Spinor Info

It’s just been a little over eleven months since my uncle Jóska died… and now it’s one of my aunt’s turn, aunt Zsóka (as a child, I called her Zsóka néni) died in her sleep this morning in Budapest.

I have Zsóka néni to thank for many things, most notably for improving my English. I was around 16 at the time, and I was complaining to her that despite my best efforts, my English is still not anywhere near where I think it ought to be. Her advice: go read a book or two. And don’t use a dictionary, figure it out yourself.

The first ever book I read in English was a gift from her: The Eagle Has Landed, by Jack Higgins. It took a year or so, and several false starts before I was able to get to the end. But my next book took only a few months; the next, just a few weeks; and after that, I was reading English almost as well as I was reading Hungarian.

Needless to say, a few years later when I came to Canada, near fluency in the English language was a tremendous asset. Instead of washing dishes or selling hamburgers, my first job in this country involved writing C-language driver code for a government client. Thanks in large part to Zsóka néni.

Who is no longer with us. She was 77, the oldest of four siblings; now only two of them remain, my mother and my aunt Edina. I hope both of them will remain with us, in good health and in good spirits, for many more years, never mind years, how about decades, to come.

I realized that I haven’t written anything in this blog for a whole week.

Back in the old days, when I was yet to convince myself to go with the times and start using the word “blog”, and I was still using my homebrew solution instead of real blogging software, I used to write something every day. I felt compelled to do so, given that I called my blog a “Day Book”. (Not an original idea, I borrowed it from Jerry Pournelle.)

But the blogging software I presently use doesn’t ask me to write something every day. So I’ve gotten sloppy. Or perhaps I have nothing meaningful to say.

Or maybe it is Facebook’s fault… I’m still debating with myself if it was the right thing to do, but I linked this blog to Facebook, so everything I write here shows up there, too. (Translation for those who read this on Facebook: everything you read, right here, right now, was originally posted “over there”, on my blog site.) I don’t know why it should intimidate me, but it does. Maybe it’s the idea that on Facebook, people actually read (sometimes) what I write, which is an odd sensation… I am used to writing in my blog with the near certain knowledge that nobody will read it, so I felt free to speak my mind.

Or maybe it’s just that I’ve been doing too much tensor algebra in recent days, all part of a devious plan to procrastinate, because once I stop doing that, I’ll have to start to think seriously about what I am going to do with a small bathroom downstairs that is in a severe need of repair…

I discovered this last year completely by accident, when I went for a late evening walk… imagine a park, usually dark at night, illuminated by a myriad of faint lanterns hanging from the trees and whatnot. It was a magical experience, made even more so that it was completely unexpected… I did not know about the Lumiere Festival at the time.

This year, I took my wife along. We went a little earlier. Perhaps that was a mistake… perhaps the crowds just got bigger since last year. But crowds are one thing. It’s another thing altogether that just about every second (!), I was blinded by someone’s camera flash. Now I will not go on about the pointless stupidity of using a camera flash when you’re trying to photograph faint lanterns in the dark, as I got past that some forty years ago, at the age of six or thereabouts, when I was watching an ice skating event on television, complete with spectators using camera flashes high up in the seating area, perhaps hundreds of feet away from the competitors they were trying to photograph.

No, it’s the inconsiderateness that bugged me. The blasted flashes made it impossible to enjoy the sights… every time I stared at a faint lantern, trying to discern its shape (and some of them were quite beautiful and elaborate) some idiot flashed his camera in my face. At one point, I could stand it no more, and yelled back at the dark, in the direction of the multicolored swirl that was still on my retina, telling the unseen photographer that he is ruining it for everyone with the stupid flashes. In retrospect, I realize that I sounded just like Victor Meldrew from the British comedy, One Foot in the Grave. So much for the promise I made to myself years ago about not joining the club of grumpy old men prematurely!

My uncle, my mother’s younger brother, is dead this morning I am told.

His name was József Sztojka, although I remember him from my childhood as Jóska bácsi, or uncle Jóska. I have many, many, many fond memories of him. He has been suffering from illness for a long time, so his death is not altogether a surprise, but I am saddened nevertheless.

Some random memories.

• I have a copy of volume 3 of a Hungarian language physics book, Mechanics by Tibor Cholnoky, which was the first book I ever owned that explained in detail how the laws of orbital mechanics can be derived from Newton’s law of gravitation. This book was a gift from Jóska bácsi. I saw it on his bookshelf when I was around 10 or so, and sat down reading it, forgetting about the world. That’s how he found me and that’s when he gave the book to me. Thank you for helping to steer my life in this direction.
• I loved playing with my cousins, his two children (later three), at Jóska bácsi‘s place. It was the selfishness of childhood (I was no more than 6 or 7 at the time), as it wasn’t family ties but my cousin’s toys that I found the most interesting. But what is most memorable is how Jóska bácsi played with us. He helped us build toy castles and helped us destroy them with toy weapons. He helped us build elaborate tracks for Matchbox cars (oh, how I envied my cousin’s amazing Matchbox car collection!) and helped us race them. Though I never understood why he seemed so offended by my childish attempt at poetry. When one of the Matchbox cars kept oscillating left and right as it went down the track, I attempted to describe this in rhyme with words that may be best translated into English as “wiggled its fanny”. He angrily told me not to say such things again.
• A relative of my father visited us once from Romania. His family name was Fogas, a word that means, among other things, (coat)hanger in Hungarian. Together with this relative, we went to the flat of Jóska bácsi one day, a flat that was under major renovation at the time. So we rang the doorbell, Jóska bácsi opened the door, and as he never met our distant relative, introductions began. “Fogas,” said our relative, thrusting his right hand out for a handshake, while holding his coat in his left. “We don’t have those yet,” apologized Jóska bácsi…
• I first heard the record At the Speed of Sound by Paul McCartney and the Wings at Jóska bácsi. I also first heard Jeff Wayne’s musical experiment, The War of the Worlds, at his place. I still enjoy listening to both records from time to time, and when I do, I often remember Jóska bácsi.
• Shortly before I left Hungary, I visited Jóska (by this time, I often omitted the bácsi part) at his cottage north of Budapest. He was already in the habit of spending much of his time alone, like a hermit, in this cottage. I spent a whole evening with him before heading back to town, and we had a long, long conversation about life, universe, and everything. He was a sad man by this time, and I listened to him with the infinite wisdom of youth, certain that I had all the answers, certain that if he only heeded my advice, all would be well.

Well, Jóska bácsi is no more. Only the memories remain.