Chapter 20
Freelancer and Grandpa
In the family it was beneficial for everyone – sometimes even for me – that I moved my PC home and was almost always available for anything. My wife was still in her job, but she expected her replacement at any minute because of the political situation. It was a period when the general mood in the society could have been characterized most properly with the words of Marx used for describing a revolutionary situation: those who had been elected to govern the country wasn’t able to do it, because those who lost the election and had to accept the place of opposition, wouldn’t accept it. It was a period when everyone hated everyone else. The man who had lost his prime minister position at the election three years ago began to organize his party – or better to say the very tight self-dedicated group around him that kept the party under its control – to win back power the next time, but he was doing it with trepidation.
The new prime minister who took the place after the resignation of his predecessor began his work in the right way. However, as numbers of the economy didn’t correspond with the EU directives, especially the budget deficit, the cabinet decided to interpret the relevant paragraphs in those directives in a way that those numbers looked better. No cheating, only excluding certain cost items. It wouldn’t go. The responsible EU councillor objected and the report had to be corrected. The opposition began making noise and demanded new election immediately. The least ugly attribute for the premier was liar.
This situation wouldn’t have been an easy one even if the government had been united. However, it was a coalition of the two leftist parties, and in the smaller one – liberal democrats – there were only a few people who didn’t dislike the premier. He began his mandate with replacing two of the ministries in the responsibility of liberals by two less important ones. Besides, he wasn’t supporting the coalition partner in their attempts on reform, although he knew well that those reforms were necessary, even the coalition agreement mentioned them. The bad atmosphere polarized the liberals themselves, and later it would result in a sharp competition for the leading position of the party. So, nothing was certain during that time, even the opposite could happen easily.
My grandson became a regular kindergarten visitor, but the rhythm didn’t change: one week in, two weeks out. In the latter it was my job to be with him and play with him, read to him, prepare food for him, even, when there was no way, to take him with me for the lunch. Mainly, however, I left him in his room with an apple sliced and promised him to be quick in returning with the food. He was clever enough to understand that he was obliged to stay there and in any case it needed to awaken his father. It took me generally only an hour to come back and he was already waiting for his lunch. After that a little reading followed or watching a cartoon on TV, and he went asleep. My own life – lunch and a little work as my job still existed – could only begin after that.
There were days when he wouldn’t go asleep at once and I had to take him with me into the upper floor. There he was playing with his spare toys attended by his grandmother or watching one of the cartoon channels. Even Cartoon Network was acceptable that time, his favourite was Scooby Doo and Tom and Jerry. Almost always he went asleep also then, only later. He liked very much the large Empire couch to sleep on. The biggest obstacle had always been to make him swallow his medicine. Even the syrup of antibiotic was an enemy for him. Slowly it became better, and I think it was due to the fact that he felt he could trust me.
Fortunately, every time the cold or flu passed and the boy went again to his playmates. He liked it when I took him there, but he did it even more when he could go with his mother. However, she had a mindless time-table in her work and it was often impossible for her to take him there in the morning. Taking him home has always been my job. When there was snow, I had to pull the sled there and to pull it with him on the homeward leg. That was too much for my legs, and it was that time I got my first pair of compression stockings. I had a hard time to get accustomed to them, but it was worth. Sometimes it rained and I drove there to pick him up. Slowly spring came and it became ever more fun to walk home. He liked to make detours and visit the familiar dogs at the houses they lived. His favourites were a pair of boxers, we named them careworn, because they had deep perpendicular wrinkles on their foreheads.
Anyway, I didn’t know it at that time yet, but learned it soon: the more you should be idle the more you will be busy as other people try to put load on you. It happened to me too. I could hardly organize my work, while in the morning I could have finished the daily routine in three hours, in the afternoon I was tired already and it took me six hours. That time was really hard for me. But I also had a lot of fun with my PC and Internet line. I had a movie maker program and it was useful to edit the video files I downloaded with the help of booster programs. The video files I burned on CD and my grandson enjoyed Winnie the Poo, Alice, the Russian cartoons Nu, Pogody very much. His favourite was the four parts of Walking with Dinausaurs from BBC. I also helped my son to get his high tech video software. Also music was good for me. When my work consisted of simple graphic editing, I always listened to the radio on the Internet. The music files I often sent to J. attached to my emails. We were in constant corresponding, she wrote about all that happened with her.
