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Childhood Notes

Once see how the things that have to be going to immediately to get an e-mail to Priscilla on the taxes and also an update to on the lawsuit from up. Prescription filled for Viagra as soon as possible before January and must be done on Monday.

Get the other packages out of what I got for the others on the security to the guy at Cambridge energy Dan Yergin.

get clothes on Monday from the house.

I recall my grandfather’s funeral as though I was there today.

He was laid out in their dining room in a casket wide-open. His face was pale and thin and I saw him as he was better then in life because this time I really looked at him and examined him very closely, particularly never having seen a dead person before.

I am certain that I think of his face still recalling that very vividly, I must have been maybe six at the time, that he was of a face of very much like my own. In fact I can see it up in the mirror now and see his face as though it had been transformed from him to me.

All of the Hungarian women were sobbing in the living room and were very distressed, which I recall surprised me because I did not think that one should be distressed when an old person dies as contrasted with a young person like myself at that time

Their place seemed to be a gathering place for the women of the community would sit in the living room and have coffee or tea or whatever and talk for hours and my mother very much at the center of all of these discussions as I recall.

And they had a big tabby cat orange as I recall, it was very friendly to me at all times. Their lush beautiful garden with a magnificent tomatoes and squash peppers was a beauty to behold and it must have taken a lot of work to maintain it. And during the war when I must”ve been say eight or so my grandfather would take me across a bridge into a field where he had a victory Garden where he spent quite a bit of time.

My older cousin Mikey, and who seemed to me to be a giant, would often take with him up to the lumber yard which was on 3rd St near where we got off the streetcar. And we would go there quite frequently to make purchases for repairs on the house or whatever project that he might be doing at that time

It seemed to me that there was another boy: Junior, but I don’t recall much about him although he seemed to be older than Mikey and seemed to go off every day I suppose to work Mikey taught me that when fighting you do not put your thumb on the inside of your fingers but to hold it out so that you do not break it- he was full of wisdom like that. He later went into the FBI or CIA, I saw him at my mother’s funeral, and among other things it appeared that he was tracking Hungarian refugees that came to the US after the 1957 revolution in hungry and keeping an eye on them. He did not say this in so many words I gathered it from things put together from what he had been doing.

I recall that I knew enough Hungarian, learned from them and reinforced by my mother, that I could carry on at least some nominal communication with them. They seemed to speak absolutely no English whatsoever and it seemed to that very few of their Hungarian friends spoke any English either. Of course the younger people all did. And the younger people who were all as fluent as I was and even the older children had all been born in this country I presumed but I’m not sure of that. And certainly my mothers sister was a born in Hungary.

In fact my mother’s sister, I don’t recall how many sisters she had it seems to me more than one, had gone back to Hungary when she was may be 18 years old for a visit to their village. And they were having a agricultural crisis at that time and soldiers stopped the train and made everybody get off and help in the harvest for several days. My mother’s sister said she would never go back to Hungary again and I guess the rest of the family agreed with that notion.

At any rate my mother never expressed any interest whatsoever in ever going to Hungary.

My mother told me that my grandfather had been the mayor of this wage and evidently had been married a several times. He seemed to be considerably older than my grandmother as I indicated above. He had learned seven languages as they lived on the border of room for various countries including Romania and Ukraine and and there are several others such as Yugoslavia in the Balkans. Strange as his language ability did not seem to have enabled him to learn any English whatsoever.

Strange, I do not remember my grandmother’s funeral whatsoever and wonder if I even went.

The Hungarians are said to have been descended from the Mongols, to be wanders as a result and quick tempered and very difficult to govern. Certainly their conquerors up to the Russians have found that out. But since the Turks occupied Hungary for almost 400 years, much Turkish blood is intermingled with the Hungarians now.

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