Month: October 2024

The Flag Raising

October 25 2024

I had mixed feelings about going. It would evoke nostalgic memories—neither negative nor positive, just neutral emotions. I may meet people with my ethnic background. Ethnic individuals tend to display increasingly ethnic behavior as they age. I was not one of those people; I escaped Hungary because there was no future for me there, or at least, that is what my parents thought.

Upon learning about the flag-raising ceremony at Ottawa City Hall to commemorate the 68th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, I decided to go downtown and see what it was all about. Perhaps I’ll encounter elderly and weathered Hungarians, eavesdrop on Hungarian conversations, and cross paths with someone from Sopron, a small town close to the Austrian border where we lived and from where I walked to Vienna shortly after the October 23, 1956, Revolution.
At the base of a flagpole, I spotted the Hungarian flag and approached a clutch of people congregating. Speaking in English, I asked a bald and paunchy character if he was Hungarian. He said no, mentioning that he was part of a Member of Parliament’s staff from Wascana, Saskatchewan. He also informed me that the MP would speak briefly during the presentation. Ok. And then the Liberal MP from Wascana, seeing me talking to his staff, came over, shook hands, and explained that he was one-quarter Hungarian. I responded that I am 100 percent Hungarian. I inquired about his absence from the caucus meeting this morning, where numerous MPs were anticipated to call for the Prime Minister’s resignation as head of the Liberal Party. I cannot recall his answer, but he was a nice young fellow, and we exchanged a few words about the beauty of his province.

Turning around, a blonde woman in a business suit introduced herself as the Commercial Attaché for the Hungarian Embassy. We switched to speaking Hungarian, and suddenly, I noticed that all the people were well-dressed: the women wore business attire, and the men wore suits. I realized I was underdressed, I wore a red windbreaker, jeans, running shoes, and a baseball cap. If only I had shaved and dressed more formally this morning. Come to think of it, it is a major annual event to celebrate the Hungarian heroes who fought Russian tanks with handguns and risked their lives.

In just a few days and the weeks that followed the uprising in Budapest, the Russian tanks arrived and crushed the Revolution. Three thousand individuals perished, and 200,000 fled to foreign nations as refugees. Thirty-five thousand Hungarian refugees came to Canada after the Revolution.

We were greeted and addressed by the Deputy Mayor of Ottawa. As we sat down, I noticed at least fifty people had attended the event. I felt I was in a multicultural milieu already – Canadian and Hungarian –  especially after the Deputy Mayor started his speech by thanking the Anishinaabe people for using their unceded land, a standard introduction for public events in Canada recently. It is a small token for reconciling the injustices Canadians meted out to the Indigenous people in the past. I find this practice gratuitous, odious, and dishonest; I never heard that we Canadians would ever return the lands to the indigenous people. So, what is the purpose of this note of thanks? And, of course, it had nothing to do with the Hungarian Revolution half a world away, sixty-eight years ago.

The two MPs spoke next before the Hungarian Ambassador to Canada talked about the Revolution. She mentioned a few Hungarian Canadians who had become famous internationally, including Alanna Morrisette, whose grandfather came to Canada after the Revolution, and John Polanyi of the University of Toronto, a Nobel Prize winner who attended high school in Toronto in the early 1940s, when his parents sent him to Canada for safety during the rise of Nazi Germany.

The other curious thing was that the Ambassador spoke in English and French, Canada’s official languages, but not in Hungarian. I am sure there must be some protocol for speaking in public in Canada, but this was a Hungarian event celebrating a historical event, so I thought she could have given a trilingual presentation greeting us.

While listening to the anthems of Hungary and Canada, the Ambassador raised the flag, and that was it. I looked around for some kindred souls but saw mostly suited men and well-dressed women. If they were Hungarians, they were the second generation following the Revolution.  A clutch of embassy people spoke in Hungarian next to me when I noticed three scruffy looking, wizened old folks who turned out to be Hungarians. They all knew each other, and their facial expressions seemed to exude some impatience with all these well-dredded folks, all the officials present without direct experience of the Revolution.

The irony of this celebration did not escape me: Victor Orban, the current Prime Minister of Hungary, is friendly with Putin’s Russia, while here we are celebrating the freedom fight against the Russians sixty years ago.

I was in grade eleven in 1956, when the Uprising broke out. Our small town had no news except that trouble was brewing in Budapest. It was big trouble, it turned out, and my parents worried about my older brother Peter, a first-year medical student in Budapest. Not having cell phones, we had no news of Peter. It took three or four days, I cannot recall exactly, when Peter showed up at the apartment house where we lived, dirty and tired after walking from Budapest to Sopron, a distance of some two hundred kilometers (circa 120 miles).

As soon as Peter showed up, our mother prepared a couple of sandwiches and ordered us to walk to Vienna with the name of a Jesuit priest who had been a classmate of my uncle at the University of Vienna. We were obedient boys, and Peter and I started walking on the highway to Vienna, where we joined an exodus of wall-to-wall people escaping the country. It was a time when my brain did not seem to function with understanding; I felt like a robot, without thinking, a state of mind that saved my sanity. We had no idea where our journey would take us and what we would do when we arrived. So yes, the flag-raising event did stir up some memories, which had faded over time. The walk to Vienna was a significant event in my life and made me think about what could have happened if we had stayed back home in Hungary. I recall a film I saw once that tracked the lives of people who made a career decision and compared their lives to what could have happened if they had made another career decision. In real life, one cannot return and take another fork in the road. My immigrant story has been a challenging but highly satisfying experience. I would not have missed it if I had a choice.

A Men’s Book Club Discusses Alice Munro

October 22, 2024

The title suggests that men and women have differing perspectives on Alice Munro’s work. Can that be verified? I do not know. But our book club had a lively discussion about Munro’s book entitled Dear Life, a short story collection published in 2012.

