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 as the teacher taught them. And there 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.
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 she could not do it out of shame.
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 it at school where i was playing so the others could dance traditional folk dances while rehearsing for the year end 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 at the age of 9 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.
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 of 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 made into the so called cooperatives where they were working as laborers 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 years after the Soviet rule loosened up.
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 termination of low interest loans after the heard what he had to say. 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 took 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, very expensive (5000 lei or 3 months wages), 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. (Later they started to build TVs in Romania, which were about as reliable).
Then they finished the factory across street in west Câmplung and we moved back there. Soon 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, we never knew what my father did with his money until he came home with that car. 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 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, eggs, potatoes and sometimes meat and also had a job in one of those factories, but we had to buy everything. Most of them started building little by little new houses and because of planning, they all had to have 2 floors and look like villas.
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. Because everybody had a stable with at least one cow in the back of the yard.
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 like 5% of what people in factory got. Good for cigarettes and a bit of liquor. My father in law was using shoes i was throwing away for example.
Yes there was another factory across the street în Câmpulung, 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 little 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 each time.
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 cleaning saw dust and small debris from different machines and i don't know if they had any filters in place, thing is there were many times this super fine irritating wood dust in the air. Maybe that's why i started to love the rain.
There was an airfield behind both factories (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. To secretly bring in and out celebrities i will talk about later.
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.
My grandma used to say after he divorced her mother, Rarița he then fled with Anna and a bag of money in Germany. Because the Soviets did not like capitalists (he had a small shoemaking shop in Pojorâta, probably apprentices). She even told me he was member of the Liberal Party and was arrested after a demonstration down town so he could have been still there when the Soviets came.
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 in Germany was called an Ausländer all of his life. Also because i think he was part Jew and part Gypsy and probably Hungarian by name with some Romanian in him, judging by a color picture grandma brought from Germany.
In 1973 or after 6th grade 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). Because the previous year the camp in Germany was free she said and she had some places to sell. 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 by example. 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. They 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 soon 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. And face.
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, and even oiled it with special oil for fine mechanisms 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 during the war).
I think it was at the end of 6 or 7 grade when they hired me to take pictures of a whole kindergarten class. I think i did at least one film, and i remember handing them the pictures which were in a stack more than one cm stick. Can't remember what i have done with the money, most likely bought some more photo materials.
At the end of school i did pictures of everyone in the class and made a sort of a graduation panel which should still be somewhere at the school. I took a picture of it with a professional camera, on wide film and made big prints, i think A3 or double legal size or big enough for the faces and names to be recognizable (with the help of Mr.
Mikitovici).
And my father reproached me for not charging my colleagues money for that. But i was like my mother, money never stuck with me. I was just happy i could finish the project in time.
My grandfather was a very skilled person. He once built himself a set of drums (he called them "jazz") and he went and played with other buddies at weddings. Because violin was not in 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 or maybe he was in the back somewhere or they put a moustache on him. 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 his face swollen, 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 in summer vacation, i was in the back yard chiseling letters on a marble tombstone plaque, 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).
My father gave me the chisels that were done at the maintenance shop in the factory with steel from files. I remember i once did a plaque that was already installed in the cemetery behind one of the
churches downtown and everybody could pass and see me from the nearby street towards farmers' market which i did not like a lot.
Early fall of 1972. After going many days in a row at the river while weather was getting colder, i fell ill. A headache like i never had before, though in every winter i was making at least one time some form of severe tonsilitis that needed intra-muscular penicillin injections (the norm in Romania back then) or once even a stay at the hospital.
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 said i had viral meningitis put me in an isolation room. At least one other neighbor kid (Mihai's brother) 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. They said i had photo sensitivity. The treatment back then in Romania was intra-muscular
Polidin. I know it's for bacterial infections 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 cold air flowing to the head maybe?). My father got the car next year anyways and i started driving that one on the same airfield. I think he left me ride the motorcycle and the car because he was feeling guilty about what happened to me during that ride on the slope with him and also the skills that i proved at 4.
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 supposedly boiling them for hours in alcohol. A mild form, did not have full body jaundice, only the white of my eyes (they said). Missing 3 weeks of school was pretty challenging this time, i missed some 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 my early 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 nose 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.
Now i recon it must have been a known local weather pattern during that time of the year and they took advantage of it to create a legend.
I was spending most afternoons (or mornings) when i was not at school at the Children (they called it Pioneers) House. They had workshops 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 small rockets.
