As I looked at this old picture of my father and uncle, I realized something about myself. I’ve never exactly been a fashion plate. It goes all the way back to those two wild and crazy guys from Czechoslovakia, Elek and Emil Paris.
In a dark suit on the left is my father Elek. He has one knee on the ground and his shoes looked slightly scuffed. On the right is my Uncle Emil. He is not dirtying his suit my kneeling on the grass. And—what’s that?—he’s actually wearing spats. Also, note the cufflinks. I would not be surprised if my Dad were wearing a short-sleeved shirt under his suit coat, as I see not a hint of sleeve.
Sometimes, the habits of a lifetime have long antecedents, even though the Paris brothers were identical twins.
By the way, the picture dates back to before I was born in 1945.
Let me say at the outset that I hate fruit flies. And they appear to hate me. I love to eat lots of fresh fruit through the Los Angeles summer, but my apartment becomes infested with the damnable bugs. I have several traps filled with apple cider vinegar in which to drown the unwary. Alas, they seem to have caught on and—except for a about 10-12 weaklings per day—avoid falling into the vinegar.
Several times each day, I venture into the kitchen to squash a few dozen of the invasive Drosophila. They retaliate by flying around my head while I am sitting at the computer and playing the insect equivalent of “chicken.” That only annoys me more, so I go and kill a few dozen more.
Last year’s infestation ended when I purchased a kitchen wastebasket with a top, but I think the new generation has figured out a way to sneak through the cracks. I have to now make daily visits to the dumpster with my garbage.
(Excuse me. I am tired of having my head buzzed by fruit flies. I will go into the kitchen and wreak as much havoc as I can on the surviving population.)
There, I have dispatched another bunch to insect Valhalla. But these bugs are getting smarter. When I walk into the kitchen, they start flying, knowing that I have little chance of catching them in mid-air. It is only when they land that I have any chance of crushing them.
Pah, I almost just swallowed one of the little monsters!
The last two days, I was revisiting one of my favorite authors, Honoré de Balzac. In his novel The Country Doctor (Le Médecin de Campagne), Doctor Benassis visits 5the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps and finds the following inscription left by one of the monks in an empty cell:
Fuge, late, tace
This is Latin for “Flee, hide, be silent.”
Which reminds me of Stephen Dedalus’s “Silence, exile, and cunning” from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It also makes me think of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky’s “If one’s fated to be born in Caesar’s empire, let him live aloof, provincial, by the seashore.”
I embrace this advice (except for the part about being silent, of which this post is a clear violation). At my advanced age, I have no hope of—or even desire for—success.
To quote the old antique dealer in Balzac’s The Fatal Skin (Le Peau de Chagrin):
Man depletes himself by two instinctive acts that dry up the sources of his existence. Two words express all the forms taken by these two causes of death: DESIRE and POWER. Between these two poles of human action, there is another principle seized upon by the wise, to which I owe my happiness and my longevity [the speaker is 102 years old]. Desire sets us afire and Power destroys us; but KNOWLEDGE leaves our fragile organism in a state of perpetual calm.
Alas, Balzac wasn’t able to follow his own advice. He burned through his life in 51 years, yearning for years to marry the Polish Countess Evelina Hanska. No sooner did he get his wish and return to Paris with his bride than he took sick and died.
Today I took another walk to the (on weekends, anyway) deserted office park. In my bag were three books I donated to the Little Free Library box at 26th and Broadway in Santa Monica. Then I sat down at a park bench and read the last forty pages of Georges Simenon’s The Hotel Majestic, in which Superintendent Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciaire solves a double murder that takes place in the cellars of the Hotel Majestic. When I finished the last page, I donated that book as well.
While I was reading, a very bossy young male voice emanated from the nearby tennis courts where Pickle Ball was being played. Somebody was carrying on a running commentary on the game with frequent snatches of advice. I cannot believe that the voice’s opponent enjoyed the outing.
Although much of the country is mired in a heat wave, there was a delightful sea breeze the whole time which was quite comfortable.
Let me see: At the rate of 10-12 books a week, it will take upwards of ten years to donate all my books. And I haven’t even gotten to the heart of the collection yet. Let’s face it, I probably never will as I am still buying books. I am totally incorrigible, On the other hand, I am living the bookworm’s dream that I dreamed from my earliest years. Never mind that it is not a dream shared by most of my fellow Americans, but it means a lot to me.
Here I am, in my late 70s and surrounded on all sides by a huge book collection. If my apartment were hit by burglars, my fear is that I would be sued for them because they would get a hernia carrying away my books. In fact, I am in the position of trying to find a home for the books I do not plan to re-read or consult.
What I had been doing is donating books to either a local thrift shop or library, but as the IRS standard deduction keeps increasing, I no longer have to keep records of my donations. All I really want to do is find a home for my discards.
