Circular No 943

Newsletter for alumni of The Abbey School, Mt. St. Benedict, Trinidad and Tobago, W.I.

Caracas, 30 November 2019 No. 943

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Dear Friends,

A “new” oldboy has looked us up, Alex (Sanyi) Tary, of the Hungarian gang in the 1950s.

Welcome.

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Alex Tary <atary1141@charter.net>

25 Nov 2019, 02:23 (5 days ago)

Today I stumbled on the website due to an email from Csaba Jakobszen of the Abbey School Alumni website and was wondering whether I was qualified to be a member of the organization since I did attend that school from 1952 to 1953. 

I have some pleasant memories of the place and would not mind getting some updates on what might be happening. 

I am aware that the school closed down not long ago and Brother Vincent got out of the order and got married.

As for me we left Venezuela in 1957 and by way of Florida we wound up in California. 

I did enlist in the US Army Reserve and after my six year military obligation got discharged honourably as a sergeant. 

That helped in my studies as a geologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA, and after working in the Texas oilfields for two plus years I went back and got my Master’s from the University of California at Riverside. 

Then I went to work for the US Forest Service and after 26+years I retired in Redding, CA.

This may come as a surprise to you but I like to keep in contact with old friends, especially from Venezuela. 

Dozsa Feri has been up this way and in Oregon several times and I would like to keep up the tradition. 

Should you ever be up here in the US we have an open door policy and behind that door we have a good supply of grape juice, fermented, of course. 

Hoping to hear from you, best wishes,

Sanyi

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My reply to Sanyi

Welcome to the Old boys list.

And I believe you were part of the Hungarian gang, at school.

I went there from 1955 to 1960.

When would you have graduated Form V? as my list is ordered by graduation year.

Csaba graduated in 1957. 

It is interesting to hear that you are in contact with Dozsa Feri.

He is the godfather of one of my sons, but lost contact with him long time ago.

Is he in USA?

It would be nice if you could send me short stories on your adventures at the Mount.

Like stories of the priests that you had as teachers and friends in general.

I am the Editor of the Circular and need articles and for the archives for posterity.

God bless

Kertesz Lazslo

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Andres LARSEN

Sat, 16 Nov, 10:46 (23 hours ago)

Brief update on things here:

In the meantime, translation assignments have recovered somewhat from their anaemic lows earlier this year so there is less idle capacity now

I incidentally have started proofreading translations from English to German for the German Deutsche Huntington Hilfe which is a countrywide NGO directly related to the Huntington Disease Society of America

There are 30.000 Huntington patients in the US and 8.000 in Germany

At present, I am proofreading a 130 page book on long term care for mid and late stage Huntington patients.

It is 9 chapters long and I am proofreading all of them except the first one which Deutsche Huntington Hilfe already proofread.

Every time I send a proofread chapter to Germany, I receive 150 EUR via Western Union International

I try to send 1 chapter per month

How did I arrive at Chorea Huntington?

A few years ago, I read in BBC World News that we are in the Guiness Book of Records with the biggest concentration worldwide of Huntington patients.

There are about 1.000 of them in a fishing village on stilts called Barranquitas southwest of Maracaibo on the western shore of Lake Maracaibo

That still does not explain anything

For a few years, I have exchanged e-mails with a lady who asked me if I had gone to primary school 60 years ago in Herrsching am Ammersee south of Munich in Bavaria.

I replied affirmatively but made clear that I had no recollections as to my classmates back in those days. 

She would unfailingly send Xmas Greetings.

When I went out to all of you earlier this year hat in hand because of the dire situation here, she referred me on to another of these classmates I no longer recall.

That second lady introduced me to the Deutsche Huntington Hilfe. 

My philanthropic work proofreading translations for them got off to a slow start but has begun consolidating

Now, when I philanthropically send a translation or something proofread over, a money transfer comes in via Western Union International

I wrote them with all frankness that I am not a native speaker in German

I have no idea what this will bring but for the first time in my life I am exporting translation / proofreading services to a customer abroad.

My contact person is another lady in Stuttgart who works with Deutsche Huntington Hilfe and is somehow connected to Daimler Benz in Stuttgart

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Abbey School - Finding an earlier Circular

Hi, Tim,

I just tried opening No 934 and had no difficulty.

Let me see.

I use Mozilla as my browser. 

When I go to the Blog, only No 935 (the most recent) appears on the page on my screen.

So, I know that I shall have to go to Blog Archives in the right-hand column to find No 934 (Ladislao publishes each one on a Saturday, once a week).  

No 935 is dated 5 October. 

That means that No 934 was published in the last week in September. 

In the right-hand column, I click on September. 

All four of the September Circulars open up in a list. 

I then select No 934 and it opens.

Hope that works for you.  If not, let me know.

Best,

Don

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From: Tim Mew MHC <tim-mew@bigpond.com> 

Sent: Sunday, 17 November 2019 01:52 

Hello Don,

Thanks for this new advice and I have a quick question for you.

I can open 935 but have tried with no luck to do the same for 934, what am I doing wrong?

Cheers Tim.

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AN ESSAY BY Wayne Brown

Sunday, December 30, 2001

(Conclusion of The bride's sister)

I had last seen her at her own wedding, 20 years ago.

The bridegroom then had been my contemporary and ex-schoolmate at college a couple years earlier; but we'd been in different Sixth Form groups and I'd only known him by sight.

Now the bride's sister asked: "Do you remember what you did at my wedding?"

She said it like someone who had waited a long time to ask that question.

