George's Blog For Friends

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I remember in HS i once read a quasi autobiographical book called just like that. The Spider Web (1938). Or maybe, On the Spider Thread of Memory (1977). One of the two. Written by the a Romanian author, Cella Serghi.

One of these days i thought. What if conscience does not reside inside our body but is the Universe itself by which our brain is linked through literal threads. Infinitesimally small but physical whirls like threads of AEther used to entangle particles, making up for our memories. Maybe created by the lightening of engrams. Shooting out of our brain, entangling with many others.

Interestingly, the name of the character of the first book was Diana, reminding of Dianetics.

Scientology also believes brain is not where our soul resides, but just an interface. To the individual Thetans.

The ancient Egyptians were discarding the brain during mumification. They said it was a useless organ (in the afterlife anyways). A burden to carry all our life? I remember the title of a poem written by Romanian poet Adrian Păunescu. The Unrepeatable Burden. Cause what is brain? Something that takes lots of precious resources of our body, for sure.

My father was born on December 16 1937 in a village called Sasca near Baia, a German colony which was the first capital of Moldova. During that time, the closest city was Fălticeni. Baia name could come from the silver mines nearby. I think he was the second of 4 brothers. His father was a carpenter and bees keeper and also had a small subsistence farm and more than 10 acres of land. Both his parents died in the epidemic of 1944 leaving the four brothers orphans.

I have conflicting memories for the fist name of my paternal grandfather, was either Ion or Costache and my grandmother's name was Ana.

They were moved to an orphanage in Brăila. The youngest, Mircea, who was 2 years old was adopted. My father ended in Mediaș, Sibiu county where he went to a professional school and became a carpenter like his father. After mandatory military stage in Calafat, he moved to Pojorâta, near Câmpulung where he worked in a shop for a guy named...

He was blackmailed into marrying my mother, who was 17. Two weeks before marriage they also forced him to change his name from Diaconescu to Ion (the most common first name in Romania, equivalent to John). One year later or in 1960 i was born.

For this reason they always treated us, mother and children as a temporary major inconvenience and he planned his escape for about 23 years. He divorced my mother around the time i got married and went and married a widow woman from Sasca. I think he was happy for a while but had a health problem.

I was a few years old and he went to play football (soccer) at the local stadium and some guy hit his left calf intentionally and he told him it was for beating my mother, something he was doing. He developed a non healing wound (eschar) that kept growing until it encompassed his whole left leg all the way to hip.

When i went in Romania only and last time in 2004 he was in constant pain but was never willing to amputate his leg. I think he died in 2013, in the same year with my mother who developed a cancer stomach, after being tortured (smoked) in her condo by right extremists from Romania, for years.

My father was a workaholic. He worked non stop including Sundays and all holidays in the factory and in his shop at home. He had a stash of money and in 73 he unexpectedly sold his motorcycle and bought a second hand car. The only time he wasn't working was in the Sundays when he went fly fishing in the rivers around Câmulung, Moldova and Bistrița. He put a lot of km on that car only to go around fishing.

He sometimes took me with him especially after HS when i think he tried me to keep me away from friends, bars and disco. He and mother asked me to work during vacations.

Also a perfectionist, he was moved to supervise from one department to another in that factory, because he was always setting things right (organizing, making them work). Though he was toughened by his early life, he had a compassionate though impulsive nature. He was always submissive to others and easy to manipulate. He wasn't drinking except on rare occasions. Also not smoking or cursing.

He had this life long friend Constantin Alistar also from Fălticeni also a supervisor at the factory. He influenced him a lot, especially into beating and divorcing my mother. When i was a college student one day i was at his place and they were partying with two women, kinda inviting me. But i didn't like their obscene music.

My mother had a very isolated and neglected childhood and i remember from the first years of my life, to her everything was new. My grand mother hated her cause she came in her life out of marriage and unwanted.