Surprisingly, our members read some stories, but not all of them. They found the stories dark and stopped reading to avoid being depressed. One found the lack of “redemption” in the stories disappointing. But does life always have a happy ending? Many people have challenging lives and fail to reach a satisfying old age. There could be health, financial, and family issues that are never resolved. The shock value of missing an ending to the stories made me think of what could have been should the author have completed it. And that I found exciting, and I dreamt up options for finishing the stories.

Although most of us considered the subjects dark, we all agreed that the writing was extremely smooth, and the characters in the story came to life. Descriptions of small towns, the location of many of the stories, also came to life with such force that one of us thought she described the city where he grew up. I admired the ease with which Munro described her characters in a few pages in such detail that I thought I thoroughly understood the person and her motivation in life.

Most of Munro’s characters are women residing in small Ontario towns during the 1950s and 1960s. These women did not usually attend university, and the smart ones hid their intelligence; it was not fashionable for women to be clever in those days.

Her characterizations reminded me of my parents: my mother stayed home and occupied herself with housekeeping while my father was the breadwinner. My mother was the sole exception among her siblings, who all attended university. One of Munro’s stories is an exact copy of one aspect of my parents’ life: the wife prepares dinners for her husband, a doctor, just like my father, who expects dinner on the table when he returns home from work.

Munro’s description of women’s societal role and status started a conversation about their role today, with the understanding that women now surpass men at university graduation. It’s common for wives to be the breadwinners while their husbands take on household responsibilities. This has been a significant change over the past fifty years. Thinking of this trend, some of us questioned to what extent Munro’s stories would be relevant today. I thought that they would. Confirming my view, the Nobel Committee recognized Munro’s universal writings and awarded her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013.

But after her death this year, Munro’s reputation suffered with the widespread publication that her husband sexually abused their daughter. Many followers of Munro expressed moral outrage about Munro being aware of the situation and not doing anything about it. Doubts were raised about her genius, and discussions ensued about the quality of her books after her questionable behavior was uncovered. Interestingly, despite anecdotal evidence of changing opinions about Munro, our book club did not dwell on this subject. Maybe this is one difference between men and women when considering Munro’s work. Three out of eight of us resonated with the book, while one person didn’t find it appealing. Most agreed that the stories were dark and depressing but beautifully written.

Cooking the Turkey for Thanksgiving

October 17, 2024             

It was the Friday before Thanksgiving weekend, and we had no plans or turkey to look forward to. We used to close the cottage this weekend, including a turkey dinner, but the weather forecast was unfavorable this year, so we decided to close the cottage a week earlier. So we were at home with no plans or turkey.

I love turkey and the atmosphere that comes with celebrating Thanksgiving. Preparing meals from leftovers is also a pleasure. To cook a turkey is not new to me; I had cooked a couple of turkeys over the past years, so I told Kathy I’d roast one. Since she has done it many times before with the family and knows the amount of work that comes with it, she said, “Go ahead and do the entire dinner.” I understood her feelings, especially doing it for only two people. My thoughts focused on roasting the turkey, ignoring side dishes then. And that is how the weekend started.

The first challenge was looking for turkey sales. I found the stores sold it not by exact weight as they used to but for a fixed price in a weight range. For example, turkeys were between three to five kilograms, five to seven kilograms, and so on. I did not think much of it, but Kathy thought it was a trick; if you bought one at the upper weight limit, you paid less per kilogram than if you bought it at the lower weight limit. I said no problem and found one at the upper weight limit. I purchased 6.3 kilograms, or close to fourteen pounds, for CAN$ 22 or US$16.

It was a frozen one, cheaper than fresh turkey, that was twice as expensive, and we never buy butterball turkeys. The frozen turkey led me to the next challenge: thaw it in less than two days. According to the cookbooks I read, the rule of thumb was that one needs one day, or twenty-four hours, to thaw four pounds of turkey in the fridge. I did not have three days, so I went to the cold-water method of thawing the frozen turkey, which would take seven hours, according to the cookbooks. I put the turkey in the sink for four hours and then in the fridge for two nights, which did the thawing trick.

On Sunday, I pulled out the neck from inside the bird and looked at cookbooks for the next steps. It was not rocket science; I had to quarter an apple, a lemon, and an onion and put them into the belly of the bird. Then, I brushed the outside with melted butter before placing the dish into the oven.

I felt happy with my progress until I realized some side dishes would also be desirable. Kathy came with me to the store, and we picked up some potatoes, green beans, carrots, and parsnips. She decided she was going to fix the vegetables. But we needed dressing and gravy; both were available at the store in ready-made form. I believe in easy cooking and was going to buy them until Kathy put them back and strongly expressed that those items were way too expensive and she could fix both for a fraction of their cost. And that was that.

With both of us working in the kitchen, we took a moment to reflect that our family lives in the States and cannot join us for dinner when we have six kilograms of meat. But, of course, US Thanksgiving will come soon, at the end of November, and we usually join one of them for the celebration.

Then we considered who of our friends would be in a similar situation and dropped them a short note asking if they were alone for Thanksgiving and that they should consider joining us for dinner. It turned out that they were either traveling or were out of town visiting family; at any rate, it was short notice, and we did not expect positive responses.

In three hours, I took the golden-brown bird out of the oven and opened a bottle of bubbly.

It was a great, chaotic weekend deciding to cook a turkey on the fly. But it felt good to end the summer and start the fall, symbolically, with this dinner; the weather turned cool and windy. With the cottage closed, we will now concentrate on the garden at home: covering the outdoor furniture, clipping back the bushes, raking up the leaves, and cutting the grass again. The fulcrum for this change-over was the Thanksgiving dinner.