Boundary issues

Once upon a time there was a nice hardworking family living on a tidal river in darkest Maine.  The father was a blacksmith with several sons, one of whom abandoned blacksmithing and opened a village store.  After the blacksmith died, the storekeeper moved his mother down the hill so that she would be closer to the store where he could keep an eye on her -- a necessity, because by all accounts she was a formidable lady.  He not only moved her, but also moved her house. He owned quite a bit of land up the hill from the store, some of which became the house lot for his mother. Although by the end of the 19th century the land had been broken up into family parcels, it was still all in the family.

Fast forward 75 years and several generations.  The store closed in the early 1950s. The mother's house had been empty or nearly empty for some years, occasionally used as a summer house by visiting family members. The family members who had inherited the various bits of property began to sell them off, in some cases to other family members or friends, but in other cases to strangers from away.  These family members were not stupid and had little wish to live in a town with a population in decline since the 1910 census.

The house of the storekeeper's mother left the family in 1961 and was owned by several people from away who used it as a summer house.  At some point, one of the owners bought some of the land up the hill so that the lot attached to the house, originally very small, would expand to about two acres.  However, the boundaries of the land were not entirely clear, and were described as being 75 yards from an elm tree no longer present, or bounded by a woodshed, also no longer present.  Town tax maps did not even associate this new purchase with the house.  

Fast forward a few more years. Along came the great-great granddaughter of the formidable lady, who decided that she wanted this house.  And, not all that strangely, it was for sale.  An offer was made and accepted and all was good to go when the lawyer helping the great-great granddaughter and her husband mentioned that he couldn't figure out the boundaries, didn't know what was actually being sold, and was not yet ready to issue a title opinion.  This delayed the closing by several weeks while the helpful lawyer tried to get title insurance,  

Title insurance was finally secured, with so many exclusions that it really didn't protect anyone from anything.  However, with that issue settled, the helpful lawyer decided that he could issue a title opinion and set a closing date.  

It's about time that another formidable lady owned that house. 

Christmas Letter 2014

The year that is ending was full of excitement, with a few challenges thrown in to keep us honest.  As always, the highlights involved travel, with trips to Hungary, Switzerland, Massachusetts, Maine, Oregon, Montana and Chicago.  The theme of this year’s travels seemed to be family.  We conducted genealogical research, attended reunions and visited relatives, and journeyed to remote places where our ancestors once lived. Our offspring have inherited the travel gene, with one going to Mexico and another visiting Munich and other places in Germany. We always enjoy hearing about their adventures.

When not exploring places near and far, we enjoy the visits of friends and family, experience the sports, music and theater delights of the Twin Cities, and appreciate the diversity that characterizes the city we have called home for almost 20 years. When we think about retirement, something we do quite often these days, we plan to spend the winters in Minneapolis and the summers in Maine and Budapest.  People tell us we have it wrong, but we are not going to stop being contrary now.

Sons William and Nicholas continue to live in Minneapolis, and it is wonderful to have them visit for Sunday dinner.  Peter lives in Portland, Oregon, and it equally wonderful to have an excuse to get to know a lovely and interesting part of the country.  We are very fortunate parents.

We wish you all the best and hope that the year to come brings you delight and wonder.

Louise and Jim

We accepted all the seller's conditions -- except price. She accepted our price.  I am beginning to get cold feet.  What have we done?  (For those of you who don't know me very well, I'm being melodramatic).

Anyway, we emailed the carpenter, asking him to fix the hole in the roof.  We call the insurance company so that our little sentimental investment can be insured -- the owner did not insure the place.  The insurance company informs us that if the inspector sees a tarp on the roof, the structure is uninsurable except through Lloyds of London.  Can't wait to see how much that might cost.

Then, we send the attorney in Eastport all the info. he will need to do a title search.  Normally he operates on Maine time, i.e., not in much of a hurry to do anything.  In this instance, however, he emails back right away:  "I thought you were only buying one parcel, but there are two parcels on this deed."   Huh?

