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Post by pieter on Dec 31, 2021 17:40:28 GMT -7
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Post by pieter on Dec 31, 2021 17:41:27 GMT -7
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Post by pieter on Dec 31, 2021 17:42:23 GMT -7
For me it was a mixed emotions New Year's Eve. Monday we will say goodbeye to dad in a cremation ceremony. But it is a New Year nontheless. We did it sober with champagne and oliebollen (a traditional Belgian and Dutch beignet). ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliebol )
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Post by pieter on Dec 31, 2021 17:53:00 GMT -7
Happy New Year folks. Happy New Year Jaga, Karl, Kaima, John, Jeanne, Ludvik, Jeanne, and all the other Forum visitors. That it may be a healthy, prosporous, succesful, cheerful, wonderful and pleasant 2022 for you.
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Post by karl on Dec 31, 2021 18:11:03 GMT -7
Pieter
I must say, you are so very thoughtful and kind to think of others in times of extreme stress in your life. Of this have my self thought a great deal of both you and your father you have lost. My self, may not understand the stress and loss you have and are undergoing at this time. But I must say this, your father in his time did extremely well with his family and his only son that is you.
May the blessings always be at your side for ever more.
Karl
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Post by pieter on Jan 1, 2022 3:45:14 GMT -7
Thank you very much Karl for these comforting words. They are very well appreciated. I have thought about your own loss of your father at an early age and have for some reason friends (both male and female) who lost their father at an early age (when they were 5, 9, 10 or 28 years old). I had the luck and privilage to have had my father so long in my life. I wished his last years (2018-2021) would have been better. He suffered a lot of pain due to a broken back (Vertebral column) after a fall with his little granddaughter he picked up from her box, he had to fall backwards to save her life. I was at my parents home in the hall when it happened and it was like a heavy bomb fell from a bomber. My sister in the kitchen, my mother and me all nearly had a heart attack of schock at that moment. Since then my father was handicapped, and tied to a chair and his rollator. The combination of broken back spines with the pressure of back muscles who pressure back was a torture for him. Morphine medication kept him alife and lowered the pain, but the pain was never gone.But he kept making his daily walks with his rollator in the neighbourhood. Hundreds of meters to 1 or 1.5 kilometer (0,621371 mile). Neighbours and people in the neighbourhood were worried about that very old man that was walking such long walks, but he couldn't be stopped in his routine. And during his walks he made many drawings and gouache water colors. He had an iron will and a strong character and personality. A talented, gifted man. Not an easy man, a very precise man, emanding a lot from his self and others. He was interested in people and read a lot of books, newspapers and magazines. Often historical books and literature (Proze). One of the books both my father and I read was Crime and Punishment from Fyodor Dostoevsky (11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881). My father read Dutch, Flemish, a lot of Polish (translated) authors (Tadeusz Konwicki, Jerzy Andrzejewski, Witold Gombrowicz, Czesław Miłosz's The Captive Mind (Polish: Zniewolony umysł) and Tadeusz Borowski's (12 November 1922 – 3 July 1951) This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Proszę państwa do gazu), Penguin Books, London, 1992. 192 pages, hardcover. ISBN 0-14-018624-7.) Russian (next to Dostoevsky also Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Turgenev) and a lot of British, American, German and French authors in Dutch, English, German and French language. He was a stubborn man, not an easy man, a man with his convictions and a man who was interested in the world, the world news, financial and economical news, sports, culture, art, history and nature. He was a man of birds and trees, a tree man. I am a tree, forest/wood man as well. My father saw trees as living beings with a tree juice stream where we humans have a blood stream. My father was a man of the 20th century who lived 21 years in the 21th century and 72 years in the 20th century. Our fathers live in us and are continued in us, because they were our fathers.
Thank you Karl.
Pieter
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Post by pieter on Jan 1, 2022 4:16:03 GMT -7
One of the things my father also read was the complete works of Winston Churchil (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965), his autobiography.
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Post by pieter on Jan 1, 2022 4:22:16 GMT -7
My father did language courses of Latin and Polish. But Polish was to difficult for him. He tried but the difference between the West Germanic language Dutch and the West Slavic language was to large. And my mother moved to the Netherlands, so she had to learn Dutch. He was interested in Polish history, culture, people, literature and art and ofcourse went to Poland to see my mom in the sixties when she lived and worked in Warsaw and after that in the seventies, eighties and nineties (1998). So my father saw more of Poland than my sister and I ever did. He experienced Poland in four decades. The Polish Peoples Republic and Free Democratic Poland.
