Chapter 10
New Things and a New Family Member
The world was moving on. The turn of millennium was over, there happened no big crash in the field of IT as it was forecast earlier, even my old 386 was working, only the year in date was shown by five figures – I still used it, even I started a new big work to do, a handbook for shipbuilders and naval architects. My wife lighted the spark in my mind to start working on it when she rearranged our books and documents again – she has been doing so frequently since we joined our lives. She heaped my handwritten notebooks from my student times in the middle of the sitting room and it was my job to put it on a new place – from where they would be extruded at a later time.
I sat down and tried to put them in chronological order, then began to leaf them through. I found that my knowledge about things learned in the technical university had thinned out a little. And also it coincided with events that were showing clearly that people in our country were far from well informed in practice and theory on ships, boats and using them. Also developments were tending in the direction of discarding and neglecting this field of science. Apart from reshuffles at the university – putting shipbuilding a small detail in a department within the faculty of transport, no books published since the beginning of the ‘80s, the most important of them being from 1955 – the former plants of the shipbuilding trust had been razed and built upon – Duna Plaza was built on the former site of the crane and boiler plant – or turned into recreation facilities as my former workplace, the first shipyard of the country having been established by Istvan Szechenyi, the ‘greatest of the Hungarians’.
All that thoughts ended in a conclusion: if I don’t make a record of my knowledge in some form it will evaporate at the very moment the hard drive within me will be switched off. I hoped I still had some years to do it. I started with my favourite topic, i.e. propeller screws. Then I discovered that without a schedule it is not possible to compile that handbook and I made the Contents chapter. With my Windows 3.1 OS I had to go with the simplest graphics and it caused me a lot of hardship. Anyway, I had a very good aim before me and every day was doing a little.
Also I didn’t stop trying to publish my manuscript, but it still remained near impossible. I still had that publishing agent in the USA, but beside sending very polite letters and banal Christmas cards – once I got a card that contained a stretchable fireplace with a cat napping in front of it, that I kept on my monitor and the daughter of S. snatched it – as well as paying notices from time to time nothing happened in our business. And, as Leslie, my colleague, said once when I recollected an exotic experience of mine, it would have been worth writing these memories down, I decided to do something in that direction.
I copied all details in the manuscript that were in connection with my trips in the world and rearranged them for a different kind of book, a memoir about my travels. I called it Canned Roaddust, as it was not a story about a recent trip, but memories only on events happened long ago. I did it simultaneously with the translation of my original manuscript to Hungarian so as to be able to do it also in Hungarian. I think it is not needed to mention that my attempts with the publishing of this new manuscript were no more successful than those with the original one.
Around that time I got a letter from the Hungarian air company where I had a considerable number of premium points for my thousands of kilometres flown with them. It informed me that the company decided to make an end to that kind of premium scoring and start a new one. However, those points collected earlier would not be kept forever, but until the end of the next year (2001) they must be used up. Otherwise they would be lost. I decided to use them for a visit of the USA, as I always wanted to, only in 1997 my leaving of the American company Tengizchevroil was too fast and I couldn’t organize that trip.
It occurred to me that it could be possible to see J. in her new land of living, so I called her by the use of prepaid phone cards from phone booths. They didn’t last long and then I sent her a fax from the office. From that time we were sending faxes to each other regularly. She was looking forward to my trip. I wanted to connect this transatlantic trip of mine with another thing. T. had made an agreement with the European manager of the American association of sanitary suppliers ISSA at the spring conference that he would ensure a free press entry card for the representative of our company, as publisher of a trade journal, at any event of the association. That year the annual show would be organized in Orlando, Florida. I settled the matter with T. that he would back me as his representative there.
At home I had a new job. About a year earlier the dog in the neighbourhood that had considered me a worthy person became angry with me. I had been taking off the net against wasps from the arbour of grapes and was entangled in it. The dog had come near the fence and had marked his territory with me within it. All wet around I had sworn about him, but his master standing nearby in his own garden had begun to cry at me. The dog had taken it a fight and had stood beside him of course. It had been the turning point and since that time I have always been a deadly enemy of that animal.
This accident had been followed by a long line of signs about the fact that the whole family had become hostile to us. Both women were telling foul things about my wife and daughter-in-law as they had been coming up the stairs. The man changed his mind about felling an enormous tree at the border line outside fences – he had been asking for my help to do it previously – and there were no cordial conversations between us over the fence any more. Even their new pup was beaten for coming through the fence – it was made of perpendicular reinforcing steel bars – to show us that is was enemy territory. For all these inconveniences my wife decided – she long left her earlier habit of discussing such things with me – to buy corrugated slate sheets, and it was my job to cover the fence with them. It took me about two months. My other activities had to be suspended for that period.
In the meantime the young (and my wife too) prepared for the arrival of the baby. They rearranged things in the attic, took out cloths, prams – sent to the sister of Clair from Moscow for her children and brought to us in case they would be needed – and everything similar. The much expected sign came late in the evening of 1 May and C. had been taken to the clinic with all of us in the car. Her doctor made the examinations, we were sitting outside in the corridor and I could watch hospital cleaning in practice too. Early in the morning she was taken into the labour room and after a short time we were sent away that our grandson was born – almost with the same dimensions as his father 30 years before – and was healthy. There was no need for us to go to bed and I took the news to my colleagues.
In the afternoon there came the first visit and after about a week we took the baby home. It changed our lives completely, it goes without saying. From the beginning he was a good tempered small creature, he slept a lot and also ate as was expected. And, as he is at the third grade now, he has passed all hurdles so far.
I was reminded by the airlines that it was no joke about the premium points and I went to the company office. I booked my seat from Budapest to New York there and back, of course certain fees had to be paid for by me. Also, as I mentioned, I reserved flights from New York to Orlando and back. It took me about the sum my monthly pay was in my job. It was a time when the airways industry was developing and prices went down sheer. About a year earlier it would have cost me double that.
I was in my sixtieth year and, although the age of retirement had been newly regulated some years before, my age group could still ask for pension at sixty. My wife already had done so, she was on pension – beside going on her job with the health authority – as she is three years my junior and women could retire at 55 that time. I decided to ask for my pension and go on working too. The procedure of that has always been arduous, but in my case it became even more difficult because of my last three jobs in Tengiz, with Linda and here. I was sent official letters repeatedly and asked to get data from my former employers – by law it is always the task of the responsible state office to get those data – unless I would get a reduced pension. At last I got the final package and found that my pension was far from enough to live only on it. T. and his wife knew about this, but I didn’t make it a very public topic that I worked and drew pension simultaneously.