So we get out the schematic of the property map for the town.  There is indeed a large parcel of land behind the house, probably around 10 acres.  However, it appears connected to another house, not (soon-to-be) ours. Of course, the schematic could be many years old and not reflective of the current situation.

Is the owner retaining the other parcel?  Does she even know that she owns it?  Does someone else own it? What do we do?  We don't really want another 10 acres -- we didn't even want the two that we just bought. We just want the house.

We have a call in to the town offices (open from 4-6 pm on Tuesday and Thursday). However, the staff there definitely operates on Maine time.  There was no one in the office when we called at 5 pm Eastern time. So we wait.

Adventures in Real Estate: Context is Everything

How did we get to the point of putting our little all into a pipe dream based on sentiment?  It's a long story that starts when yours truly was 10 years old, helping Dad clean out his mother's house in darkest Washington County, Maine.  The house was part of a family compound that seemed like a lot of fun at the time, with three houses so close to each other that shouting really did work. At the bottom of the lane where these three houses were located was a country store that supported the families in the three houses. There was horsehair furniture, a soapstone sink, gleaming wide board floors, a pump in the kitchen, and an outhouse.  I was told that it was an upscale outhouse because it was in the shed -- poor people had to go outside. There were blackberries and a brook that gurgled as it wound down to the tidal river below. There was a barn with a swing, just like Charlotte's Web.  It was magical.

My mother had convinced my father that he should not own the house.  It's a long way from Massachusetts, she said.  Whether he really agreed I will never know, but the house was sold.  Fast forward a few years to another house in the compound, for sale by an uncle.  Tempting, but the town had just been accidentally sprayed with pesticide by the paper company that owned most of northern Maine.  With small children around and more on the way, we thought that relocating to this part of the world, if only for the summer, wasn't the most sensible idea.

Many more years elapsed, and we went to look at the house in the pouring rain, just for fun while on a very damp vacation for which we rented a nice, brand new house about 40 miles away. We walked around in the wet grass that had not seen a lawn mower all summer, but I got the bug even though the house was not for sale.  This past Labor Day weekend, OLGS spirited me away to look again, because it was for sale.

We got to the house at the appointed time and waited for the real estate agent to show up. After almost an hour, he arrived, angry because the owner no longer had a key. After climbing on the roof, trying to jimmy the shed lock and open the cellar door, we broke a window.  OLGS crawled in, opened the door, and there we were.

It was heartbreaking.  There was a hole in the roof and there was no electricity because Bangor Hydro had cut the wires due to non-payment, according to a neighbor.  There was white mold on the massive beams in the cellar.  "At least it's not black mold," said the helpful agent. The pocket doors had been replaced by some truly ugly see-through plastic.  The soapstone sink was long gone. The porch was falling off the main house, the shed was listing to one side, and there was paint splattered all over, a sign that the owner had been trying to spruce things up.

I left very discouraged. But I've been obsessing about it for 50 years, and am not going to be deterred, although I am also not willing to pay very much for my obsession. We made an offer on it today.

What we learned about the house between our visit and the offer will be the subject of the next blog post.

Something Big, or Adventures in Real Estate

OLGS and I are going to do SOMETHING BIG!  Here's the plan:  we are going to buy this house, deconstruct it, and rebuild it on the water somewhere in Washington County, Maine.   Since we have more money than sense (and not much of that), this should be quite an adventure.  Did I say the house belonged to my great, great grandmother? Did I say it's a dump?   And if the owner does not accept our lowball offer, we will walk -- sentiment goes only so far.


How we do this while working many jobs, taking care of adult children with "issues", schlepping undergraduates to Zentral Europa, playing church lady and feeding Mitzi the cat I do not know.  All I know is that the time is now.

Stay tuned for developments.

Adventures in Hungarian medicine

Before I start the story, let me say that the point of this post is how nearly impossible it is to do anything complicated when you don't speak the language. Case in point: A trip to the emergency room.