My father was neglecting and ignoring her and us children. There was lots of confusion in her mind and some people took advantage of her. But the vast majority of times my father was beating her for no reason because i knew all the circumstances. She made me some sort of confidant and i knew everything she did as she was carrying me around everywhere.

When i was at the age of 4 or 5 my father went for a trip to Soviet Union. Must have been nearby Moldova. He brought back a photo enlarger for my grandfather and I think a camera, and a tricycle for me (that was later converted to a bicycle). After i got bored of three wheels my father one day made it two only but it lacked a freewheel mechanism. Which means the pedals were always linked to the rear wheel.

One day maybe at my repeated requests my father took me to ride on the street that was paved with asphalt. They were very few cars (for lack of cars in Romania at that time) maybe just a few a day. We went and climbed a long slope beyond the milk processing factory. Then when we got back, i took my feet off the pedals. The pedals started to turn so fast i could not put my feet back on.

At the base of the slope i think i had maybe 50 kmh (30 mph). A group of gypsies on a side of the road were gesticulating and yelling at me to keep focused and not give up which i think helped me a lot. I continued out of inertia for several hundred yards or until i could control that bike.

Was it in that year when one day he asked for that kerosene cooking lamp, he took it to his shop and made some tea. Then he left the cup in a place where i could reach it. My grandfather asked him what he wanted to do and he said he does not want to go to jail. I drank one sip from that tea, but it smelled like gasoline. Then my mother said i fell asleep for a few hours.

I was 5 or 6 years old. I went with my grandmother, Livia and my grandfather, Valerian Mitre (from Storojineț, today Ukraine) in Suceava, county residence, to visit with his sister, Miți. Tante (aunt) Miți was her name.

Believe it or not, this picture was taken by my sister Angela (coincidence of name) who was 3 or 4, during one of those days in Suceava.

Grandfather was not biological, he married my grandmother when my mother was a few years old. He was a many years war veteran, was a driver on a truck carrying other soldiers and a piece of artillery. I remember he also said something a mare he was riding. 6 years of war. I once asked him, when i was about 8, why people do go to war. He said "they were too many people".

Besides Romanian he spoke German (and he always said, Ukrainian and Russian). He spoke German with my grandfather when they wanted us not to understand (witch was drawing me crazy) but never wanted to teach us. He also played violin and was the motor behind me learning how to play the accordion from that blind teacher.

Here in this picture we were all smiling better said laughing because of the way my sister was holding the camera. The reason the picture came out crooked.

One night tante Miți drove me really mad. She said i was fat and my tits were big and kept giving me bras to try. Finally could go to sleep. I heard a very loud noise that briefly awoke me. In the morning i saw a big branch ot the tree (walnut maybe) in the courtyard was down. It was hit by lightening, they said.

I remember here a story my mother told me. When she was a kid they once went with the school to destroy mole mounds on one of the many hills around that part of the town. It started to rain and they came back dragging their hoes on the ground behind as the teacher taught them. And here came this lightning and hit the hoe of the kid right in front of her.

Was it that evening or the next when we went to visit other relatives or theirs. They were in a front yard some sort of flowers (queen of night they called them) that were making a smell so strong it was choking me.

I remember i was playing in a barrel with collected rain water (they did that a lot back then because the rain water had very few minerals and needed not carrying from a fountain) with a little boat that had an electrical motor in it.

They gave it to me to take home în Câmpulung (Suceava). I played a lot with it but in the end i took it apart (like i always did with everything i ever had, maybe it broke) and my father built with that motor a little metal propeller thrower. I remember later i made a drawing with a man on a backpack with a motor in the back and a propeller above him.

Because it took piano lessons between 5 and 7 with a teacher named Redlov(e) and had to write (copy) notes for homework, i kinda learned how to read and write before i went to school. But i remember the first thing i ever read was the word PHILOSOPHY (FILOZOFIA) on a cover of a HS book of my mother, who abandoned HS after about a year "because of headaches" my grandfather said. She later went to a medical assistant school, but never graduated because of the weird test she had for finals and she could not do it.

