On my grandfather's passing

I was in Budapest when I heard about my grandfather's final illness and death last week. Whenever you are away from home you feel more attune to how time and space work, how the simple act of stepping out of your day-to-day life exposes how the threads of narrative that tie people and places together weave around each other, overlap, veer apart, and come together. It was what I thought about standing on the balcony of our friends' apartment in Budapest, thinking about how someone I tied so closely to my hometown spent so much of his youth not a day's journey away from where I was. The world felt a little smaller, and a lot more mysterious. The details of my grandfather's passing were predictable: he was 97 years old, after all, so you couldn't call it unexpected. He had been in declining health for years, which in some ways is a very sad and slow way for things to happen, but for those of us who survive it is in some ways the best, for you have plenty of time to make peace with the idea of loss before it happens. It was certainly sad to be so far away when it happened, unable to make a last visit and see the rest of my family when it did. The experience gave me a chance to witness just how pitiless airlines have gotten in these rough economic times. I hoped to make it back for the funeral on Friday, but thanks to some unfortunate restrictions on my type of ticket, it took only ten minutes on the phone with a Delta representative to reach that very rare point in customer service in which you only hear monosyllables and silence on the other end. "No. Anything else?," followed quickly by just plain "no," and waiting for me to hang-up. (I paid my respects Friday morning at St. Margaret of Hungary Church on Lehel Ter near where we were staying.) My grandfather led a full and long life, and is hard to really grasp when you think about it. When he was Mila's age, Archduke Ferdinand was murdered in Sarajevo, setting the fuse on the tumultuous 20th century. The entire history of the Soviet Union, from Bolshevik conspiracy to its restless aftermath, fits comfortably within his lifetime. I'm certain he could have told a multitude of interesting observations and impressions, but I didn't hear many of them. My grandfather was a profoundly laconic man, at least around me. My wife often scolded me for not learning more about his life and times. But I don't think she fully realized realize how many hundreds of afternoons I spent fishing with him on his boat on the Connecticut River, and how few questions I ever got answered. What was the 1933 Paris Exhibition like? Lots of crowds. What was interwar Poland like? we lived in a village, like any other. The stories I heard most -- about why he never took up smoking, or about how the local kids teased him for his Polish first name -- were interesting, but felt like small details of a much bigger picture. I'll never be able to say for certain why this was. Some people just don't like to talk much. I've found myself that as I get older, the days when I felt any and every occasion deserved a poem and every impression should be shared have decidedly ended. Or maybe I was just being a pest and asking the wrong questions. But it could also be that we saw things differently, and that he couldn't see what I thought was so interesting. I grew up in a small town, and didn't really begin to travel until I was done with graduate school. So the world seemed very big and interesting to me. I was full of romance and illusions. It could be my grandfather, who had seen a lot of the world by the time I came around, just saw them with a realist's eyes. That would probably be a very Old World way of looking at things. We Americans have a touchingly naive sense of history as straight line, always going up. Even our ugly chapters have a sort of cheery optimism -- like race relations for example. The big story most of us probably have in our heads is of our unfortunate history of slavery, wiped away in the Civil War, delayed during the Jim Crow era, blossoming in the Civil Rights movement, and culminating in Barack Obama becoming president. Whatever comes next, most of us probably think, will be great. We stick to it admirably, but it constantly struck me traveling around the Balkans and Hungary that no one else thinks this way. In Budapest I visited the Museum of Military History, which is located in the northern corner of the heavily touristed Castle Hill. But it was largely empty when I went -- a grandmother and her son, one other English visitor, and myself. These kinds of museums are usually of a type -- lots of uniforms, swords and armor, and usually the kind of basest nationalist chest-thumping. Hungary's museum has plenty of costumes, but the chest-thumping was astonishingly meek. Partly, that is due to Hungary's rather spotty military record -- it is a history of lamented losses, bad luck, and worse decision-making. It reflected itself in an almost self-effacing sort of museum experience. One major exhibit focused on the years 1918 to 1945. National museums are always incredibly careful about what they show and how they show it, so how this period was framed is astonishing. It begins with how the Austro-Hungarian army disintegrated at the end of WWI and was at the mercy of Czechs, Serbs, and Romanians. It follows the efforts in the interwar years by the Horthy regime to rebuild the military. It traces the country's disastrous decision to follow Hitler in the invasion of the Soviet Union (though perhaps tries a little too hard to justify this unfortunate chapter), and ends with the army's complete annihilation by the Red Army. The story goes: Big Loss, Bad Decisions, Enormous Loss. It used to be said that American southerners were the closest to Europeans because they were the only Americans that had lived through a story like that. Americans don't have the patience for this kind of difficulty and honesty in our national storytelling. Take immigration, for example, which is consistently presented to schoolchildren as a tale of osmotic motion, of people suffering in the Bad Old World, having the gumption to adventurously seek out a better life, and then arriving on America's shores to live happily ever after. It never worked that way, and for the record, it still doesn't. Consider my grandfather, who was born in Easthampton in 1912, but then moved with his family back to Poland when he was 11, after Poland became an independent nation once again. He would decide on his own to come back in the 1930s. There is something very childlike in this kind of linear sense of history, and it is perhaps something many of us carry as we are launched into the world. I always thought, for example, that as I grew older I would learn more about things. When I was younger, I was always aware that there was much I didn't know, but was confident they would be revealed as time went by. But in truth, what you learn comes in disconnected drops, and doors are constantly shut for good. So I'll never know if my father thought of me as anything other than a lingering inconvenience from his distant past. And I'll never know what my grandfather thought when he was boy traveling across the sea to Poland, or what he thought years later on another ship coming back.