I really thought I had appendicitis. I gutted it out (so to speak) for most of the day, and then finally called the clinic recommended by the State Department and the Fullbright folks. The English-speaking doctor on call said I should go to the hospital, and recommended one that he thought would be best. So off we went in a taxi. So far so good.

We get to the entrance to the hospital, and it is totally unclear where the ER is. When we think we've found it, there's a gate with a guard in a booth. So OLGS finally persuades the driver to go ask at the booth to be let in. Amazingly, we are and we drive off to the entrance, or what we think is the entrance.

We are right about the entrance, so we enter the ER waiting area and go to registration. We are waved off to somewhere else, but when we get to the somewhere else, it is totally unclear where we are. OLGS goes back to the registration area, and the clerk, showing only a little scorn for the stupid Americans, finally walks him back to where she had sent us in the first place. Apparently, this is triage, although whether it said anything about that I don't know.

After a short wait, a young woman in a polo shirt, jeans and a stethoscope pops her head out of a door, and indicates that we are next. In I go, along with OLGS as my translator. Then the problems really begin.

In addition to the young woman with the stethoscope, there is an older woman with what looks very suspiciously like a ledger. After showing our State Department-issued health insurance card, we are told that it is no good and that we will need to pay in advance. How much, we ask? 100 euros, we are told.

OLGS yanks out his credit card, brought along for exactly this eventuality. We don't take credit cards, he is told. Cash? We have exactly enough in Hungarian money (not Euros) to pay the cab back and the $15 co-pay that the insurance card says we will need to pay at an ER visit. Of course, the card is in English, and I suspect the concept of co-pay is foreign to them.

Now the lady with the ledger picks up her phone. OLGS understands enough to know that she's saying that there are some Americans who cannot pay and what should I do? Fortunately, the woman with the polo shirt and stethoscope says, in broken English, "Why don't I examine you anyway. We'll deal with this later." I was quite ready to kiss her, as the pain was getting worse from the stress.

So she examines me, asks all the right questions, with OLGS helping. She says that she is pretty sure I don't have appendicitis but that I should go see a surgeon. Surgeon??? She fills out several forms, stamps them repeatedly, and sends us back to registration, where we deal with more skepticism about the insurance card, and ultimately fill out a form in English that I think committed us to giving them our firstborn child.

We were going to leave after that -- I decided that since I didn't have appendicitis, I could deal with it the following day at the English-language clinic where they understand the concept of the State Department. However, a woman in scrubs rushed out as we were ready to leave and marched us into an examining room.

She spoke no English, but did a great demo of vomiting. OLGS finally told her that we wanted to go, and she agreed, after telling me that I should see a surgeon. That made me even more anxious to leave, so OLGS called the cab company, which promised to be there in 10 minutes. It was, and we walked back to the gate, since the driver did not argue with the guard about driving to the entrance.

When we got back to our flat, I went to bed, and although it was hard to get comfortable, I finally fell asleep and felt somewhat better in the morning. During the day I continued to feel better, so I never called the English-language clinic.

Lessons learned: Stick with English speakers for medicine -- OLGS is not advanced enough to do this in Hungarian. The basic humanity of the woman in the polo shirt -- a PA or intern -- who was going to examine me whether or not the payment issues were resolved. We were a charity case. And the meaning of surgeon: Physician -- similar to the Brits calling a doctor's office a surgery. And I'm more or less back to normal two days later. Food poisoning? Indigestion? Who knows. We didn't understand.

Hungary's tax dollars at work

You can tell a lot about a country by what it subsidizes.  Hungary, for example, subsidizes the arts -- heavily.  It also subsidizes public transportation, at least in Budapest.  But that is for another post.

