All It Takes Is A Little Love

We once had a European friend who opened our eyes to the possibilities of different ways of living. Egon Osterloh was the child of a German father and a Norwegian mother. He grew up in Bremen, Germany in a time just after World War II. 

Egon often recounted how his parents purchased a small apartment in the town where they lived after the horrific world war that changed the face of Germany. The went to work for the local telephone company and would spend their work lives there until they finally retired. Each day they used public transportation to get to and from their jobs. In the meantime Egon entered school and was placed in advanced classes learning English along with reading and writing in German. By the time he was ready for college he was fluent in German, English, Norwegian, French, Spanish and Italian. His schooling provided him with two years of college credit at the University of Houston where we met him in the nineteen sixties. 

Egon’s uncle was a professor of Sociology at the university and he introduced my husband Mike to his nephew. The friendship between the two students flourished immediately and Egon became the brother that Mike had always dreamed of having. Our lives would become permanently intertwined even after Egon married a beautiful woman from Chicago named Marita.  Egon was our source of a worldwide view of life. From him we learned about people and places that would otherwise have been foreign to us. He also opened our minds to possibilities other than those we had learned as American citizens. 

Egon spoke of playing in the bombed out ruins of Bremen in his early childhood. Times were tough right after the war and he developed scurvy from a lack of needed vitamins. Nonetheless he experienced a good life with his parents and enjoyed travels to Norway and across Europe with them. With his facility with languages he felt comfortable wherever he traveled and he learned to value every person and place that he encountered. He brought his optimism and insights to the United States and adapted quickly to our ways of living. 

There came a time when my mother had grown older and was struggling with a low income and an aging body. One evening Egon contrasted the life of his mother with mine. He noted that his mother had no need of a car because public transportation took her wherever she needed to be while my mother often worried about the expense of having a car to take her on her errands. Much of the anxiety that my mother experienced involved keeping her car in running condition without busting her meager budget while Egon’s mother never had to think of such things. 

Egon noted that his mother went regularly to her dentist and doctors without paying a dime while my mother fretted over her copays even when she finally had Medicare. My mother lost a tooth or two because she could not afford the cost of saving them with dental work. Egon’s mother took it for granted that she would always get whatever kind of care she needed. 

My mother had to drive a rather long distances from her home to procure the groceries that she needed while Egon’s mother walked a few blocks from her home to shop for food. Somehow her life seemed to be much easier than my mother’s world of constant worry. It made me wonder why our nation which is so rich is reluctant to improve life for all of its citizens. 

Many of the arguments about universal healthcare revolve around long waits in countries where everyone visits doctors for free or very low prices. The truth is that those long waits exist here but we have to pay so much for them that citizens of other nations do not incur. The price of health insurance keeps rising along with the costs of medical care that often price many Americans out of the system. It may cost me twenty dollars since I have Medicare and a supplemental insurance but the same procedure might run hundreds or even thousands of dollars for younger folks. Additionally waits for specialists are now running six to nine months which is hardly different from socialized medicine.

Egon never became a citizen of the United States because his mother worried that she would never seen him again if he did so. Each year he returned to Germany to visit with his parents and to get the dental work that he needed. He would joke that the savings in dental procedures more than paid for the trip. He was never able to understand why Americans are willing to pay so much for medical care that was free or low cost in his place of birth. 

I suppose that we Americans have been lulled into believing that things like universal healthcare for all is the first step toward becoming a communist nation. Of course such hyperbole is false but as long as people believe such ideas we will continue to pay the horrific price of our stubborn insistence on keeping medicine out of reach for most citizens. We will cling to gasoline and new roads rather than creating system of mass transportation. We will make life difficult for anyone whose financial condition is weak and we will do so to enrich people who are already wealthy simply because they want to horde most of their money rather than sharing it to make lives better. 

Egon’s way of seeing things would have provided my mother with a much more worry free life. His was a tale of two cities. In one life was difficult and harsh, in the other essentials were there for the asking. Perhaps one day we will have the good sense to make changes that benefit us all but for now people like my mother will have to fret and worry about getting from one day to the next in a country where wealth seems more important than caring for each other.

Before this war, I thought I was a quiet person.

Ukraine taught me that’s not true

I just hadn’t found anything loud enough to fight for.

Now I can’t shut up.     Viktor Kravchuk

I came across this post on Substack and it spoke to me as clearly as if Viktor was in the same room with me. I too am a quiet person. I have always preferred to stay at the back of a crowd. I enjoy being anonymous when I go out and about from my home. I work best in small groups where I feel comfortable and unlikely to be challenged for my ideas. I suppose that in my essence I am shy and a follower of rules and yet I have found myself again and again in the uncomfortable situation of speaking up for people whose voices were not being heard. 

