On Gratitude, Chandeliers, and Other Things That Glitter

Last week, I went running in the Budapest city park behind Heroes’ Square. I took a wrong turn trying to find the right metro line and by the time I got myself situated on the M1, I had spent twenty minutes wandering up and down very long escalators very deep underground. Emerging into the twilight was a welcome relief. The park was beautiful. Even though I got there late—around 6:45PM—the park was full of people walking, running, pushing baby strollers, playing with dogs, and sitting with friends and loved ones in the waning light. Summer is ending. We all thought summer had already abruptly ended a few days earlier, when the weather suddenly snapped into the low 40s out of nowhere—but she returned for a last goodbye, and the city had turned out to say goodbye too.

It is so good to see people enjoying nature together. It made me glad to see a healthy culture in action because I think that’s what people who live in healthy cultures do. They spend their leisure time with each other: with friends and families and neighbors. Screens and phones are part of the picture, but they don’t take up the whole frame. People are the focus, not screens. And there are so many children in Hungary—so many strollers and so many young parents with babies walking through the twilight. All of these are good signs—signs that the culture is hopeful and looking to the future.

But amid all that hope—all that beautiful architecture lit up by the sunset filtering through the trees—I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being a little homesick. That’s a hard thing to say because it feels ungrateful, but ignoring the melancholy feeling is no use.

Part of it was the park, the pulse of a thriving confident culture, because it brings into relief the struggles that my own very dear country is facing. Our parks aren’t full of people spending time with each other, and broad swaths of Americans have no conception of a shared culture or shared heritage. As a result, we are disconnected, distracted, and depressed on a societal level and that’s an incredible sadness.

Hungarians know who they are. To a man, they proudly explain that their country and its people have been defined by their losses and their sufferings. Hungarians celebrate the battles that they’ve lost—battles that were won by regimes that no longer exist. Hungarians have outlived enemies and empires, and their survival has made them resilient. I’m afraid America hasn’t suffered much—at least by comparison—and maybe the fiddler’s bill is coming due.  I want more for my country. I want more hope and vitality; more parks full of people enjoying the sunset together.

The other part of this melancholy is just human. I miss my family and friends in the United States, and I miss the fall—the mums and marigolds, especially. I’ve been known to deadhead marigolds in a number of places and situations in which the deadheading of marigolds is not strictly speaking socially appropriate. I’ve also been known to keep said deadheaded marigolds in my pockets and other readily available places because the smell is just an indescribable comfort, a memory of childhood and my dad and gardening in Nevada and every fall since then. It’s hard to be so far away.

And there’s something else. The world we live in puts everything into sound bites and hot takes and tweets, reducing even cultural observations and life events and the vast and varied human experience into counter cultural signs of the times. It’s a kind of commodification: a reduction of human life into online currency. It reminds me of the instinct—that I recognize in myself, sad to say—that when I see something beautiful, the first thing I do is reach for my phone to take a picture. That instinct is there, even though more often than not, the picture doesn’t do reality justice.

I love looking back on pictures, so it’s not all bad. Still, there’s something ungrateful about immediately and instinctually capturing and commodifying instead of receiving and appreciating something beautiful, at least for a moment. And the irony is that the conquest is unsuccessful anyways. There’s no capturing the way the sun sets over the roofs and trees of Budapest, or the ripple of the river, or the way the organ music at the end of Mass fills St. Stephen’s right to the top of the gold dome, like the invisible flights of sound are taking shape for a triumphant, glittering moment, or the walls are coming suddenly alive to make crashing brilliant music. It twists me up inside for beauty like that to get pixilated, trivialized, and transformed into culture-war ammunition written in twitter-speak. It’s inhuman and wrong.

It's taken quite some time to put all this into words—even to find the words for the disenchantment that started in the park. But now I can say that the misuse of beauty was no small part of the convoluted homesick malaise.

Errands don’t respect melancholy moods, so in the midst of all of this, I had to toughen up, screw my miniscule Hungarian vocabulary to the sticking the point, and go on an expedition for envelopes. I’m glad I did because on the way home, I stopped to look in the window of a shop. It was tiny and dark, but the ceiling was glittering, and I think that’s what caught my eye. The man who opened the door was old, and he spoke no English. He was sitting in the center of a very small room with his dog at his feet. The room was dark, dusty, and filled to the brim with lamps and cords and crystals—and every inch of the ceiling was covered with chandeliers. He was a chandelier maker.

Even if I could have come up with something intelligent to say in Hungarian, I would have been at a loss for words because as I stooped to pet his dog, he puttered over to turn on all the lights. The result was breathtaking, I was delighted, and he was delighted that someone thought his handiwork was beautiful. The moment crossed right over the language barrier, and I keep coming back to it because that unexpected, shared moment of wonder cut right through malaise and homesickness and everything else.

The homesickness is already easing. Gratitude and joy are learned virtues that I’m practicing. And marriage helps. Facetiming my sister helps. Creature comforts like lavender ice cream help. And at the end of the day, writing helps tremendously, so that’s just one more gift for which I’m deeply and profoundly grateful.