Spring meant also more work for me, there was spraying, pruning, weeding. It meant some annoyance too. Even with my grandson. I wasn’t able to protect young grapevines from him, even a rare one of four years had been destroyed. It was a terrible period of his, I couldn’t understand his manner at all. It would go away, this bad manner, but for a time I suffered a lot.
After spring also summer arrived and I took my grandson with me as we visited several places. I knew that he liked the large playground on the slope of Gellert Hill near the Danube. I went there with him, we spent a whole day there and he didn’t get tired. He only became sleepy when we sat on the bus. I went with him to walk around Margaret Island. The Danube was at a low level and we could go down to the water, he played there for hours. But our main terrain was a large meadow, originally a dump, where he collected insects and lizards. First he kept them in a terrarium, but, as they died soon, the next ones he let go in the garden. Even spiders he caught and took them home. His favourite was a wasp spider that he kept in the garden in a certain place – this kind of spider makes his net on a large bunch of grass.
There was a certain circumstance that made it necessary for me to spend more time with him: while he liked being in the kindergarten, he couldn’t sleep there. I fetched him after lunch and then our long walks began. As the mushroom season arrived, we also went mushrooming in the woods near our house. In our family – as I had had mentioned it earlier at the events in my younger years – mastery in the field of mushrooms had always been more or less a must. My wife had acquired a certificate in that skill, I myself had begun picking mushrooms as a child accompanying my mother in the woods, but my knowledge became much deeper at the time of my wife’s study. My grandson enjoyed rambling in the woods and he picked up everything, his favourite were galls, we took home plastic bagfuls of them.
I mentioned the nearby dump already. It was five minutes from our home and as soon as we went over the dike at its border we could find any kind of insects. My grandson was a sharp hunter, it was hard to any grasshopper or locust to escape him. During those walks on that meadow we encountered an outcrop of loess (or something like made of dump), where bee eaters had their holes. Alas, they migrated from there already, but it was a great experience for the boy. He wanted to climb that outcrop and its top we found something like a complete wilderness. It happened there that my knee became dislocated and it made my life much more difficult. That kind of expedition became more rare for us following an encounter with a man living nearby. He is the so called foreman of the local gipsy population. We were just walking in the outward direction from that meadow in the dump, when we met a Mercedes FWD with the man at the wheel. He asked me if I was not afraid for the child getting into trouble. I asked him what kind of trouble could arise if we were walking on public lands. He raised his voice and said that it was no public land, it was his one. Although I was of different opinion, I had no intention to argue with people like him and we left the place. The other reason we went to walk less frequently in the woods and meadows that ticks became more numerous.
My greatest sorrow at that time was that my small Sony video-camera went wrong twice. First it lost its sound and I had to take it to the mechanic servicing such devices. Those people had become rare as white raven. When at last I found him on the other side of the town he repaired it – for a sum almost prohibitive. Second time the camera couldn’t handle its cassette. He took it on unwillingly and remained it with him for more than a year, at last he gave it back as it was. I didn’t have any luck with another man either. These problems caused us that we have only silent records about my grandson from that period when he was learning to speak. And later even those stopped. Thus I could make only photos on our walks.
It was the last year we could do abandoned walks in the woods or on meadows. There would follow two mild winters when ticks would survive and multiply extensively – also my small fig tree would enjoy it and bear fist-size fresh figs. With so many of those blood suckers at large even in the garden it would be possible to get one (and potential deadly infections as lyme disease or brain fever). I wouldn’t risk the life of my grandson, I would take him rather into museums.