They later bought me a small accordion, with 32 bass buttons, but could not play with it mostly because i could only play by notes at that time. So my grandfather brought me an accordion teacher was was literally blind (was brought in by his daughter). In the end he taught me a few songs and after a few years i forgot about notes and was playing only by ear.

At some point i started to hate that accordion because the teacher asked me to bring at school where i was playing so the other could dance traditional folk dances while rehearsing for the end year celebrations. So i was the only one who didn't get to dance with the girls and that was the reason i could not dance at the end of grade school, like others.

Also that year when we lived downtown and I went to another school they hired me to play at a kindergarten dance rehearsals and then Christmas celebration and I got paid with enough money to buy a couple of flashlights which I was fascinated with.

(Later i had a regular size accordion and while still in grade school i learned lots of stuff from a teacher, also by ear, at the House of Children and got pretty good at it). He was conducting an ethno band (taraf) with oher children playing violins, bass, trumpet and drums. He was reading notes and thought us old folk songs from a collection book.

Together we once went to Bucharest and recorded a few songs that were aired on a Sunday morning for children broadcast on National television. Yes we were all wearing the local traditionals sleeveless jackets made of polecat fur (borrowed from generous neighbors).

At the age of seven i once cried all day until my father bought me a camera, 70 lei or one day's wages. Again my grandfather was probably behind it. He once told me that one of his sisters had a photo studio back in Storojineț and she taught him.

When i look at it now i even remember the smell, it was made with formaldehyde resin. Wide film covered with red and black paper with numbers on the back read through a little red window when advancing the film. Could make pictures with it in a darkroom directly with paper under, without an enlarger which my grandfather did. With it i did take some pictures before i broke it (was pretty brittle material).

I started school at 7 and i remember i was very excited about it but my mother warned me, it was not like kindergarten, the teacher gives you grades (it was from one to 10 in Romania back then) and that saddened me. I remember my first note was a 9, at Romanian language. My 1-4 grade teacher, Valeria Mihalea, did look a lot like Italian actress Claudia Cardinale. Acting kinda b...y (they called her a severe teacher). But she had another side (funny, laughing) that she showed during a trip with the whole class to Bucharest.

I remember that day we were waiting a lot for the bus to come. The driver, who also looked like an Italian actor (dark skin, blue piercing eyes) had to fix the oil pan which got broken (by a rock?) or somebody tried to sabotage the trip? (Bus was most likely an Ikarus - 55).

Here is a pictures with my class mates in second grade (fall of 1968) at the age of 8. Probably done by my grandfather who became the photographer (weddings, funerals, colorized portraits, etc.) in that part of town after he got pensioned from his painter job in Sadova. I am at the right of the teacher, bottom row (white collar). I was taller than anyone and now i suspect some of the kids were actually 1 or 2 years younger than me. Like this guy second right bottom.

Three of the girls were wearing same traditional polecat vests.

Ok so here i am with my next big memory at the age of 8. My father was at some sort of supervisors school again in Suceava (for the factory they were building in Câmplung across the street) and had a room in a condo there and my mother was with him and they were both working at the wood processing factory in Suceava. Again with my grandmother and grandfather we went to visit them.

He had a small transistor radio and because the regular AA batteries were expensive, he used a bigger, cheaper battery external to the radio and of course i started to play with it. Was attaching and detaching those wires kinda like i was sending morse code messages and my father asked me what i was doing and i told him i was trying to contact the aliens.

In that day i saw my father and grandparents looked scared. It was the day of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet Union and the famous Ceaușescu speech which opened for him the doors of west banks for borrowing money and building the industry that made so many things like condos and jobs for half Romanians.

Who quit those ancestral lands that were confiscated anyways by the pro Soviet regime and moved into cities.

Later i learned from my father it was also rumored that Ceaușescu had a secret weapon, built with the help of Coandă, Tesla's and Einstein's friend, with which they melted the Soviet tanks that were about to cross the border.

