June 30, 2008

Where I'm from

There is one meme I have been wanting to do, but I never got around to it. It's a meme I saw on a couple of blogs months ago, while I was first writing my thesis, and I immediately loved the idea. I knew though that I would need time and a certain state of mind to do it. I finally got around to that.

Where I'm from (based on a poem by George Ella Lyons). The instructions can be found here, I'm not tagging anyone, but please let me know if and when you've done this on your blog, because I'm interested in reading it.

I am from stacks of books, from LEGO and ski slopes.

I am from the little lake that was my ocean (fiery at sunset, warm and clear after a summer storm, wind in my hair).

I am from the dirt road leading to my “island”, the low vegetation beating on my arms, snapping in my face as I playfully raced through it.

I am from Canasta and the mono-brow, from playfully wrestling with my grandfather in the mornings (he always let me win), from Sándor, who I lost, and Maria, who I barely knew.

I am from the short-tempered and the bullheaded.

From reading is adventure in the mind and clean up your room.

I am from processing history. From not knowing about one belief while another one was being imposed on me - and now churches creep me out.

I'm from the Danube, twice along its route, I’m from paprikás krumpli and Tafelspitz.

From the grandfather who thrived as a prisoner in Russia, enjoying the arts, the grandmother who got scarred for life in a war that put a tattoo on her arm, and the grampa who didn’t go to war because his hand got disfigures – most probably not completely by accident if we're being honest.

I am from a grandfather and a mother (and me) - who all used to see life through a lens quite frequently, but organisation got lost over the generations and the pictures are mostly scattered in boxes and chaos by now. Except for a couple, that hang on my wall: My grandparents, two of them old, two of them young. Inadvertently the ones who got older are younger in the pictures. One grandmother blinking against the sun that lightens up her hair even in black and white, the other in colour but with little me in her arms (my memory of her comes from that picture mostly). One grandfather, old, I knew all the liver spots on his face, the other one in his best clothes, once on the other side of a camera – in the 50’s or 60’s? My parents, and me with almost-white blond hair, missing teeth and always those glasses. A rare picture, of me on my tricycle, my dad pushing me, smiling (a rare treat), taken three days after Tschernobyl.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is beautiful and very personal and good to read (what a combination!)
I'd like to do it myself when I have the time. :O)

cu
L.