Light Years

I promised to write something for my birthday. I already had a plan what to tell you, but that plan had been changed so many times by life since then. When I was a kid, I might have had an idea how it was going to be 30 years old. Good job, loving husband, kids, car and a house with garden, probably. But I have never thought that I’m going to mourn my cousin, who was one year older than me and passed away three days before my anniversary. Sad enough, I know, yet there is something important I learnt last week: there is no young or old, there is only dead or alive. Let me devote this entry to him, who is no longer with us.

As time goes, you have to realize one more thing: the number of funerals will only increase for the rest of your life. What are you going to do then? You’ll just try to keep on going with your own things, maybe with more devotion and more discipline and hope you won’t be the last one going away…

Therefore I stick to the plan and I’m telling you one of my favourite stories of my life, that has some perspectives to the Hungarian history just like my childhood. This is the story that many of you might have heard already.

Everything happened in 1989, when I was eleven years old. It was summer vacation and I went to a camp for pioneers. At that time, to be a pioneer was obligatory for all the children in school, and to go for such camp was a normal thing. As far as I remember I had fun at the camp, but my real story started the day I went home. Actually, it was only a moment. When I arrived home, probably I opened the door, took off my shoes and sat in front of television. I only remember that I was sitting on the coach and I was watching the programme.

There was a funeral on TV. It was the funeral of our last communist leader, János Kádár, broadcasted in live. He died while I was trying to be a better pioneer in the summer camp. Of course, I was not aware the depth of this event and its consequences. All I found strange was the colour of the roses. „Mum, mum, come and look: the roses are red!” - I shouted sitting on the coach. That was the moment when I realized that my family changed our black and white TV for a coloured one… This is what I call the hint of the wind of change.

(The same summer I wrote to a kid TV show called „Three Wishes” – I wished to participate in an excavation. So they took me to Aquincum (Roman part of Budapest) to dig out some bones and urns. If my fellows convert that tape into a youtube-able file, I’m going to attach that "movie" here. Just that you know…).