I remember during 7 and 8 grade i was dragging that accordion to the bus station to go downtown at Pioneers' House at least one time a week.
In seventh grade 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 there 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.
In the spring of 74. Mihai Erhan (3rd from left, upper), my neighbor and life long friend came with a new trick. We were grabbing a branch of a long pine tree that was in a slope and jumping towards the slope, goin around the tree and landing on the other side while holding that branch. That would give the sensation of flying way above ground, for a few seconds.
But soon that was not enough and Mihai came with a rope and he climbed the tree (he wa a good climber) and tightened the rope high above and we did the same thing with the rope, flying above the slope around tree.
But soon that was not enough either and i came with the idea of tying a stick with a knot perpendicular to the rope, creating a device like i saw at circus flyers, only they had a stick between two ropes. And guess what. The stick slid out of the knot while i was "flying" and i landed on the slope and would not have been a big problem, i tried to cushion the fall with my hand like at judo when i hit my elbow to a rock that was sticking out of the ground.
My hand swollen in a few minutes like a loaf of bread. Mihai kept telling me to try and move it. (We were both 14). I went home in pain and then at the hospital where they took an X-ray and the doctor gave me some pain killers and sent me to Iași.
It was several months before i was admitted to Tehnoton HS and probably my escape from going to the Military High School in East Câmpulung which absolutely would have meant the beginning of a military career, when father persuaded me to go (to finally get rid of me i think).
At Iași Professor doctor Nae
Niculescu said i needed surgery. Ok, no big deal, i said, i was in pain and waited for a relief. But he kept me about a week on pain killers saying the inflammation and swelling has to go down first. Health care was free for all during those years in Romania but there was this tradition and my parents of course gave him the usual gifts (bribe).
The Emergency Hospital for Children was built on a sort of hill or with a view to a lower areea, brand new and looked good inside which gave me much confidence. I remember i was sitting there, in some pain and watched through the window thousands of people moving like ants in a colony, back and forth around a number of buildings somewhere at a lower elevation and kept asking myself what was that. It was Tudor Vladimirescu campus, with more than ten thousands students, where i was to spend 5-6 years, some 5 years later.
One night a nurse came and gave me an enema (was standard procedure). In the morning they gave me an anti-anxiety pill and took me to the operating room but i still was not worried of anything. They started an IV, i think i heard the words sodium
pentothal, and suddenly i awoke in the ICU unit, with a cast on my left hand covering my elbow, with some blood on it.
One of the most beautiful women i ever seen was there, attending. For a second i thought i was in heaven and she was an angel.
She gave me some tea from a jar (was that a sign) to clear the anaesthetic from my bloodstream. Then they sent me back to the saloon.
The doctor kept coming every morning (vizita as they call it in Romania) every time with a bunch of students and i think i heard him saying to the students the word "Re" while watching the new X-ray.
One evening the whole procedure repeated, but this time i was a bit worried, mostly because i felt terrible because of side effects of the anaesthetic the day after. When i woke up in the ICU, the same woman gave me another jar of diluted tea. But right after that they sent me home, i don't think they took another X-ray.
They said they installed a silver screw to reattach that piece of
bone.
On the streets i had trouble walking but i made it to yet another sister of my grandpa (i think they were 10 siblings) whose husband was a lawyer (state prosecutor) in Iași.
Could not gather my thoughts together. Since that day i was never the sharp kid i was before.
But as that was not enough.
When i went back to remove the cast, could not move my elbow articulation. And he decided i should do what they called a "mobilisation". That is forcing the articulation under anestezia. This time they used
Ether which has a terrible smell.
I awoke with some mobility in my hand but that went away in a few hours.
He did a total of 4 so called mobilisations, each time me having to go to Iași. But next one was with chloroform and since i did not like that one either i think he did the rest with pentotal.
My elbow gained some 60% mobility but i was turned basically in some sort of vegetable for the next few months and maybe years after those six general anesthesia done within a few months with things today obsolete. I heard them saying, every general anesthesia shortens your life with six months (or was it years).
I cannot straighten my left arm to more than 45 (135 degrees out of 180). It is visible when i walk and especially when i sit i have a tendency to keep my left hand between my legs.