Today's visit to the Bartok Marathon was quite revealing.  For under $10 we attended two concerts, one a celebration of the folk dance tunes Bartok used as the inspiration for many of his piano works.  It was charming and professional, with two modern folk dancers performing against the backdrop of early 20th century peasants filmed while dancing.   The second was an  orchestral concert, again performed at a very high level. And expensive to put on -- two harpists, eight French horns, and a massive string section.  They were very good, and while not sold out, the hall looked full.

And the venue?  The Bela Bartok National Concert Hall is about 10 years old, and has amazing acoustics.  Unfortunately, it's in a unprepossessing neighborhood, surrounded by construction-related mud.  Inside is just fine. And maybe it looks better in the summer.  But that is my only quibble.

I feel almost guilty taking advantage of these offerings -- but not guilty enough to boycott.

Are you an advocate of English-only? Try to learn another language and then see how you feel.

Language class is over for now.  OLGS and I celebrated with a luncheon party, or buli, for his classmates and his and my teachers (no classmates for me -- I was in a class of one!) Charming people, all of whom spoke English.

In fact, they all spoke English amazingly well. I complain about Hungarian, but it is logical and is pronounced phonetically.  What you see is what you get -- kind of like Spanish.  There is no gender issue, like French.  There are very few irregular verbs.  In contrast, English is amazingly difficult, and the more I learn about other languages, the more impressed I am by people who manage to learn English.

It's full of irregular verbs, and the spelling and pronunciation seem to follow no rules that one can hang on to when trying to navigate the words that come from many different roots.  Then there are all those homonyms -- words that are pronounced the same but spelled differently, or words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently, depending on context. It's a mess.

I want to say that I can't understand how English became a world language, but I kind of know why.  It is infinitely flexible, and most English speakers -- the ones I know, at any rate -- are pretty forgiving.  If they get the meaning, they don't usually care whether you were "correct."

In contrast, everyone in Budapest is a Hungarian teacher, from the shopkeeper to to the ticket taker at the movihaz to the kind stranger who gives up her seat on the bus for a gimpy American.  Whenever you open your mouth, they correct the fine points of grammar that you have missed because you've only been speaking the language for three weeks.

So to those yahoos who want to restrict entry into the US to English speakers only, or keep citizenship away from people whose English doesn't measure up to some impossible standard, I say this: Go try to learn a new language yourself.  Especially if you are over 21, you'll find it amazingly difficult.  And bear in mind that English is one of the hardest.

I bet that the loudest English-only advocates don''t speak any other languages.  Just a guess ...

Belvaros neighborhood

Veres Palne Utca

Our Budapest street is named after the founder of the first high school for girls in Budapest in 1867.  The neighborhood is quite lovely, with five and six story apartment blocks with inner courtyards.  Our apartment building until fairly recently had little stores in the courtyard where one could buy basics.  Now the space is used for parking bicycles.

A late evening walk after a snow storm that left the streets wet revealed some interesting buildings, a church encircled by a high wall and gates -- the Serb Church -- several bars, a youth hostel and what is apparently one of the few vegetarian restaurants in Budapest.  There are also many historical markers, primarily noting the literary and political figures who lived in the buildings in the 19th century.

The street is mostly cobblestone and barely wide enough for one car.  Parking is allowed, and I suspect the search for spaces occupies a significant amount of time -- kind of like New York.

But I don't need to worry about that -- it's only a five minute walk to the veggie restaurant, which I suspect we will visit often.

The district is called Belvaros, which means "beautiful city." They got that right.

English as a second language

Today's excursion: A lengthy tram ride along the Danube and out into the working class part of Budapest.  On the newer trams, the recorded announcements are in both Hungarian and English  when there's a connection to the metro.  Most restaurants and shops in touristy areas have signs in English -- the language that works for everyone.  Tourists from Germany, Holland, Austria, Italy and Switzerland all speak English as their second language.

Not only do we - and, to be fair, the Brits -- export our language.  We also export our food culture.  There are McDonald's at every metro stop. Subways and KFCs create a jarring contrast when paired with beautiful fin de siecle buildings.