I think that the first time that I broke out of my protective shell was when a group of boys were taunting one of my dear friends and threatening to throw her into the deep end of a swimming pool in spite of the fact that she was screaming for help and declaring that she did not know how to swim. Before I even thought about what I was doing I found myself standing in front of them and demanding that they put her down immediately. I suppose that because they knew me to be a little mouse they were stunned by my furor and handed her over to me without another word. I was still shaking and wondering in my mind where I had found the courage that I needed in that moment but I never let them know how frightened I actually was. 

The next time I had to assert myself was when I was twenty years old and my mother was showing horrific signs of her mental illness. I turned to every adult that I knew and none of them seemed to know what to do. They essentially stepped back and told me that I would have to figure it out on my own. I found a psychiatrist through a family doctor but was still so unsure of how to proceed. Ultimately I found the courage to become her voice for over forty years. Again I was in wonder of how my aggressive tactics had developed because I still believed that I was essentially unsuited for the many fights that I had to endure in the name of saving her. 

I had always believed that I was a person of quiet resignation who simply accepted the realities of life but over and over again I found a voice inside of me that surprised me as much as it did the people around me. I became an advocate for my students and for the teachers with whom I worked. I saw injustice and was unable to simply back into the warmth and familiarity of simply being quiet. I realized that there were some issues so important that they required me to fight with a determination that was unstoppable until the people about whom I cared were safe. 

Now I find myself embattled in a cause that is bigger than anything that I have ever before attempted to set right. I feel as though I am watching the slow but deliberate destruction of the delicate democracy of the United States of America. I marvel at the coincidence of the two hundred fiftieth celebration of our nation and the deliberate ignoring of so many of the tenets of our Constitution. I don’t want to keep writing or protesting but now like Victor I can’t shut up.

Victor is from Ukraine. He has watched his country being invaded by Russia and little by little being torn apart. He has seen whole villages pillaged and watched the young men of his nation dying as they fight the invader. He knows that he can no longer be quiet. This is not the time. This is a moment when everyone must find a voice and those voices need to come from all over the world. 

We should all be enraged by the horrors happening here in the United States and across the globe. We should be standing in unison with Pope Leo who has understood that he too cannot be quiet about the death and destruction being wrought on innocents in so many places. I too feel the need to condemn the bloodshed and the destruction. Have we not learned anything from history? 

I want to return to writing happy blogs about vacations and childhood stories. I long to feel secure in the belief that the people of the world are doing fine. I like being quiet, sitting in the corner just observing life. Still, in this moment I must fight.

We choose the people that we want for our friends. We choose the careers that we wish to follow. We choose a house to purchase and a spouse to live with us for all of our days. Somehow when it comes to choosing who we actually believe ourselves to be we question whether or not we are choosing or simply bowing to some kind of mental disease of our minds. Those who know that they have a different way of being are not the same as those who are attacked by depression or bipolar disorder. They are not somehow broken. They have chosen to be the persons they know themselves to be.

For centuries the human mind was considered to be sacred and only the domain of God himself. Those who dared to study the brain and human behaviors were often thought of as sacrilegious demons who should be punished for the audacity of attempting to understand how our brains work and what mechanisms cause us to feel certain ways. 

Only about one hundred fifty years ago did we humans begin to earnestly attempt to understand how our brains function and why we make certain choices in life. We have learned that there are indeed diseases of the mind caused by malfunctions in the brain. We have identified mental illnesses that are not the result of the devil but of problems in the chemical and electrical aspects of the brain. Some among us suffer from depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and other debilitating diseases that are as real as cancer or heart disease. Unfortunately the old taboos continue to deny the existence of such things often leaving those who are afflicted feeling like outcasts and broken souls. 

On the other end of the spectrum are those who blame any kind of different behavior in humans on some kind of mental problem that they should be able to overcome given a bit of therapy. So there still exist many people who think of members of the LGBTQ society as sick folks perverting the sexual tradition of a man and a woman being together. What we have learned is that what is really happening is that these individuals innately know that they must choose a different lifestyle because everything tells them that their sexual preferences are not perverse but simply different. They choose the pathway that feels right and comfortable to them and such choices have been made throughout the history of humankind. There has always been an LGBTQ community but through much of history they have had to hide in the shadows because of judgmental souls who found them to be disgusting and sometimes even turned them into outlaws to be punished. 

In more recent years our society developed a much more understanding reaction to those whose sexual preferences are different. We seemed to finally understand that such choices did not hurt us and instead lead to happiness for those who had been historically shunned. Suddenly we had gays and lesbians free to be themselves in public. Trans people were hired by the military, the government and even religious institutions. It was a nice time in which we accepted people for who they are rather than forcing them to be afraid to be themselves. Now the old ugly undercurrent of judgement and abhorrence is front and center and innocent souls have become afraid once again. 