But in the end those loans ruined Romania, financially, leading to what historians have called "the 7 years of hunger by Ceaușescu".

But i believe that was triggered by the defecting of Pacepa and cut of low interest loans. Could the invasion, the speech have all been scripted, to allow Soviet Union to get some proxy access to western technology.

We moved for one year in downtown Câmpulung were my father had a job (and where he worked a lot to finish his graduating project for that school of supervisors). We were close to that repetitor in down town so we had a good signal for the TV to see the Apollo moon landing (and also heard about Apollo 13 accident). The TV was by the brand Orion, made in Hungary, and had a contact problem at the channel selector and was flickering all the time and needed tweaking and sometimes hitting, yelling and praying.

Then they finished the factory across street in west Câmplung and we moved back there. He became the head of a wood carving department where they were making medieval French style furniture for export i believe in Germany. He was making good money there.

BTW, i never knew what my father did with his money. He always kept saying he did not have any, wasn't drinking or smoking and went to borrow from neighbors when my mother forced him. But now i think he was borrowing from himself.

We were always hungry, my mother was spending her salary in a few days (yes, on cakes, coffee and cigarettes), and we were eating at grandmas. I remember day 11 and 26 of the month when was jubilation day, or when she was coming with a paper plate with the cakes.

Most of my neighbors inhabiting that town had traditional small subsistence farms including milking cows, pigs and sometimes sheep and didn't have to buy food like milk, potatoes and sometimes meat and also had a job in one of those factories, but we had to buy anything. Climate there at 2000 ft did not allow growing crops like corn or grapes, which were abundant were my in laws lived, some 50 miles east from there.

Later after i got married and was visiting Câmpulung i noticed this peculiar thing. As soon as i was getting off the train, during summers, the whole valley was smelling like cow dung.

My in laws had also cow, sheep, pigs.

In there they were organized in so called cooperatives, made with the confiscated land, where they did lots of manual labor and they were allowed to have like one acre so called "helping lot" where they were growing corn for animals and grapes for wine and they were also given some share, in the hundreds of pounds of wheat and sugar. But they had absolutely no money. Maybe for cigarettes and liquor. My father in law was using shoes i was throwing away for example.

Yes there was another factory across the street there, milk processing, built around year 1960 or the year of my birth, by the Swiss. They had these cisterns and were driving around that mountainous rural area, gathering surplus milk from those farms. My mother worked there for a while. They had a siren that was going off three times a day, at 6 AM, 2 PM, and10 PM for at least one minute.

The furniture factory now is a mall, like so many others factories in Romania. Finished in 1968, it was there were all my family worked. I did so during HS vacations. There is something i have to say today about it. They had these gigantic vacuums on top for different machines for cleaning saw dust and small debris and i don't know if they had any filters in place, thing is there was many times this irritating wood dust in the air. Maybe that's why i started to love the rain.

There was an airfield behind both (now it's just a pasture or something) where i learned how to ride the motorcycle, around 10. I heard a story about my mother when she was a child being taken in a plane by one of the communist dignitaries (confirmed by her), maybe Dej or Botnăraș who was from Bucovina and had a villa în Câmpulung. Today i suspect small planes could have landed and quickly taken off during the noise made by that siren, especially at 6 and 10 during shorter non summer days.

In 1972 i went to a summer camp in Hamburg, Germany. My grand grand father was in Germany, my grandmother wrote his address on the back of the suitcase lid, other boys in the dorm must have seen, the director of the camp (Klaus Meine from Scorpions) pushed me to call him, i think the plan was for me to stay there but the guys in charge at Bucharest Children's Palace scared me pretty bad before we left.

Yes it was the year of Munich terrorist attack that happened 2 months later.

Good thing i didn't stay, for the little time i spent i already saw some gay behaviour at the one of the boys from Germany (we were all 12 years old). And my gran gran father Andrei Lehaci (Andreas Lechatsch, not sure of the spelling, from Tübingen, then Stuttgart) was too old to take care of me anyways.

