Monkeys on TV

Home is where you speak your mind. In one weekly magazine in Lux, they used to have this naked cartoon couple (believe me, it was not in the least indecent! Just cute…) and it used to say Love is… on the top and something or other on the bottom. Hence the first sentence. I am not a person you can hope to get to know fast. I admire people who can just speak to strangers about what really matters to them. I feel awkward when I happen to be that stranger. When I live with someone for some time, I will open up eventually. Not guard and censor everything I say, and rather shut up than destroy the harmony, and just start to tell what is on my mind. It takes some time, as I say, though, and I think it coincides also with me not bothering to get up earlier than the other person all the time. My host and me get along well most of the time. She is a wonderful woman, actually. We both hate monkeys on TV, and we will squeal and zap until they go away. We both pretend to get mad at the dog when she steals food, but actually we are just proud of her intelligence. We like to wonder at all kinds of every day things, ask a lot of speculative questions, and like to give even more speculative answers. She has a wicked sense of humour, self-deprecating, ironic and sharp. We both like good food, but we have a radically different conception of what that means for each of us. She likes really meaty and fatty things. When I make pasta she considers it hospital food. Chicken to me is just about acceptable as meat for me, but she thinks it is tasteless. She actually said this, and I almost felt offended, until she said ‘no it’s not about the cooking, it’s the meat itself’. Ah, that’s a relief! She made me think about a lot of materials around the house, and she is always interested in ‘how it works’. She can deal with all things around the house, including electricity, and I am very impressed by that. No, she can not just fix a light bulb, she replaces fuses, fixes cables, installs thermostats, repairs electric radiators, knows about AC and DC current and so forth in practice. I can just draw some diagrams, and if there is anything in the world I am afraid of, it is electricity. She managed to get me interested in plants. Before I came to live here, I was always someone who would love animals, hate plants [vegetarian too (though only outside of Romania), yes I remember the joke!]. Now I am tempted to buy some land, and make a garden with roses, spring onions, garlic, Sauerrampel, strawberries and tomatoes. Maybe I am just getting old! She is very diplomatic, and you notice that she disagrees only if you pay a lot of attention to an ever so slight change in her voice, or to a silence that you did not expect. But if you ask her opinion, she will tell you. She does not get angry for no reason, because she considers it a waste of energy. Probably lives a lot better that way. But as Ms Hausemer used to say, c’est une question de tempérament! One day when I was feeling down, she drove me to the place I needed to meet someone. On the way there, I gave some directions. We were supposed to turn right, up the hill. She stopped, looked left, and I noticed she thought something for herself, I said, turn right here, and she started turning left. I said, no, no, the other right. We laughed for at least half an hour about this. She had got it in her mind that it might be easier downhill. We both watch the horoscope and tell the other one about it if they missed it. She likes language and explains all the meanings of words to me carefully and slowly, and finds me kind of funny if I wonder about some weird word that reminds me of another one, entirely unrelated. Today the headline of the paper read: “sobolanul rozaliu” sare la “betivul transpirat”. She said, oh did you know guzgan means the same as sobolan. A sari means to jump, to skip, or, here, to attack. Betivul you know, it comes from a bea, to drink. Rozaliu is pink, of course. So: the pink rat attacks the sweaty drunkard. They are talking about Viorel Hrebenciuc, man with fingers in all kinds of (money) cakes, and Traian Basescu, president with suspension. Over and out. Your faithful insomniac, nutshell-the-cat