Surely it has occurred to everyone that few people would choose to become ostracized unless they knew beyond a doubt that somehow their sexuality was different from the majority. Who would purposely make themselves pariahs if not for an internal understanding telling them who they are? Why would we even care that they are different? Why would we attack and demean them? What purpose could there be in our ignorance of their situations?

It has to be very hard to be stared at and even feared wherever one goes when all they want is to be left alone to be themselves. It must create grave anxiety to see laws being enacted to essentially force them to deny who they really are. They are all too often treated like outlaws and perverts when getting to know them would be a kinder and more logical way of accepting them just as they are. 

It is heartbreaking to hear the foul accusations about the LGBTQ community being uttered by people who have been found guilty of sexually assaulting women. It is unbelievable to witness the fear that so many people have of these individuals that are based on lies about who they are. It is as though we have not yet left the dark ages when we ascribed evil to anyone who dared to be different. 

I hope that we will one day embrace all people and love them just as they are not as we want to force them to be. We can make all kinds of laws sidelining them but history has shown us that they only suffer rather than thanking us for saving them from themselves. They are good people who want to be left in peace. Perhaps one day society will be intelligent enough to realize that their choices do not diminish or hurt us in any way. Just loving them is all we need to do. 

Who was my maternal grandmother? Even though I saw her virtually every Friday night during my childhood I never really had any idea what she was thinking or what the story of her life might have been. Maria Bartakovics was born in Trencin, Austria Hungary in 1890. Her parents, Andreas Bartakovics and Maria Trebaticzky baptized her in the Catholic Church at Cactiche that same year. I have little information about her childhood but my eldest aunt seemed to think that she had a brother who died in some kind of accident involving a horse. She arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1913 where she met up with my grandfather Pavel Dusan Uhrik. 

My aunt said that my grandmother and my grandfather lived and worked on a farm until she delivered the first of her ten children in 1914. After that her story becomes murky but it appears that she spent time cleaning an office building until her manager made an improper pass at her. She quit that job and worked for a time in a bakery. Evidently she was learning English then but when her second son was born in 1917, she became mostly homebound and having no need for English she reverted into speaking only Slovak. The children came in quick succession after that in 1919, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1925, and 1926. 

My mother was the youngest of the brood but only a year before her birth a boy was born in February and died by July. Evidently there was also another birth that never got registered because the child died in utero. My grandmother gave birth to all of her children at home, so I marvel at her fortitude. I have often felt that surely life must have been difficult for her even as she gave no hint to her sons and daughters that she ever had any struggles. 

She ran the household from a small home with three bedrooms and one bathroom. It had to be rather wild with so many children running in and out of the house but somehow she made them all feel loved. When the Great Depression occurred she kept the family fed with vegetables from a garden that she tended in the backyard and made meals stretch even if she was left with only the bones. Somehow the children communicated with her even though their knowledge of her language was minimal. They spoke English at the insistence of their father. 

Not long after my mother was born my grandmother had a breakdown which is not surprising given the loss of two children and the pregnancies that seemed to come without much time to readjust. She spent some time in the hospital and none of the children were ever able to estimate how long she was gone. Her absence was particularly hard on my mother who was only about five years old when her mother was taken away in an ambulance. It was a horror that haunted my mother for all of her life. 

Once my grandmother came back home she never again wanted to leave the house for any reason. She only left two more times, once when an appendix burst and another when she was diagnosed with the cancer that ultimately took her life. 

I first recall my grandmother with a long braid of black hair running down her back. With her blue eyes and lack of English she seemed rather exotic to me. Her vocabulary was limited to calling all of us either “pretty girl” or “pretty boy.” She feted us with cups of weak coffee filled with sugar and milk served in enamel cups and accompanied by dark rye bread. I actually enjoyed the little feast, seeing myself as being rather sophisticated with an “adult” beverage but most of my cousins disliked having to pretend to want the sugary mixture. 

My grandmother had her own special chair in the corner of the living room where she perched herself like royalty as she enjoyed watching her children talking over one another just as they must have done when they were young. Visits to Grandma’s house were never quiet but the raucous bunch seemed to please her well. Their almost religious habit of meeting every Friday night insured my grandmother that she would see them frequently and I suppose that was rather nice for her. 

Two of my uncles ended up living with Grandma full time. One was a dyed in the wool bachelor and the other had a brief marriage that ended in divorce. They kept things repaired at the house and shared the bills for utilities. It was a nice arrangement that seemed to be perfect for my grandmother because my grandfather had died from a stroke before he had even retired from his work. She happily cooked and cleaned for her sons while eschewing shoes in the summer and donning slippers when it was cold. 