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Post by Jaga on Jan 2, 2022 16:34:48 GMT -7
Pieter, thanks for sharing with us the memories of your father, the tree man. I think i remember a bit about this accident that happened. These books your father read are important for Polish and European culture. Polish language is difficult with its conjugations and pronunciations, I am not surprised. I am glad your dad saw a lot of Poland!
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Post by Jaga on Jan 2, 2022 16:38:11 GMT -7
Happy New Year and Szczesliwego Nowego Roku. Thank you all for posting great posts. I love Abba and hearing from you all. We have a white Christmas in Idaho. Sorry for not writing that much recently but we were came back from Texas and had to clean our front and back yard. We also waited for the luggage for two days and did not really know where it was. There are several delays in the states due to weather and covid.
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Post by kaima on Jan 3, 2022 0:13:19 GMT -7
Happy New Year to ALL!
I hope it is a good year, a better year for us all.
Pieter, it is particularly trying time for you with the loss of your father. Thanks for letting us get to know a bit about him; he sounds like an interesting and multi-talented, multi-dimensional man.
Given his experiences and time of history we shared during his life, I include him in what I have come to call "The Cold War Generation", which extends to include several generations by conventional reconing. Beginning with "The Forgotten Generation" that started with awareness of the world immediately after 1945, through the Baby Boomer Generation" and the "Millennial Generation" to the gates of 1989, we all shared lives led during the long Cold War, which was very much a part of our daily lives, with as many stories of how we were affected by the Cold War as there are lives led in so many different fashions. Some of us grew up in the USA with the McCarthy Era affecting out ability to discuss topics and the manner in which they were discussed; the external (to us) communism that affected many others, Jaga and your parents included, and others who were raised with hidden identities or ethnic identities played down in order to blend in with the masses. So in part, there are many people in their 30's to their 80's who are unaware of family background because it was not politically comfortable for parents to pass on the heritage to the children when that heritage could be construed or mis-construed with "the enemy" across the "Iron Curtain".
At best it provided interesting times for us to live in.
May you have many smiles in your sadness, with fine memories of your father.
Kai
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Post by Jaga on Jan 6, 2022 23:19:07 GMT -7
Kai, good to see you back in the forum. I also did not realize how multi-dimensional Pieter's father was until seeing his beautiful art. Referring to my growing up in the communistic Poland I did not experience as much hear as people of my age in other Eastern European countries. I still remember my parents talking freely with their Slovak friend and a professor in 70s in Bratislava. He was talking to them freely (in German mainly) about the communistic history, still we knew and he was telling us that the repressions for intellectuals after Prague Spring were much more cruel than in any time of Polish history in that time. It was in 1977, we went to Slovakia and Bratislava and we were watching Austrian TV, since Vienna is so close to Bratislava and then we learned that Elvis Presley died (August 17, 1977).
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Post by kaima on Jan 7, 2022 16:17:15 GMT -7
Kai, good to see you back in the forum. I also did not realize how multi-dimensional Pieter's father was until seeing his beautiful art. Referring to my growing up in the communistic Poland I did not experience as much hear as people of my age in other Eastern European countries. I still remember my parents talking freely with their Slovak friend and a professor in 70s in Bratislava. He was talking to them freely (in German mainly) about the communistic history, still we knew and he was telling us that the repressions for intellectuals after Prague Spring were much more cruel than in any time of Polish history in that time. It was in 1977, we went to Slovakia and Bratislava and we were watching Austrian TV, since Vienna is so close to Bratislava and then we learned that Elvis Presley died (August 17, 1977). Thinking back to 1968, my first visit was in 1970, and a proud Hungarian friend who stayed in the west when the Hungarian Revolution hit in 1956 convinced me to go to Budapest on my 1970 trip and to stay with his family. It was a great experience and I went on to travel through Czechoslovakia and Prague, a total of 2 weeks behind the Iron Curtain. When I returned to the USA the Hungarian friend and I were visiting and I shocked him when I said that Budapest was much more cheerful and gay than Prague. He was shocked, as he said Hungarians before 1968 used to go to Prague to party, because it was so much happier and more of a party town back then! To finish with your first comment, I didn't realize I was gone from this forum so much! I do check in, but am keeping prtty busy. Kai
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Post by Jaga on Jan 7, 2022 23:29:49 GMT -7
I was in Hungary I think in 1973 and it was a happy place. My first visit abroad was in Slovakia when I was 7 years old. We actually crossed the boarder on feet and since we were in the country site and in the mountains the politics was not there.
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