A Season of Singing Hearts

Thirty-three years after I stood transfixed before a photograph of Russian tanks moving into the streets of Budapest, quelling the popular uprising there with determined brutality, true revolution and an overthrow of communist government came to Czechoslovakia.

British historian and political writer  Timothy Garton Ash, noting the series of revolutions cascading through Eastern Europe in 1989,  reminds us that “in Poland the transition [from communism to democracy] lasted ten years, in Hungary ten months, and in Czechoslovakia ten days”. Those ten event-filled days between November 17th and 27th, known to Czechs as the “Velvet Revolution” and to Slovaks as the ”Gentle Revolution”, were in fact a remarkable, non-violent resistance whose effects reverberated throughout the world and still are celebrated today.

The Advent of Wisdom

The key sits loosely in its lock, unturned, unnecessary.  In a neighborhood where children drift from one house to the next with the freedom of wind-tossed leaves and women freely borrow milk or sugar from unattended kitchens, no one locks a closet.

In this neighborhood, closets hold no treasure – no jewels, no gold, no banded stacks of bills.  They overflow with life’s necessities: shoes tidied into original boxes, purses and shirts, a wardrobe of ties. Now and then, two closets nestle side by side. Hers is obvious, all ajumble with boxes of quilting scraps, extra pillows, photographs and report cards. His, more intentional, arranged with more precision, is a purposeful array of hunting vests, stamp paraphernalia, drafting tools and gun cases. It’s a perfect marriage of closets.

Dimly lit and cave-like, the closets are mysterious, compelling and sancrosanct.  Few children dare enter them without permission, but in these weeks before Christmas a child might be tempted to cross the bounds of caution by the merest whisper of possibility: “There might be presents…”  

It’s a special kind of hide-and-seek, this business of children seeking out what parents have hidden  -  under the bed, in the basement, on those out-of-the-way shelves behind the washer.  And always, the list of potential gift caches is crowned by the best hiding-place of all -  a parent’s bedroom closet.

Re-leafing the Golden Grove

Colleen was a hand-waver, one of the slightly obnoxious ones who’d bounce in her seat while caught up in the throes of enthusiasm. “Me! Me, teacher! Call on me!” she’d insist. Valerie, on the other hand, was the slinker in the group. She’d sit in the back row of our third grade classroom, sinking lower and lower into her one-armed wooden desk until you thought she just might dissolve into a puddle and flow away beneath the door, evaporating out of our lives forever.

Neither a slinker nor a hand-waver, I preferred to sit at the front of the class.  Our teacher spent most of her time distracted by the hand-wavers and trying to ferret out the slinkers, so I rarely was called on.   When it did happen I’d squirm and fuss, and then mumble a few words. Sometimes I’d shake my head and shrug my shoulders in a perfect gesture of casual detachment, as if to say, “No, I don’t have the answer, but you already knew that.”

No matter how my teacher coaxed, I wouldn’t tell her the product of 3 x 8, or name the capital of Nebraska or spell “stitches” properly unless I was allowed to go to the blackboard.  If I was chosen to go to the board, I worked the arithmetic problems or spelled the words without difficulty. My performance was so erratic she began to call on me more often - sometimes telling me to stay in my seat, and sometimes asking me to go to the board.

One day, she asked me to stay after school. I was terrified. I knew a few kids who’d been detained after school, and my parents wouldn’t be happy for me to be included in that group. As it turned out, I hadn’t done anything wrong. She only wanted a bit of privacy to ask me a question. “When there’s a problem on the board and I ask you to give me the answer from your seat, you seem to be guessing. But when you go to the blackboard, you always get it right. Can you tell me why?”

Of course I could tell her, and I did. I couldn’t read the blackboard from my desk.  “Hm-ummm,” said my teacher, reaching for a pen. “I want you to take this note home to your parents…”

Opening Windows, Opening Lives

Even for those whose roots sink most deeply into the salty seacoast soil and whose lives blossom under the heat of a coastal sun, it is a truth tinged with bitter irony. Despite being so eagerly anticipated throughout the dark night of dormancy, despite being so deeply desired, so coveted for its beauty, the longed-for season of summer inevitably ends as a season of imprisonment.

When implacable heat and humidity begin to rise, the pleasures of earlier and more temperate summer days begin their slow devolution into a world of languid passivity. A monotony of cicadas melds with the metallic hum of air conditioners. Unrelenting tendrils of lassitude twist and entwine their way into the heart’s smallest crevice, choking off energy and joy.

As the long days pass without relief, windows close. Neighbors disappear. Birds grow silent. The stray, limping dog with the friendly demeanor and the scar encircling his foreleg no longer prowls the fenceline at night, and the  indolent cats seem not to breathe. Seeing one on the stoop, under the car or – there!  behind the trash bin! -gives pause. “Look at that,”  says the casual observer. ”Is that thing alive?”

All Dressed Up with Somewhere to Go

 

On October 23, 1956, I celebrated my tenth birthday.  There was cake, ice cream and a small party with balloons and crepe paper streamers.  On that same day, in a world utterly removed from my cozy Iowa neighborhood, other children watched as friends, parents and neighbors celebrated an occasion first known as the Hungarian Uprising and later as the Hungarian Revolution.

As I headed toward our kitchen for my post-birthday breakfast on October 24, or perhaps the 25th, the Des Moines Register was lying in its accustomed place on the dining room table where my father always laid it before going upstairs to shave. A huge photograph filled the space above the fold, with the words REVOLUTION IN HUNGARY splashed across the top.  

At that point in my life I never had met a Hungarian and had little idea what a revolution might entail.  But I could read, and I liked to look at photographs. Curious to see what required such large print and such a big picture, I paused to look at the paper, only to have  my mind wiped as clean of thought as our classroom blackboards at day’s end. Gripped by a strange, vertiginous feeling, I realized I was holding my breath as my first, visceral understanding of a world far larger than my own and far less pleasant began to envelop me.