What I have been doing lately is using are the display boxes of the Little Free Library (“Take a Book; Share a Book”), of which there a a number of “free libraries” in my neighborhood. So when I take a walk or go shopping, I usually have three or four books in my bag to donate. How do I make a donation? I simply take the books from my bag and put them on the shelves of the Little Free Library.
How did I ever get in this predicament? Well, to tell the truth, to the extent that I am a fairly happy well-adjusted person, I owe it all to my upbringing (I was lucky with my parents) and to the fact that books were a major form of escape for me—from the age of eight onward.
I remember the time that my little neighbor Patsy Strohmeier got me a hardback of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. While I was reading the book, my cousin Emil came to visit and was angered to see me with my face in a book. He picked up the novel and slammed it hard on the floor, saying “THIS is what I think of your books!” By that time, I was already so hooked that my first reaction was that he was, in effect, saying “THIS is what I think of YOU!” I wasn’t offended because I knew that Emil was a good-hearted person who just didn’t like to read.
Simply put, I became a bookworm because I was a sickly child. In fact, between the ages of 10 and 21, I was walking around with a brain tumor in my pituitary gland that stunted my growth and, in pressing on my optic nerve, caused severe frontal headaches on most days. Even with a headache, I could still read—though I was useless when it came to baseball, football, basketball, and most childhood sporting activities.
Somehow, in the course of time after I had brain surgery in 1966, I became a fairly healthy person. Oh, to be sure, I am a diabetic, have asthma and chronic rhinitis, but I seem to survived surprisingly well. (Bad rice! Bad rice!)
I worked for a quarter of a century for two accounting firms, the second of which was an outgrowth of an earlier firm. During that time, the best friends I had at work were two accountants. Don Kiyomi Yamagishi was a Nisei and in every way more of an American than I ever was. Danilo Cabais Peña was a Filipino. Both passed away in the late 2010s. (Somewhere, I have a picture of Dan Peña; but it will take me some time to find it. When I do, I’ll post it.)
Both of my accountant friends were genuinely good human beings. Surprisingly, that’s not always true in that particular profession, where the temptation to cheat carries both penalties and rewards.
I was greatly saddened that I lost both of my friends—both within the space of a single year. I attended both of their funerals and had to soldier on at work for another year without their wise counsel.
This post is about the things that scared me as a child. In it, I go back as far as I can in my memory banks, back to before I was two years old. There are three things that scared me around that age.
First and foremost was … would you believe … toilet training. We were living in the Hungarian Buckeye Road neighborhood of Cleveland, and my great grandmother was living with us. She was born in Felcsut (pronounced FEL-choot) in the province of Fehérmegye (don’t even TRY to pronounce that one) sometime around 1880. She was old school. Not only that, she didn’t particularly like me at that time because I was the son of that fuszóru Tóth (cock-nosed Slovak) who was my father. (She was later to love my brother me and me, but never my father.) Therefore, she was fairly brutal about my toilet training.
I remember my nightmares at the time. I was seated on the toilet and the walls of the bathroom would close in on me with the roaring sound of a steam locomotive. That occurred fairly regularly as I recall.
As an infant in the crib, I had a boogeyman which I couldn’t exactly describe, only that I knew him as the Lobogó (LOH-boh-goh), which is one of the Hungarian words for flag. It’s odd, because I wasn’t afraid of flags as such, just that word that sounded so sinister to me. My Mom would kid me that there was never any danger from the Lobogó.
Finally, I remember a series of nightmares I had in which I was being chased by a lion. My Mom and Dad must have taken me to the zoo, because how would I know about the existence of lions. This was at least two years before I ever saw a television set. It could have been in a fairy tale that my mother told me. She would make up wonderful stories about a fairy princess (tündérleány) in the dark forest (sötét erdő). A lion must have wandered into one of her tales.
The image above, which is the flag of Irkutsk Oblast in Siberia, combines the dread Lobogó (flag) with my lion nightmares. I particularly like the red eyes.
Sorry for all the Hungarian words, but at the time I didn’t know a word of English, or even that the English language existed.
I have a friend who has been pretty much out of circulation for a quarter century. On an average of once a week, I give him a call. When I do, I have to brace myself for a series of rants on various subjects that are currently galling him. I would say he does about 90% or more of the talking, deftly segueing from one subject to another. He is capable of going on for hours if not stopped, usually by me—I am not overly fond of long telephone conversations.
At the same time, he is my best and oldest friend; so there is a reason why I continue calling him. Fortunately, this behavior mostly manifests itself over the phone. In person, surrounded by his family, the conversation is more of the give-and-take variety, which I prefer.
One of the dangers of living an isolated life is a tendency to go off into rants. If I did it, Martine would tell me in no uncertain terms to shove it. I guess he feels I am a safe person on whom to vent his grievances. And, as we age, the number of those grievances only increases.
