Heves. Ma Volt.

(Blogspot used to let me cheat. I could edit the dates, after I wrote the story, to make them fall chronologically. Apparently I can’t do that anymore, I apologize for any inconvenience.)

Heves and I have an up and down history.

My intro to the town, before I’d ever stepped foot in it’s little park, was a two-hour long conversation on the drive from Budapest two Augusts ago. Tirade would be the best word selection if we wanted to capture the tenor more fully. Peter was the ambassador and he found the little town of 10,000 suffocating and impossible to escape.

When I arrived in the town, I couldn’t agree more. Agi bombarded me with German, I couldn’t work the blinds, the neighbor yelled at me for not locking the door. It took me a week to make a friend.

So I escaped. For 12 straight weekends, I left to visit the other Americans in Hungary. Kalocsa. Budapest. Tiszaujvaros. Nyiregyhaza. Anywhere but Heves.

I realized slowly, that I was being silly. Part of the adventure of being abroad is discovering happiness in your surroundings. So I set out to enjoy Heves. The about-face corresponded directly with my first visit to the local weekend disco.

Students bought me beer, because that’s the way Hungary works. I bought them beer, because that’s the way Hungary works. That might be ketchier than shit in America, perhaps, but sustenance in a little Hungarian village.

So I found happiness in befriending them – they were much more willing to talk in English or German or any combination of the two at the disco. It liberates where the classroom is claustrophobic. And I met their older brothers and sisters and friends, home in Heves for just the weekend. That’s how I made my friends, like Miss Petra, and how I learned to be able to find enough happiness in Heves to stay every-other weekend, sometimes more.

When I finally left, I had been in the process of saying goodbye for more than 30 days. I was ready, and said goodbye with the vain flick of a wrist.

But here I was, standing in front of the Heves train station again, planting two kisses on Petra’s cheeks. Suddenly back in Heves, Petra translating the discourse of a meal of pork. Her mom is fun, but hardly speaks a lick of English. Petra’s taken only literature and grammar classes lately, it took her a while to regain the ease of fluency. Or maybe it was the new braces.

The same, but different, she explained on a backyard swing under Hungarian csillagok. Things had changed, she didn’t want to be heart-broken when I left again, as I had to do. She knew, of course, Heves isn’t home for me.

(She still thinks, though, that I’m a good story-teller, when she reads the tales on this page.)

The school, too, was different. Peter and Viktor are both gone. Left for the promise of better opportunities. It makes me happy. And thankful that I didn’t stay a second year without my two best teacher-friends. I got to meet the Canadian couple who replaced me, they’re charming and wonderful. It was odd to know that they enjoyed Heves so much to know that if they weren’t expecting a grandchild come July that they would stay another year. Kitti bobs on in German with Agi while petting little Bandito, who finds himself at home in the school lobby. Rob has the confidence of a businessman that I could never have, the kids said it worked well.

Handshakes with Bandibacsi were the same, but a high-five with the kids was different.

7A has grown so much. They’re taller and stouter and broader and more. They bubbled with the same energy, though, so much so that I promised them that I would always consider them “my little 7A,” even if now they’re 8A.

I got to visit with all of 8A, both the German kids and the English. They all learn both languages now, and we bounced back and forth with the playfulness of young trilingualism. I wish those kids could join me in some sort of classroom of life, they’re all so eager and heart-warming and bright.

Ricsi and Petra never moved on from 9D. They’re still there this year. The rest that blossomed into 10D gained too little in the transition, I fear. But because they were excited to hear my name, the teachers assumed that I should visit them, so I was sentenced to visit even those I never grew to hold dear.

The first question out of every class? “Have you got a girlfriend?”

I was almost excited to escape the school, one last time.

And the evening return to Unikum Disco that I had so long treasured? Seven people playing cso-cso, closed out early. None of my iwiw friends who had promised excitement to welcome my return. I didn’t even stay for a beer. Bulis happen only on Saturday, Petra explained on an early walk home. Or maybe exams were better to blame, she offered, as I quietly sang whatever song was pulsating through my thoughts.

I’m having a problem these days…with expectations. To high. Always. Rationality perversely miss-guided by romanticism. And when the expectations flop, I get disenchanted, but refuse to lose optimism for the next bend around the river.

There’s only one phrase for Heves and my trip. Ma volt. Already done. Used up, taken. Been there, Heves, done that. Treasured always in memory, but no longer my story.

Ma volt.

So it goes.