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The Touch Screen Fugitive

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This Interface Is Not for Me!

This Interface Is Not for Me!

When I lost my cell phone at the Ringling Brothers circus about ten days ago, all my friends assumed that I would replace it with a smart phone. Surprise! I bought one of the rare dumb phones, an LG model that does not have a touch screen interface.

What do I have against touch screen interfaces? I guess I associate smart phones with people who don’t know what to do with their hands, so they spend their lives tweezling around with a microscreen to play games, devise phantom to-do lists, send and read e-mails, and in general replace life with a digital simulacrum .

So today during lunch hour, I took my turn waiting in line at the local AT&T store, while some bonzoid in shorts apparently tried to stage a hostile takeover of the phone company using Lithuanian zinc futures. He took so long that the rep who was helping him went off to lunch, leaving him on hold on the phone.

My cell phone, on the other hand, is used almost exclusively for making calls. I don’t even like to receive calls on my cell. But then, whenever I removed my old Samsung cell phone from its holster, it would automatically shut down the incoming call.

I’m not saying I’ll never get a cell phone, it’s just that I’m not interesting at this time in expanding my cell phone usage, or dirtying up a tiny screen, making it even harder for my bad eyes to read it.

The Boy Who Loved Maps

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Somehow, I Had to Get Out of Cleveland...

Somehow, I Had to Get Out of Cleveland…

Ever since I learned how to speak and read English, I grew to love maps. We had an old atlas whose binding was falling apart. Whenever I had a few spare moments, I would sit down, page through it, and try to memorize the maps that interested me most. Not that I understood what I was looking at: I remember pointing to a Mercator projection map of the world and claiming that Napoleon cheated us in the Louisiana Purchase, as Alaska was so much bigger. And Greenland was gigantic! Was it not one of the world powers?

Even as a boy in Cleveland, I loved the whole idea of far places, of different cultures. In the 1950s, read such obscure books as the Rev. Harold W. Rigney’s Four Years in a Red Hell about the Catholic priest’s imprisonment in Red China, and another book, whose name I have forgotten, about Soviet concentration camps around Vorkuta. What interested me was not so much the attacks on Communism as the books’ exotic locales.

Baudelaire describes me to a tee in “Le Voyage”:

Pour l’enfant amoureux de cartes et d’estampes,
L’univers est égal à son vaste appétit.
Ah! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes!
Aux yeux de souvenir que le monde est petit!

Which can be translated as follows (though I prefer the French):

For a child in love with maps and engravings,
The universe is equal to his vast appetite.
Ah, how the world is great by lamplight!
Through the eyes of memory the world is small.

Here I was, simultaneously hooked on the idea of travel and, at the same time, stuck in Cleveland. We didn’t have much money to allow for travel. All I can remember are a few day trips in Ohio, a few days in lovely Detroit, Niagara Falls (but I was only five), and trips to Florida at the ages of five and fourteen. Why do you suppose I wanted to leave Cleveland to go to college? Not only was my parents’ marriage threatening to go on the rocks (it somehow held), but I felt stifled by Cleveland’s provincial ways. All those Hungarian-American homebodies!

But there was always that atlas. You know what? I’m still that way. My mind is a capacious geographic storehouse. I can sketch the outlines of many of the countries on earth and locate their capitals and major cities. And I can tell you what countries border them.

That knowledge has always stood me in good stead. When I go somewhere I have never been before, I make sure that I am prepped for it. Although my vacations only run about two or three weeks, I can s-t-r-e-t-c-h out the time so that the vacation and its preparation take half a year. I started in on Iceland in February, and it won’t be until July that I work it all out of my system.

Acres and Acres of Carbs

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Most Supermarkets Are—To Me Anyhow—Carb-filled Minefields

Most Supermarkets Are—To Me Anyhow—Carb-Filled Minefields

Under my new way of life, after I learned that my pancreas was in the process of giving up the ghost, mealtimes are fraught with danger. This morning was all right: I ate a can of smoked trout from Trader Joe’s and a few stoned wheat crackers. I made it through lunch all right, too: A tasty spicy calamari salad at a local Thai restaurant. Tonight, Martine and I will eat some of my ham and lima bean casserole, which has not proven too destructive, along with, perhaps, some cherries and a white peach. As for my beverages, it’s always unsweetened hot or iced tea.