And there is Hunglish -- words borrowed directly from the the language of marketing: polo, pullover, TV, whiskey, non-stop (24 hour store) and many more.

But Hungarian itself may prove impossible to learn.  Unlike French and German, there are no clues.  Take, for example, the word "tej." It means "milk."  But it's pronounced "tay," which sounds like the word for tea in French and German. Remarkably, tea means tea in Hungarian and English (and Basque, for those who care about such things).

There are few cognates that sound and mean the same thing in both English and Hungarian, except for words that have been borrowed. A person with a big English vocabulary can often puzzle out the meaning of words in Romance languages and German without actually knowing the language.  Not so in Hungarian.

Adventures in Budapest, 1

Veres Palne Utca

From my study window I see the Buda hills and the Erzebet Bridge, which is beautifully lit at night.. Step out onto the tiny balcony and I can see a dingy rose-colored building with a big hole in the roof.  Repairs were clearly started but not completed.  That may be the story of Budapest -- lovely sights, but still slightly battered.

But you wouldn't know that Hungary was part of the Soviet bloc until relatively recently by looking at our street. Right next door is a shop that sells only single malt whiskey. Next to that is a coffee shop with a sign in English, "Hot chocolate to go." There's a dressmaker, a fruit and veg store that sells Canadian squash -- who knew that the neighbors to the north exported veggies -- a jewelry store, an ice cream shop, a bar, a restaurant (open 12:00 noon to 12:00 midnight), some kind of financial business -- perhaps a commercial bank -- and that is just our block. Two blocks away is the Vaci Utca, where one can eat, drink, stroll and purchase goods from Hugo Boss, H & M, Nike and Lacoste and a variety of German stores.

Lots of tourists, but lots of Hungarians, too, crowding the outdoor cafes even during 45-degree weather.  And what am I if not a tourist, albeit a long-term one?  Loving it.

Live from New York

OLGS and domtran are in NYC, and have been for almost three months. There have been visits from two of the sons, many movies, church services, concerts, lectures, walks in the park, and frequent meals at our neighborhood brasserie.  We are the opposite of the people who say that New York is a nice place to visit but wouldn't want to live there.  I think it's a nice place to live but wouldn't want to visit -- too overwhelming.

Yet Another Hungarian Actor Makes it Big

Did you know this?  I sure didn't, but the great English actor Leslie Howard -- the dreamy Ashley Wilkes from Gone With the Wind -- had a Hungarian father.  OLGS thought that ol' Leslie was a Hungarian immigrant, and could not believe that the quintessential gent could have mastered the King's English so beautifully.  However, Leslie was born in England with the last name of Stainer (changed from Steiner so it wouldn't sound so German during WWI).

Innocents abroad, or Joe's visit to Colombia

Joe College Grad is off again -- this time to Colombia.  He's moving fast, and has made it to St. Gil, a colonial city that looks quite lovely.  Ah, to be young and healthy.

Eastern Europe

We've been back from our trip to Vienna, Budapest and Romania for almost two months, but the glow lingers. Vienna, where OLGS was working with Austrian colleagues, is rich, accessible, clean and very western. Budapest is more gritty, with many remnants of Soviet-style architecture, a significant police presence, and fewer English speakers. But that's OK, 'cause OLGS speaks Hungarian. And there are the broad boulevards, the elaborate fin de siecle apartment buildings, the cute trams, and an atmosphere that conveys, "Yes, we were once grand and could be again. Just give us time." But Romania?

In some ways it's a throwback. Donkey carts, lumbering, exhaust-spewing trucks, and many, many Roma people who are universally despised by the Romanians. It's what I imagine Alabama to have been in the 1920's. And the reminders of the Ceaușescu regime -- huge dams and factories, extreme poverty, suspicion and fear -- linger still. But the Hungarian-speaking village where we stayed in Transylvania is both very poor and very rich -- self sufficient in so many ways, dedicated to the children's education and improvement, and living out their heritage every day.

Will we return?  You betcha.