He died in a hospice when i was in HS and his wife Anna also from Romania didn't like my grandma when she went to see him, i think in 69 when she came back loaded with cheap gifts (i was given a watch and a suite and a tumbling monkey). He had i think a boy with her who was working in South Africa at the time.

And she told my grandfather who had, like in Romania (Pojorâta), a small shoemaking shop was called an Ausländer all of his life. Also because i think he was part Jew and part Gypsy with some Romanian in him.

In 1973 the teacher Mihalea forced me to go into a summer camp in Costinești, a resort for youth at the Black Sea and my father had to pay for it (360 lei i guess, about a week's wages). By that time i had a camera of my own he also brought from another trip to Soviet Union.

But i have to stop here and say about Mrs.Dranga, our physical education teacher. She looked a lot like Marta Karoly, the wife of Nadia's trainor. I remember she was trying to teach us basketball in a covered court near the train station downtown and my sister got pretty good at it. But i was a sleuth like creature, absolutely not muscular.

Life was really slow in Câmpulung but i was slower than anybody. And a bit fat. They never let me play soccer with them. Could that had anything to do with my father's soccer accident, which could had traumatized me?

Then i saw the movie Judo Saga. All of a sudden i developed a passion for judo. But there were no instructors in Câmpulung and i guess a few in the whole of Romania at the time. But i found a book at the book shop downtown and started to throw myself to the ground, with other kids in the neighborhood.

Strangely enough there was a guy renting a room in one of the neighbor's houses, engineer fresh out of college working at the milk factory who said he knew judo. He also looked a lot like the actor in the movie. He showed us some real throws.

So i went to the camp and teacher Dranga and one of my neighbors was there too and we put a rope on the beach and were jumping over it. Some guy passing by asked us if we were from some gymnastics school.

But with the same train we reached Costinești came a bunch of kids from Vatra Dornei, the closest city west of Câmpulung. There was among them a remarkable girl named Nadia. I fell in love mostly with her... legs.

One day i snuck with my camera in front of her sheet at the beach and took a picture. I was expecting her to yell and react but to my surprise she smiled in a very... provocative way. However, i was just an overgrown stupid kid, or my mother's confidant so i just ran away. I think i sent her a picture in Vatra Dornei, i am not sure.

But Mihai Nuțescu continued learning gymnastic during his mandatory military stage and when i saw him after he showed me some impressive skills. I think he reminded me of Bart Conner.

But when i got back home i discovered my camera was ruined. It wasn't working anymore because it had sand everywhere, in the lens and all the mechanisms.

However my grandfather found a small screwdriver, took it all apart with the patience of a clock maker, cleaned it and put it back together, making it like new which impressed me a lot. He was also good with fixing bicycles and all kinda mechanisms (also because he was a driver and probably his own mechanic in the war).

He was a very skilled person. He once built himself a set of drums (he called them "jazz") and he went and played at weddings. Because violin was not on demand. He was part of the band who was playing on Sundays "hora" at the "Cultural House" downtown which was an ancestral traditional Sunday dance in Romania. He was very mad when they replaced the band with a tape recorder.

He told me they took him to be an extra in the movie about the Romanian composer Ciprian Porumbescu. I recently watched the movie, could not see him there in the band. And yes we sometimes played together, him at violin and me at accordion.

However he had leg problems, probably due to undiagnosed diabetes and his legs became purple and were hurting and he started to drink which usually lowers blood sugar by increasing kidney output.

I remember when he came from weddings, with cakes for us, sometimes with swells on his face, beaten by other guys, a good Bucovinean tradition. From him i got the passion to listen to radio "Free Europe". He was doing so every evening.

I remember the first time i saw him drunk was that day when they brought my mother home after some guy, a potential ex suitor found her on the rail road, trying to kill herself. I started to cry just by seeing him like that, sad and drunk.