But God, how I miss the carbohydrates! There are times I would sell my soul for some white rice, potatoes, noodles, bread, or candy. As for pizza, it is a thing of the past, a fond memory of times gone by.

I wish I had something to replace rice. My doctor says that barley has too many carbs (though it has an acceptable glycemic index). In tonight’s casserole, the lima beans are filling in for the carbs, though again my endocrinologist says they have too high a carb count, but an acceptable glycemic index. Perhaps I could serve Styrofoam pellets with meat and vegetables?

Going to the supermarket is like crossing a dangerous border. Whole aisles of the market are loaded with stuff I can’t eat. I never realized before that our whole culture is based on carbohydrates, that Americans eat vast amounts of the stuff. Some of them become grossly obese, some of them develop diabetes sooner than they normally would otherwise.

Tonight I will go to the market, mostly for tomatoes (they’re OK) and sweet peppers and other stuff I can munch upon without sending my sugar levels into the red zone.

It used to be that my doctor told me that if I lost weight, I might overcome my diabetes. But how does one lose weight when one has to take Prednisone, a known appetite-enhancer, just in order to survive? Oh, I can lose weight all right; but I would have to be in a concentration camp.

But I have free will to choose anything I want at the market. Perhaps some tasty noodles, some sugar-laden breakfast cereal (like 99% of them) or a fruit smoothie. But no, I will try to be good. I lost both of my parents to Type II Diabetes. I want to survive, even at the cost of jettisoning virtually everything I like to eat and concentrating on salads, fish, fruits, vegetables, and tea.

If you see a sad guy in the supermarket line with a pile of stuff that’s good for you, it may well be me.

 

The Traveling Cripple

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In 2001, I Traveled with a Cane—In Considerable Pain

In 2001, I Traveled with a Cane—In Considerable Pain

When I went to Iceland in 2001 (and yes, this will be the last you will hear about my 2001 trip), I was in considerable pain from a severe case of osteoarthritis in my left femoral head. I had hobbled around with that arthritis ever since 1967, the year after I had my brain surgery. Once my pituitary gland was removed and I started taking hormones, I began to grow again. Unfortunately, my left hip joint did not take too kindly to the changes taking place to my body.

By the year 1997 or 1998, I was using a cane. People would constantly ask me why I was standing up when there was a nearby chair. I would answer them by saying because the pain of getting up was far worse than the mere inconvenience of standing. (I can still stand still for long periods of time without discomfort)

Things got worse when I landed in Iceland in August 2001. Of course, pain or no pain, it didn’t stop me from being active. The only effect was, on the two days of touring with my guide Illugi, I had to avoid climbing a particular hill and taking a trail around lava formations near Dettifoss. Otherwise, I was still pretty game.

Pain is one of those things which I can tolerate in fairly high doses. Not that I want to, but it is usually better than the alternative. Now that Martine is in pain from fibromyalgia (or something that looks and behaves very much like fibromyalgia), I tried to explain this to her; but she wasn’t buying it. Every person has his or her own acceptable threshold of pain, and mine just happens to be higher. Is it because I have been in fairly acute physical pain ever since my childhood—first from a pituitary tumor pressing on my optic nerve, and then from osteoarthritis? Only in the last ten years or so have I been as free of pain as I was when I was ten.

The photo above shows Lake Mÿvatn from my window at the Ferðaþjónustan Bjarg. (Don’t try to pronounce this without a Icelander present … or I should say don’t try to pronounce this with an Icelander present.) Notice the tents between the guesthouse and the lake’s edge.

Many campers don’t like the Bjarg and regard the management as unfriendly. I gained points when registering for one of the two rooms in the guesthouse by asking, “Wasn’t the name of Grettir Asmundarsson’s family home in West Iceland called Bjarg?” Not only was the owner shocked that an American knew this, but I quickly found that he was a big time fan of Grettir’s Saga and named his son Illugi (my guide) after Grettir’s youngest brother.

I loved the Bjarg Guesthouse. It had only two bedrooms, but a big kitchen, where I sat eating harðfiskur with fresh Icelandic butter spread on it. There was also a nice living room which I had to myself when I stayed there.

 

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.