I always had so much fun at my grandmother’s house. I had dozens of cousins and we played so many games while our parents filled the place with smoke from the cigarettes that they would eventually stop using. During my youngest years everybody seemed to smoke and so they puffed away while playing penny ante poker games. While they were busy we had a blast outside, sometimes pushing the envelope of safety when nobody was watching. 

I would like to know so much more about my grandmother. I often wonder what she was really thinking and whether or not she missed her homeland and the family that she left behind there. I wish I had known how to talk with her instead of just assuming that her thoughts were unimportant. I would have liked to know what she had experienced as a young girl and how she met and fell in love with my grandfather. I would love to have an idea of how she looked in her younger days. I have so many questions that will never be answered. The only thing about which I am sure is that she loved all of us who were part of her family. She was a wonderful hostess who never failed to welcome us with her coffee and bread. 

My grandmother died in 1977 when I as twenty nine years old and I still knew so little about her. She was loved by her entire family and our get togethers never again felt the same after she was gone. I especially missed seeing her sitting serenely in that corner where she seemed to be so content and I find myself wanting just one more cup of her sugary coffee. I rescued one of her enamel cups so that I would never forget how wonderful she was. It is a treasure that nobody but me understands.

Many years ago I purchased a metal sign that said “Simplify Simplify.” Of course that short statement comes from Henry David Thoreau, the famous writer, philosopher and environmentalist who lived for a time in a tiny cabin that he built on Walden Pond. 

The irony of that sign is that I found it at Hobby Lobby which is a bastion of “stuff” that we really do not need but we sometimes have to have. I mounted it in my laundry room as a reminder to make my life a bit less consumed with possessions and for the most part it became lost in the chaos of cleaning products and appliances that I use to keep my home tidy. I did not even remember seeing it of late until I watched a lovely three part Ken Burns program featuring Henry David Thoreau.

With all of the stresses in the world today it was quite enjoyable to sit back and learn more about the man who spent most of his life attempting to determine how humans and nature are intertwined. His philosophies of how to live without the “quiet desperation” that most of us endure was a lovely change from the doom scrolling and worries that seem to crowd our daily routines. For three hours I was immersed in Thoreau’s wisdom and appreciation for the humble aspects of living. 

Thoreau was so much more than I ever realized. He and his elder brother had both run a school for a time. He was a natural born teacher who enjoyed educating the  young people of his time. When his brother became ill they closed the school and Henry nursed his sibling until he died. Somehow the loss of his brother seemed to heighten his belief that we should all be striving to find a kind of harmony with the world around us because it is in such ways that we find the best of ourselves. 

After living for a time in the simple environ of Walden Pond Thoreau became a leading voice in the anti-slavery movement. In fact, his thinking about the enslavement of of humans was rather radical, believing that anything was fair in abolishing this horrific practice. When he voiced support of violence to rid our nation of slavery many of his followers were appalled but he felt that anything that would stop the vile tradition of slavery was necessary. 

Thoreau was a deep thinker whose passion was understanding the world and its people. He wrote thousands of pages in his daily diary that outline his belief that we humans are supposed to be stewards of this world, not owners who destroy nature and other people. While his thoughts often appear to be idealistic he actually predicted many of the problems that modern men and women encounter because of our hubris in believing that we have the right to destroy nature and others for the sake of progress. 

Thoreau died rather young from tuberculosis, an illness that ran in his family. Nonetheless he left a treasure trove of knowledge and wisdom in the many articles and diary entries that he wrote. He was a futurist who understood the need to balance human needs and wants with doing what is right for the common good. He understood quite clearly how our place in the world was being perverted by greed and lack of empathy for one another and for the nature around us. 

Somehow Thoreau reminded me of my Grandma Minnie Bell who seemed to be a child of the elements. She had a connection with animals and plants and the environment that was stunning. She communicated with birds and carefully guarded the soil and the plants that she used to grow her own food. Somehow she understood that she was but a part of the ecosystem and that her role was above all to be kind to the earth. Without being able to read or write she was a genius when it came to caring for the planet on which we live. She recycled and enriched the land with great respect and care. 

I enjoyed learning more about Henry David Thoreau. I had only ever viewed him as a kind of hermit living in a tiny cabin away from other people. I learned that he was very much involved in the world around him and that his quiet and seemingly humble way of living often became quite vocal when it came to protecting his fellow humans. He was much like my grandmother in that regard. Both of them embraced other people without prejudice. Both saw themselves as simply one among millions tasked to care for every living person and thing. 

It seems fitting that in this time when greed is often destroying our planet there is a program about a man who understood our true responsibility for each other and the world in which we live. We would all do well to consider Thoreau’s ideas for living in harmony. When we forget what is really important we seem to hurt each other and the beautiful planet on which we live. Our desperation comes from a lack of understanding that we can live in harmony and still find great happiness. Life has never been about power, destruction and selfish endeavors. We are at our best when we work together and simplify the way we live.