Point Lobos: A Memoir

Just about every routine conversation between my parents Lilo and Janos eventually evolved into a shouting match.  This was especially true in the time that plans were being made to move permanently from Brazil to the United States.  Major change, major fights.  Every issue was reason for raising the heat and noise, and the level…

Much of my undergraduate career at Yale College was spent inside the film projection booth at 101 Linsley-Chittenden Hall on the Old Campus.  The classroom-turned-screening room was the headquarters of the Yale Film Society, of which I was a member, factotum and primary projectionist.  We ran screenings of films on an almost daily basis, films…

Where have we been all this time?  I’ll tell you.  Got a minute? I’ll start with your note of December 9 in which you take on my pleonastic Class Book essay.  OK, OK, you’re right.  I larded it on (and only overshot the 500-word limit by a little), with delirious and overwrought descriptors.  I failed…

It’s what he said to me, inside the emergency room.  He got it right away.  He understood.  In the midst of the controlled chaos of the emergency room, my son, my baby, looked at me with his bruised and battered face, and said, “Papa, thank you for everything.” As I crushed his hand in mine,…

When Johnny lived in São Paulo in the early 1950’s, he couldn’t speak Portuguese, so he didn’t talk very much. He had come from somewhere else, far away; he was very white, with long, blond curly hair.  His folks had fled the European War, and here they were. Once, coming back from the ice cream…

      Notes: Eva and I bring home a dog…

Because it has a tilde over the A and an S instead of the Z.  That’s just the way it is. ❖ Long before coming to Land’s End, my family had to pass through Brasil for ten years or so after leaving Budapest, where I was born in 1947, after the War and the arrival…