He died while i was in HS from esophageal cancer, he was not able to eat for months. I remember in that day i was summer in summer vacation, i was in the back yard chiseling a marble tombstone, something we both did for an extra buck (it was 3 lei or a loaf of bread or a pack of Carpați cigarettes for one letter).

Fall of 1972. After going many days in a row at the river, i fell ill. A headache like i never had before, though in every winter i was making at least one time some form of sever tonsilitis that needed muscular penicillin injections or even a stay in the hospital once.

My mother took me to the hospital and they did a spinal tap. Liquid came clear. I remember i had to stay for 2 hours on my tummy after. Then they put me in an isolation room. I had viral meningitis. At least one other neighbor kid had it in the same time.

It was a one weak ordeal. Alone in a small room. I could not sleep at night due to a lamp street next to window. I had photo sensitivity. The treatment back then in Romania was intramuscular Polidin. I know it's for bacterial infection but it generally boosts your immune system.

I made it after one week but father told me the doctor said no more motorcycle rides (because of air current to the head maybe?). My father got the car next year anyways and i started driving that one on the same airfield.

Exactly 6 months after that i made hepatitis for which i stayed for 3 weeks in hospital, but not total isolation. Must have gotten it from those Polidin injections because they were reusing needles and syringes back then, after boiling them for hours in alcohol. Missing school was pretty challenging this time, i missed important math lessons.

And here i am at another one. Starting with 5 grade we had separate teachers for all disciplines. For math, drawing and counseling i had a teacher that was looking exactly like Liz Taylor. She was supposedly an acting teacher with no college degree, and was reading all lessons from a book.

I think i discovered at the end of grade school the real math teacher at that school, who was a guy named Popescu living nearby school. He was sort of retired (though he seemed not old enough to me). I heard of him as being a good teacher and went to him for a few lessons before HS admission exam though he said to another kid i had no chance.

I remember he showed me a pile of handwritten courses from college, saying, "today i just can't believe i once went through them all". He had a sort of a curtain in the hallway where he was giving the lessons, for privacy, and when he pulled that one for the first time he said "this is like theater here".

Don't know about IQ but i had a good memory during grade school. Probably due to music background.

I could remember everything the teachers were saying in class though i was very lazy at doing homework. Every time the teacher asked something and the class went silent, out of boredom, i was raising hand and all of my colleagues hated me for that.

But i liked physics. Because of the teacher i guess (a very sexy young petite wearing short mini skirts).

One winter when i had a terrible cold and runny noise she sent me to the county physics "olympics". Kept pulling that handkerchief every minute or so during the test, there was not one single clean spot left, and i made 15 points out of 20, one point short of going to nationals.

One day in 5th or 6th grade during early fall at geography class the teacher told us about rains at the equator. She said it is sunny all day and then it rains every day at 2 PM. I was so envious of people living at the equator and wished a lot it would happened in there too.

Guess what. One whole week after that the pattern showed in our location. But at 2 PM precisely (had a watch, we were doing school in the afternoon those days due to lack of classes). I spoke with the physics teacher and told her that. She kinda freaked out and left me without a word. The pattern ended that day.

I was spending most afternoons (or mornings) at the Children (they called it Pioneers) House. They had workshop called "circles". I was at wood carving, carting, radio (electronics), photo, cineclub, taraf. There was a single one i haven't been to, and that was plane modeling. They were building there functional flying models resembling today's small plane like drones and even rockets.

I remember during 7 and 8 grade i was dragging that accordion to the bus station to go downtown at Pioneers' House.

Was that in 7th grade before i got hepatitis? We had to do 3 weeks of "practice" which meant learning skills like locksmithing. The director of the school, a guy who looked a lot like Karlheinz Böhm arranged for us to go to a brand new workshop with benches with vice grips and all tools at the local Silvic HS. The teacher asked us to build in that time a square and a compass out of 5 mm laminated steel sheet. I almost finished it before i got to the hospital with hepatitis.

working on, best case scenario, would be for days.