveling pains around her back and shoulder blades (fibromyalgia?). She got tired quickly, and she wasn’t able to sleep comfortably on the king-sized bed in the motel because the mattress was too mushy for her. Also, she was still too exhausted to do much walking at the tourist attractions we visited, about which you will be hearing over the next few days.

More seriously, last night as I was dozing off in the motel room, I received a phone call purportedly from the front desk. It was one “Stacy Anderson” to tell me that the registration records for eighteen rooms in the motel had been lost because of a computer glitch, and would I dictate the relevant info to her over the phone? Because I was groggy and my critical faculties were not operating at par, I complied—including giving “Stacy” my credit card info.

As Bugs Bunny, would say, “Whatta maroon!” Just after I gave this info, I was given an 8-digit “confirmation number” (94184437) and told that I would get 40% off my bill for helping them out. It was at that point that I said the big “Uh oh!” and threw my clothes on.

Naturally, the night crew, who were sitting around sharing a pizza, had no idea of who “Stacy Anderson” was, nor had they called, nor was there anything wrong with their computer. I ran back to my room, picked up my cell phone, and called U.S. Bank to report a credit card fraud. Sure enough, they had already run up a $320 charge with Access Secure Deposits, which I denied having initiated. My credit card was promptly canceled, and I scissored it and distributed the pieces across a wide swath of Southern California.

If you are staying at a hotel or motel, you would do well to distrust any communications over the land line telephone in your room. If it is from the “front desk,” tello them you’ll be right there—and hang up! Don’t be a fool like me.

Another Tax Season Over and Done With

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You Won’t Find Me on the Side of Late Filers

You Won’t Find Me on the Side of Late Filers

I hope that this will be the last tax season I have to live through. It was by far the worst, mostly because of the same clients who—every year—wait until the last minute to get their information to us. I would probably lose a lot of these people by attaching late charges of 100% for all information submitted after, say, March 25. But my boss doesn’t want to get rid of these deadbeats, so the last few days are always a horror.

Perhaps it’s getting time for me to retire. Part of the problem is that the firm’s president thinks I’m an accountant. I’m not: I’m just a very good specialist on accounting software—not on tax law per se. I don’t get to go to the continuing education classes, and I am totally ignorant on how to prepare returns for trusts, corporations, foundations, partnerships, and estates. And yet I am consulted as if I knew about tax law for all those entities.

 

Howdy Doody and Harvey Rice

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Me on a Tricycle Ca. 1950

Me on a Tricycle Circa 1950

That’s me on a tricycle, sometime around 1950. We were living at 2814 East 120th Street off Buckeye Road in Cleveland. The whole place was filthy with Hungarians. There were so many, in fact, that I did not know the English language existed until two things happened: First, we got a television set late in 1949, and I started watching the Howdy Doody show at 5 pm every day, just after Kate Smith closed her show by singing “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.” (It took me a while to understand what Howdy and Buffalo Bob Smith were saying.)

Secondly, I started kindergarten at Harvey Rice School on East 116th Street in January of 1950. My parents thought that, living as we did in a Hungarian neighborhood, the public school teachers would speak Hungarian. Nothing doing! Mrs. Idell sent me home with a note pinned to my shirt that asked, “What language is this child speaking?” As if she didn’t know!

That last factor decided my Mom that we had to leave our little Hungarian womb on the East Side and move to the suburbs. Gone forever would be the Reverend Csutoros and the First Hungarian Reformed Church; the Regent and Moreland movie theaters; Kardos’s Butcher Shop with its delicious Hungarian sausages; the College Inn, where my Dad would take me for French Fries; and the Boulevard Lanes where my Dad bowled and I kept score.

It was a cohesive little world, but my parents ate the apple from the Tree of Knowledge when they decided to raise me as a Hungarian. You know what? I’m grateful that they did. I made my adjustment to English (and I’m still making it), but my heart belongs to the Magyar Puszta.

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My Lack of Civic Spirit

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The L.A. Marathon Is Good Mainly for Screwing Up L.SA. Traffic

The L.A. Marathon Is Good Mainly for Screwing Up L.A. Traffic

Every year around this time, the Los Angeles Marathon is run; and, every year, it’s run on a Sunday morning and afternoon during the most brutal part of tax season. Those of us who have to go to work on this day are frequently re-routed in a way that makes us feel tired before we even get to work.

Here is the problem in a nutshell: I live south of the usual L.A. Marathon route, and I work north of the route. That means I have to take the freeway to work … But wait, CalTrans is still working on the exit I have to take. So I would have to go miles out of my way to get to and from work.

The other option is Wilshire Boulevard. Fortunately, the boys and girls in their floppy shorts go under the road through the Veterans’ Administration campus on Bonsall. That works fine in the morning, but in the afternoon, for the return trip, all the left turn lanes are a mile long. So I had to take Veteran Drive to Montana to Sepulveda and take a right on Wilshire. That was a five-mile detour.

If it were me to re-route the Marathon, I would have them run straight up the San Gabriel Mountains. That’ll show how much heart they have!

 

The Thirty Plus Years’ Quest

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Saverio Mercadante (1795-1870)

Saverio Mercadante (1795-1870)

It was over a third of a century ago. I was preparing to go to work at Urban Decision Systems and listening to a classical music station on the radio, probably KUSC-FM. Suddenly, a piece of music came on called “Variations on a Theme on Stabat Mater by Rossini” by the Neapolitan composer Saverio Mercadante.

I have been looking for that piece of music at record stores (when there used to be such things), eBay, even iTunes—without a shred of luck. Then today I just happened to Google “Mercadante Rossini Stabat Mater” and got two hits on YouTube. Needless to say, I played both clips. One was an Italian recording entitled Sinfonia Sopri i Motivi dello Stabat Mater de Rossini, and the other was a recording conducted by Claudio Scimone with the L’Orchèstre National de l’Opéra de Monte Carlo and entitled Sinfonia sur des thèmes du Stabat Mater du célèbre Rossini (1843).

The musical phrase I loved came in at around the 7:50-minute mark on both recordings and lasted for a little over a minute.

It was nice, but it didn’t impress me as much as it did back in the 1970s or 1980s. Perhaps what I heard on the radio was a better recording. I just don’t know. Or perhaps my taste in music has changed. I am no longer like Swann and Odette de Crécy at the Verdurins oohing and aahing over that little phrase of Vinteuil’s.

What amazed me is that so many things that were impossible to find just twenty years ago can now be Googled and brought up in mere seconds. Technology is wonderful. Sometimes.