By Marta Szabo
My father’s voice sang and his face smiled. You didn’t want to be sad when he was in the room, as if it would hurt his feelings. He sang Hungarian folk songs. He didn’t hum them or sing them absent-mindedly. He sang them out strong, sweeping you up into the tempo, sometimes sweeping me up onto his shoulders so that we could both march out together, singing, to conquer the world.
His forehead was high and broad, his black hair grew straight back. He liked his hair. “They used to say I looked like Beethoven!” he told me happily, combing it back with a small black plastic comb – in his Hungarian accent he pronounced the “b” in “comb” – he combed it back with his right hand, his left hand following, quickly, no mirror needed, three or four movements and it was done. His eyes were bright blue, no other description possible – no grey or green depending on the light, always bright blue. His nose was straight, his chin defined. My father never had a moustache or a beard. I used to ask him for one when I was little, but he would scoff. Moustaches and beards were for other people. They were not for him, Miklos Arpad Szabo-Pelsoczi.
Miklos is the Hungarian form of Nicholas. My father would tell me with pride that it meant “victory of the people.” He liked that. That’s who he was, who he was meant to be, a leader of men.
He was tall enough to be proud of it. He wore leather shoes, shined, always with laces that did not criss-cross like other people’s, but marched up the tongue of his shoe in tidy straight horizontal lines – one, two, three.
My father gave me a small zippered leather case that held several different types of nail scissors. No clippers. Clippers were modern and American and he told me always to have the half-moon showing on each nail.
“Don’t be a bubble gum person,” he said, and I knew what he meant. Bubble gum people were the opposite of us. First of all, they were American. Bubble gum women were the ones in the supermarket with curlers in their hair and long painted fingernails. Bubble gum men wore tee-shirts, drove trucks and listened to sports. The children had runny noses and probably no half-moons showing. They all, of course, chewed gum and knew nothing about yellow powder.
My father believed in yellow powder. It was something only he had. It came in a small beige tin with navy blue print. He sprinkled it on when he took a splinter out or when someone fell down and scraped a knee. When that happened, and if he was home, my father would pretend to be a doctor. My mother would just open up the medicine cabinet and stick a band-aid on your cut. But if my father was home the solution became formal. You had to lie down on a bed for him to examine the wound, or the “vound” as he called it. Carefully, slowly, he sponged it clean with warm water. Then he applied yellow powder.
Fred Poole and Marta Szabo will be leading a workshop November 4-6. Click for more info.