One day at the beginning of the VI grade (yes after Germany and meningitis) Mrs. MeZinu came to me out of the blue during a break in the courtyard at school and introduced me to a guy one year older than me, Petrică (
Peter) "Titi" Avram. He, his brother Ionel (Noni) and mother were living in a cottage right in front of the offices of the milk factory.
One room only, probably the only place there with no electricity.
He said he was the nephew of Emil Bodnăraș (uncle Mili he said) and there was a physical resemblance between them (on the Gypsy side). They said they just moved from Iacobeni, a remote place on Bistrița valley, a few tens of km away from Câmpulung.
He was writing with capital letters only like i did when i went to school (sign he didn't attend much school) and one day he showed me the design of a vehicle, resembling a race car with a propeller and a smaller propeller that was supposed to power the bigger one. He was dreaming of making a transformer that would take electricity from the "radiofication system" (a central amplifier downtown with wires and speakers in homes all over the city) to power their cottage.
They had little money and food and i saw his mother painting eggs for
Easter.
I started to hang out with them a lot, he taught me how to smoke. But when i left at Iași, i lost contact with him and when i came in a vacation he told me he went to jail for shoplifting and i think that was after the death of
Botnăraș and that was after he sent me a letter at Iași, with capital letters and full of grammar mistakes, during the time i was Gabi's roommate and he saw it and i got very embarrassed.
When i saw him next i was working at xIMU Bacău and he said he was fixing TVs in Pojorâta where his mother married to a guy (i think i was at their place once). Fixing TVs in those days meant swapping tubes, and he had a stash of those and kept swapping them from one TV to another.
I think it was in the summer of 78. Cause i remember what i've done in 79. In the summer of 80 i had two exams left and learned all summer. But those were easy cause it was known, in fall those teachers would not fail no one. Ok let' say it was 1980. Maybe i will remember later. So i was either in last year of HS or first year of college. Maybe i will remember later some detail that would help me date this one.
I met this girl with fair curly hair, but i don't think she was totally blonde, maybe a shade of red. She seemed very fragile, both physically and maybe emotionally. Probably met her at the disco or someone intruded her to me. We went on a few dates, walking only in downtown Câmpulung. My father saw me once with her and tried to talk me out of it.
Then one day she told me she had a problem with the chemistry teacher. She was failed by Mrs.Mezinu, by then teacher at the Dragoș Vodă HS, where her husband was director and was due for a correction in the fall. But she was afraid she would not pass that time either.
Since i knew Mrs.Mezinu i told her to buy a bouquet of flowers and went together to her house which was not far from ours. It was easy, conversation was very short, she agreed to pass her as a favor to me, now i remember vaguely, i think she did it because i was probably her first ever student to go to college.
I was in Lake Oswego in that apartment managed by McNeely (Hubbard) and was crazy all the time due to the smoke coming from walls. I was out of control and today i am wondering how come nothing worse than getting diabetes happened to me during that time.
Yeah i remember at some time i got too many driving tickets in a short period (mostly if not all from not fully stopping when making a right turn on red at intersections with cameras) and i was put on a one month hardship permit by DMV.
One day i bought some summer sausage at WinCo in Tigard and was full of mustard grains that were irritating my stomach and went back with it, yelling at the employees. I remember this Asian guy who listened me without saying anything but went in the back and came with a woman, in her late 40s, dressed in a blue gown like uniform and she was trying to be nice to me. I calmed down and left.
Similar symbolism in the AHA video but over there they are actually featuring an ex class colleague.
Ok maybe it's time to write here about Mihai and i will begin with his resemblance with Mircea Baniciu.
During grade school, we were going afternoons still in the old building, must have been 4th or 5th grade, a music teacher came to us and did a selection for a choir. I remember her nick name, Pupa (which colloquially means kisser in Romania). I think she was an acquaintance of my mother.
But one day i went to their place (next, big villa from hour modest house) and saw an accordion the same as mine with 32 bass buttons but different color. They seemed embarrassed and did not talk about.
Time has passed, i went to HS in Iași, but one day i came back home in a winter vacation and Mihai had two girls at home and lots of home made wine and a guitar. Back then there was this band Phoenix in Romania, i think they were trying to do hard rock that was never heard before in a country with lots of ethno music, and they were played on the radio all the time but i never seen them on Romanian television or in pictures back then.
So i sang one of their songs, with modified verses accompanied by guitar and Mihai was looking in disbelief with a strange smile on his face. Cause he didn't know i learned to play guitar by myself. Or he heard but never seen it.
