February 22, 2010

It is 10:30 am or for my European friends it is 10:30 in the morning.

We Americans are extremely intelligent people. We can't hack the metric system but insisting on using latin description for before noon and after noon.

The day is just beginning. The weather is nice but they are already forecasting some nasty things to come. I wanted to go skiing on Wednesday but with more snow in the forecast I think I am postponing it.

Just to change the subject I want to mention that at the end of next month a very good friend of mine and his wife are coming to New York for their annual visit.

We know each other since elementary school, we practically grew up together (if we can call this status of our life grown up) and in the past several years see each other once a year when they visit here from good old England.

At these visits them and another very old, dear and good friend and his wife we get together and reminisce about the old times (or tymes), exchange gossips and in the meantime stuff ourselves with Hungarian soul food.

We always enjoy and look forward to these get-togethers.

It is nice to meet people from our old lives. We are so far from our roots and there are so few of us left that it is very refreshing to talk and remember about our younger (and unquestionably wilder) days.

Since the Winter Olympics is on I can't help but remember when my friend and I used to go ice skating practically every day in the winter.

We probably put in more ice time time than any serious competitive skater. As the saying goes "I could a been a contender" applies to both of us. However, our interest was far far away from the sport. Well, sport as it is commonly known.

Our single minded devotion was to meet girls. That was the only reason why we were willing to freeze our teenage arses off on the outdoor skating rink. I also think this was before the invention of recreational sex. At least for us.

This was an outdoor rink. In those days, and I am talking about the 1950s, there were no indoor ice skating rinks in Budapest.

We actually never met anybody nice out there but we always had a great time.

Getting together with friends from the old days is such a comforting way to spend time. Meeting these people always give me a warm and fuzzy feeling and I am looking forward to it.

Anyway, here is a life changing story.

Yesterday I received from my other friend an e-mail with a photo attached to it. The story is that he is going through old slides and digitizing them and he keeps finding stuff he gets very sentimental about .

This particular photo shows a grocery store in our neighborhood. The story goes that he went there one day in January 1957 to buy something. The store was almost closing and the woman in charge would not let him in and in addition made some antisemitic remarks.

Next day my friend came up to our house and told my Mother and I the story. He said this was the last straw and this was what made him decide to leave the country. My Mother agreed with him and together they convinced me to leave also.

OK, looking back in the past fifty three years I am not sorry that I left. I have a good life, a loving wife and this is not the worse place to be in the world.

But the funny thing is how sometimes something insignificant can have a life changing effect. If that little scenario did not happen between my friend and the woman in the grocery store him and I would be two retired gentlemen still living in Budapest.