Reality Shmeality

Chapter Five

Dad was invited to join the West Coast leg of the 1983 Eric Clapton tour, and he confirmed with my Mom's doctor that I wouldn't be born until early March. He didn't want to miss my birth and told Mom to wait for him to get back on March 1st before having me. Seeing as how I wasn't due until March 8th nobody thought that there would be a problem.

Nanna came from Buffalo and stayed in our house with Mom to help with chores and look after her and the bun in the oven. A few months earlier, Grandma had moved into a nursing home and Mom and Dad visited her a few times per week so she could rub Mom's belly and talk to me through her waves of lucidity. Her English had pretty much vanished in her later years, and she spoke to everyone in Hungarian as if she had never left her homeland. Dad hired an interpreter to work with the staff of the nursing home and to help my family communicate with her. Dad had held on to the basics of Hungarian, but he was nowhere near fluent and even he struggled to understand Grandma.

On February 7th, Mom's water broke and Nanna rushed her to the hospital. Dad was at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, and I was born during Clapton's first song of the night, which happened to be After Midnight. A pretty remarkable coincidence was that I was born at 12:02 a.m. on February 8th, just after midnight. Dad didn't get the message until after the show when he returned to his hotel, and he was on the first flight back east the following morning. He met us at the hospital and promised Mom that he would be there for us full-time and, once again, put off the work he loved so much.

He was a very attentive father and loving husband. He helped with everything and never hesitated to get out of bed in the middle of the night to comfort my wailing or change my diaper. I was a quiet baby who was happy to sleep, happy to eat, and happy to receive attention . I made things easy for my parents who were still getting used to such a major lifestyle change. In July, my parents received some news that completely rocked their worlds. Mom was pregnant again.

In March of 1984, my little sister Sunshine was born, and I was no longer the main focus of the family. Having two infants at the same time was rough on my folks, though they had a lot of support from Nanna who moved in with us and from our neighbors who were close friends of my parents. We had everything we needed and nothing more. While Dad had made a good living working over the years, he never saw the point in being a materialistic person and preferred living a minimalist lifestyle. He wanted to save as much money as possible for future travel plans and to one day buy a small farm where he could produce all of the food we could ever need.

Dad believed that travel was the key to a meaningful education, and instead of rocking me to sleep with lullabies, he would tell me PG-rated versions of his world travels. I would wrap my tiny fingers around his thumb and pull on the hairs of his knuckles. He wanted to homeschool us when we got older so we would have the opportunity to learn about new languages and cultures while being immersed in them. He wasn't the best at speaking other languages but had picked up some basic French from Mom. He had big dreams for the family and was never shy about sharing them. Life was good, and he and Mom were happy in our little blue house on Woodsmeadow Lane.