Slowly Going (Good) Crazy

Gosh, folks, allow me to gush for just a moment. This place and this time -- even with the rain --  makes me smile.

It started yesterday, Sunday, when the sun came out at about two in the afternoon. I figured it was finally time to get out of bed, disengage from War and Peace, and put on some pants for the first time that day. I set out for a walk, headed in a direction I don't usually go.

Sometimes the fences of Hungary make me sad. Why do these people feel the need to lock themselves into their own little surrounding, and at the same time lock others outside of it? But as I walked past the fences -- they're all different and all shroud different homes and yards and gardens -- I appreciated them as simply something pretty to look at and nice to wonder about.

Lost in the moment of attempting to understand a home, and a people, by a quick glimpse through rusty metal or long-ago painted wood, I found myself in a new part of Heves. I was amazed in wonder, I hadn't know that Heves had different neighborhoods! My boots got muddy, but I liked the exploration.

(I have no idea what's happening...the elderly woman who just sat down at the computer next to me speaks perfect English...?!? It turns out her daughter and son-in-law live in Edinburgh, Scotland. And she just invited me to her house to be her friend.)

I was strangely enamoured with the differences between here and there, and impressed with myself for being so far from where I came from.

And today, after a Monday of teaching, I'm in love with the Green Club, which we can pare down to three 9th graders: Bagi, Janka and Winnie.

Bagi is some sort of boy wonder. He can recite pi to 33 places. He used to be able to do a hundred, but is apparently losing magic in his old age. I did become a little concerned this afternoon when he told me his life goal was to become a terrorist.

Janka's great. So willing to make her my little sister. And I've already made her the president of the Green Club in my mind, so she's pretty much the president of my universe.

And Winnie is such a sweetheart, in a wonderful, hardworking introverted way. She's a Harry Potter-fiend, just loves it. For her "Vak Randi" last week, she drew a picture of Emma Watson, the actress that plays Harry's best friend in the movies. She thinks Emma and I would be perfect for a blind date and has done everything short of naming our love-children.

This afternoon, she handed me a thick packet of paper with a smile, telling me she had some "extra time" last weekend. In my hands was the second paper-clip I had seen in this country and 11-pages worth of nearly flawless English prose as to why a Jeremy-Emma union was a perfect idea, along with pictures as proof. Half of the briefs before the Supreme Court are less praiseworthy in content and style.

"I think Miss Watson would be the perfect girlfriend for you (or later perhaps a wonderful wife) because she's beautiful, clever, talented, famous and very-very rich!"

It's almost like Winnie knows what I'm looking for in a woman! Winnie's efforts come despite the fact that Miss Watson is just 15. She's six months older than Winnie and Janka, but she couldn't be more perfect for me in Winnie's world.

And here, another confession: I'm pregnant. I'm pregnant with thoughts on life and love and fiction and Hungary. I can feel them bubbling inside of me, trapped in a mind forced by an adventure into isolation and contemplation. I can't escape this urge to write and tell and speak and say and laugh and create and cherish and explain. To write. To story-tell. There's a life, a story of some sort, inside of me, demanding to be born onto paper.

I don't think the labor will be easy, and it certainly shouldn't be to live up to that name. I don't think it will be easy because I don't know what it'll look like, I don't know what the process will look like, or can look like, or what the final result will be. I think that'll be half the fun. Simply inventing an invention that explains the invention of inventing. Simply telling a story that tells the story of why telling a story tells the story. On the fiction of fiction as a fiction to fiction.

If you can understand any one of those sentences, you know what I'm feeling like. But if you don't, perhaps reading the book will help. Imagine that. I run off to Hungary and get myself pregnant.