Alarmed, I said no.

"You shook your head."

"I did what?"

"You shook your head. We'd just been married and were walking down the aisle, and you were standing at the end of one of the rows, I guess, and you shook your head."

The image was galvanic: a matter now for intense shame and furtive delight.

"How?" I asked incredulously. "Up and down -- or side to side?"

"You shook your head like this." And she nodded slowly, thoughtfully. Then she laughed.

"You wouldn't believe how many years later X (her husband) asked me what you'd meant, shaking your head like that at our wedding. I said I didn't know."

To her enduring honour and my relief, she now withheld the obvious next question.

I smiled and looked away.

I was thinking, it must have been fun to be young.

By 40 you forget just how much fun it was.

Even if you wind up remembering the occasions of youth, some of them, most times you miss the mood; and the mood, hopelessly plagiaristic and yet felt to be intensely original -- the mood is everything.

Nineteen sixty four.

Is this invention, or was that the year that Dirk Bogarde and John Mills, in The Singer not the Song, played out the same church-steps hiatus?

Trying to imagine the scandalous scenario the bride's sister had just sketched, it occurred to me that it would never happen again.

Never again, standing at the end of a pew while newlyweds glided by, would I risk such a boorish display.

We get lonelier, getting older; we learn not to interfere.

Now, transgressing the line between nostalgia and sententiousness, I asked the bride's sister: "You think we're wiser than we were -- or just less innocent?"

Her answer was splendidly tangential. "I like myself," she said simply.

Then she half-spoiled it by adding: "I enjoyed my marriage. I had a whale of a time in my marriage."

The way she said it, with relish and no regret, she might have been talking about a fortnight vacation, a riotous excursion through Rio, say -- and not about a bond that had lasted for 14 years and added two children to the world's stock of humankind.

Marriage, that awesome synonym for half-a-life's worth of companionship and quarrels, adventure and boredom, consolation and exhaustion: on her lips it became an event she had "enjoyed".

I disbelieved her utterly, of course; and for a moment I was tempted to gatecrash her privacy: to say something derisory and provocative, something that would shatter that blithe formulation and extract from her some confession of her sense of helplessness and bewilderment at finding herself unmarried again, after so long.

But simultaneously I discovered my admiration for her was growing.

We are young once only; after that, the main thing is to hack it to the grave as stylish as you can.

Cast adrift for the moment, the bride's sister was hacking it with style and courage; and I thought, looking at her, that in a few year's time she would make some man a fine, bigboned and striking wife, tempered by grief yet open still to laughter: the kind of woman a man would be lucky to find at his side as the downhill slope steepened.

"You American women are tough," I told her, only half-mockingly; meaning as well to honour her exile.

"Only because you make us so," she said, meaning men, but saying it almost fondly, without a hint of the feminist lash.

I wanted to get up and shake her hand.

"So!" she said, settling back.

"Tell me about you."

And when, ungenerously though not unpleasantly, I make light of that topic and got through the telling of it in 10 seconds flat, she went on to talk of herself.

Back in the States -- to which, she added, she would be returning the following morning -- she was a professional woman: a kind of real estate developer, specialising in apartments for the aged.

This wasn't an ad hoc business.

Failing muscles and eyesight required single-level dwellings or else ramps at prescribed angles of slope.

Arthritic backs demanded that appliances and bric-a-brac should all be within reach, without the need for bending or stretching.

Failing memories required fail-safe devices installed on all electrical and gas outlets. Susceptibility to pneumonia demanded circumspect ventilation.

She obviously liked her work and was good at it; yet as she talked I felt again the strangeness of her.

Forget the past, I told myself; I don't know this woman.

In the 21 years since last we'd met, our lives had been as different as our children.

How could I, even with her connivance, ever hope really to read the book of her life in those years?

I said: "You've done well for yourself, kid"; and with that "kid" felt the thrill of violating a strangeness.

Did she feel that too?

I don't think so.

It is the genius of women to shuffle Time's cards as they will; beginning with that breezy "Hi! Come and say hello to the folks," she had plainly pulled the past 21 years from the deck, so that now July 28, 1985 came immediately after August 29, 1964.

The missing cards could be substituted by a brief synopsis.

What could a bewildered, time-sunken man do in such a situation but tag along, letting himself be led by the hand, so to speak, across the vertiginous void in between?

So in the end I stopped struggling and played along.

Thus, fondly, we betray our lives.

But she was a fine woman, the bride's sister, a woman worthy of such a betrayal; and for a gift, before I left the wedding feast, I gave her back the one clear picture I had of her (complete with stage props and sound track) amid the dimming panorama of long-gone beaches and fetes.

"I remember," I told the bride's sister. "One night you cried in my car. By where Long Circular Mall is now. You remember that?"

The bride's sister remembered only too well; and I got in return a remonstrative, delighted cuff...

(PS By an extraordinary coincidence, a couple hours after I began this piece, her letter arrived from America. In it the bride's sister had written:

"You might remember you said something to the effect that this 'American woman' talks tough. Well it just dawned on me what my reply should have been. You men create us that way, and, besides, it's called a matter of survival. Only the strong survive....")

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EDITED by Ladislao Kertesz,  kertesz11@yahoo.com,  if you would like to be in the circular’s mailing list or any old boy that you would like to include.

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Photos:

09LK6292FBAAM, Antonio Aman

16LK4193FBKMA, Kristof Marothy

10LK0057FBALE, Alves Leon

17LK8586FBJAM, Jean Ambrose