I will continue to call him and listen—but not uncritically—to his rants. As soon as he mentions some subjects, such as artificial intelligence, or AI, I just ask him not to go there. He has nothing to say that he has not said a hundred times or more. But, as long as the grievance sticks in his craw, it will attempt to migrate to my ears as well.
Middle School Greek Dancers at St Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church
I remember a time when most foreign-born Americans were of European ethnicity. My father, Elek Paris, was born in what is now the Republic of Slovakia; and my mother, who was actually born in Ohio, was taken to Hungary to be raised by her grandparents. For the first five or six years of my life, I thought that Hungarian was the language of the United States.
What inevitably happens has happened. The children of European-born immigrants see their parents’ culture, religion, and language as something quaint which they are being reluctantly marshaled into accepting. The three-year Covid-19 lockdown has brought this tendency into sharper focus.
Yesterday, Martine and I attended the annual Greek Festival at St Nicholas in Northridge for the first time since 2019. Sure enough, the tours of the church were more perfunctory; the calamari was more breading than squid; and there were fewer people able to do the traditional dance steps. I noticed much the same at the two Hungarian festivals we attended this month. Only the Grace Hungarian Reform Church in Reseda had anything like the same quality of food and entertainment as before the lockdown.
Our neighbors downstairs are refugees from Putin’s Ukrainian invasion. I notice that their two little daughters are addressing their mother in English instead of Ukrainian.
When I first came to Los Angeles, there were at least half a dozen Hungarian restaurants. Now there are none. If I want real Hungarian food, I’ll either have to cook it myself or visit my brother more often. (He’s a far better cook than I am.)
If Martine and I expect to find more authentic ethnic events, we will have to concentrate on the Asian and Latin American ethnic events, as they have arrived in this country more recently.
Today was another Hungarian festival, this time it was the Tavaszköszöntő at the First Hungarian Reformed Church of Los Angeles. Although I can speak Hungarian (ungrammatically), I have a difficult time understanding the language when all the long agglutinative words are strung together in paragraph lengths.
Still, just letting the language wash over me, while understanding only bits and pieces, sends me back to my roots. As a child born in the Hungarian neighborhood of Buckeye Road in Cleveland, Ohio, I did not even know that English existed as the language of my home and neighborhood was strictly Magyar. Listening to spoken Hungarian makes me feel as if I were being washed by the gentle waves of the Danube as it flows through Budapest.
This is the 100th anniversary of the Treaty of Trianon, which resulted in millions of Hungarians being assigned to Czechoslovakia, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. One cannot go to a Hungarian gathering without seeing a map of the pre-Trianon borders of Hungary. It has led to a mythology of the lost cause, which is perfectly enshrined in the Himnusz, the Hungarian national anthem. Here is a YouTube video of the Himnusz:
Here are the lyrics in all the stanzas of the Himnusz:
Verse 1 O God, bless the nation of Hungary With your grace and bounty Extend over it your guarding arm During strife with its enemies Long torn by ill fate Bring upon it a time of relief This nation has suffered for all sins Of the past and of the future!
Verse 2 You brought our ancestors up Over the Carpathians’ holy peaks By You was won a beautiful homeland For Bendeguz’s sons And wherever flow the rivers of The Tisza and the Danube Árpád our hero’s descendants Will root and bloom.
Verse 3 For us on the plains of the Kuns You ripened the wheat In the grape fields of Tokaj You dripped sweet nectar Our flag you often planted On the wild Turk’s earthworks And under Mátyás’ grave army whimpered Vienna’s “proud fort.”
Verse 4 Ah, but for our sins Anger gathered in Your bosom And You struck with Your lightning From Your thundering clouds Now the plundering Mongols’ arrows You swarmed over us Then the Turks’ slave yoke We took upon our shoulders.
Verse 5 How often came from the mouths Of Osman’s barbarian nation Over the corpses of our defeated army A victory song! How often did your own son aggress My homeland, upon your breast, And you became because of your own sons Your own sons’ funeral urn!
Verse 6 The fugitive hid, and towards him The sword reached into his cave Looking everywhere he could not find His home in his homeland Climbs the mountain, descends the valley Sadness and despair his companions Sea of blood beneath his feet Ocean of flame above.
Verse 7 Castle stood, now a heap of stones Happiness and joy fluttered, Groans of death, weeping Now sound in their place. And Ah! Freedom does not bloom From the blood of the dead, Torturous slavery’s tears fall From the burning eyes of the orphans!
Verse 8 Pity, O Lord, the Hungarians Who are tossed by waves of danger Extend over it your guarding arm On the sea of its misery Long torn by ill fate Bring upon it a time of relief They who have suffered for all sins Of the past and of the future!
It is a powerful anthem. Hearing it sung at the festival today, I felt like taking my sword and riding to the border to stop the Turkish invader in his tracks. It is such a powerful hymn that it is forbidden to be sung at international sporting events—which just adds to the Hungarian sense of grievance.
Tarnmoor 
You must be logged in to post a comment.