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Since my parents retired, I have been embarrassed. Not because I can no longer retire with a clear conscience, but because I realized that I think of people of retirement age as stereotypically as those who write children’s stories: in my little girl’s storybooks, Grandma is still being a very old woman -Red-haired bunny aunt who looks at the yellowed photos with a sigh, is afraid of bites on the shelf, the smell of apple pie fills her kitchen on Sundays, and always has sweets on the porcelain holder.
In comparison, my parents are actively working and look the same as they did ten years ago. Mom watches series and buys home decor ideas from Pinterest, Dad has no way to prune roses in the garden or walk a vizsla in old age.
A dear friend greeted me the other day on his 62nd birthday. I also have an invitation for you, to the new house. He and his wife bought and renovated that old house on Masters Street last summer. Both could refuse for fifteen years, even though they are already grandparents.
A house has been built on our street, the man sixty-four, the woman sixty. I would know why said another woman in town, it doesn’t matter for this little time? No. The retirement years are not about waiting to be mowed with hypertension, cataracts, and leg ulcers. and we no longer buy winter coats.
It’s not just people in their twenties
In the Baja development where I grew up, the ones I met as a young couple in their twenties have retired in recent years. They are not willing to be bored, much less leaf through a photo album, contemplating the good times.
So, for me, it’s not retirees, but Eszti, Aunt Zsuzsa and Uncle Joci. They watched me grow up and I watched them grow old, and I’m happy with that aging. Of course, I don’t know if they are happy.
Somehow I assumed that, in their old age, they would not be like the German tourists on Lake Balaton as children or the Viennese ladies who were bubbling with us on the terrace of the restaurant in the morning. They shone with prosperity, serenity, and indescribable serenity as they lived out their old days.
My retirees at the time of the regime change were in their thirties, whom no one had prepared for democracy, capitalism, Western virtue. They were also called the losers of regime change, and in the sense that their predictable lives had ceased overnight. From capitalism they took the workplace, the forced enterprise, the purchase of municipal housing, privatization, redemption and recycling, and whether or not there were twenty other banks outside of old age, they were forced to learn things like renting, a lot weather. term rent and what is the total loan rate. The generation whose motto became that I understood and accepted the terms of the contract.
They saw the fall of the city’s leadership and they saw emerging young people who, unlike them, did not work for a minute, yet a few years ago they were told, and you too, that I felt as much as I could.
It was they who first had to fear if they were going to have a pension, and they began to balance that self-care on their heads. In his living room, the agent in the purple jacket appeared, who presented that the savings of the Austrian financial institution were miraculously good, after thirty years some of the savings could be taken back. They were the first to go to Reiki at one and two courses, the first to read from Louise L. There is life should be good, they first ordered cosmetics from a catalog and bought the book Health from God’s Pharmacy by Maria Treben.
And they were thrown into the ditch first because the factory closed, they sold the tea, they became old and unusable at first, they were stupid at first because they had no language skills, they had no foreign experience, and they had a western car first. Do you remember the Opel in the form of a drop?
Mom please tell me
Now we are withdrawing them and their older brothers and laughing at them, pointing to them as the Fidesz voter base and asking them to explain why they didn’t like to make a revolution. And we roll our eyes to see what they are and how they should be.
No one had ever asked them what it felt like to be out of work as a strong man in his thirties and forties, to sneak into the workplace, where an employee his daughter’s age taught me that he really needed those language skills. How did you feel when they were offered and did not apply for the job because they wanted a young, beginning person for the position? How long were they left alone when the factory closed and the comrades, the brigade, the usual atmosphere disintegrated? To what extent did they understand what innovation, rationalization, downsizing, outsourcing, employee satisfaction research are? How much did they feel orphaned and betrayed, from whom did they get help and how the hell did they start over, how did they find out what they were starting to do? What does it feel like when the whole world rearranges itself around you and you don’t understand any of it? What were your plans, your dreams, that turned to mist?
Of course, expectations are there for our elders. Understand this beautiful new world. Stay up to date, differentiate the fake news from the real ones. Let them save. Understand that for your retirement, which you think has been discounted in forty years and locked in a nice closet, we, just two million, are working now, right now. That a large percentage of Hungarian loans were pension funds. Don’t hit the second wave lottery on Saturday and don’t buy four hundred thousand bedding sets at a trade show.
We are angry with them because there are many, they get sick. It was as if they could pretend that there was a woman named Ratkó and that the three shifts made them small. For us, it was easy for them, they had a job, an apartment, a long-term loan of 25 years with a monthly payment of 700 guilders. There was a Socpol, and they didn’t take away the most pleasant one either. You could merge, always on the sly, if nothing else, the plot established the garden of hobbies. We just don’t get two things: vision and safety.
We don’t want to do anything like they did, and then we did everything like we did. We also believed in quasi security, apparent freedom, and we financed our lives on credit. It was the result.
So they didn’t even get a chance to spend carefree retirement years, European cruises. The last great adventure of their lives was when they replaced the Skoda 120 with a Nissan. But with that, they no longer took him to the Bulgarian coast, to the camp, as they once did with the little polsk.
If they don’t live like this, it’s strange. However, there are many who know and dare to enjoy life, who have plans, hobbies. Those who embark on a renovation, house construction, who do not share cats and beautiful images on social media, who proclaim love above, and do not have the mind of being a peaceful grandmother who folds the cake firmly by the stove gas to gas and Young people wait for fried meat with fried meat, they welcome the grandchildren all summer and they wait for death.
It is appropriate to know what is appropriate
That is not very good, it does not fit the role we have assigned them. Why can’t you keep calm? For this little time? We know very well what they should be at their age and what is no longer worth it. Become. Go to artificial nails. Pay for the bus trip to the Venice Carnival. Wear leggings with a colorful tunic. Wear colored eyeglass frames. Bepasizni. Hatha practicing yoga. Widow flowers. Build a house, renovate a bathroom. Go to work instead of babysitting. Not realizing that all this is no longer true in his day.
And they would be the ones who deserve a good life. Because they did not lie to us (only) day, night and night, but to them. Because they were the ones who believed that we had to tinker a little more, go the Lenin path, fulfill the next five-year plan, and then their children, we, would be better. Because they couldn’t go on a vacation to the Turkish beach on credit either, and they didn’t build that damn big basement in the early eighties because gas was cheap and they could heat it, but because we, at least, could live there, until we stay in. our own feet. Because they still believed that if they gave us a baccalaureate, a diploma, we wouldn’t have to cry so much. Because after all, they wanted to do it, they nodded to change everything here so that something new could come along, something else that would not paralyze, suffocate, or stay there for a lifetime. Open the doors and walk through this little pool of wind, although who knows where it will blow.
They cannot make sure that it becomes that. But all of us.
It would be nice if all retirees lived, stayed alive there, not us, but they would complain about canceled trips due to the epidemic. If everyone had to go to the dentist, chop up the fried meat on Sunday. If they were consumers of our welfare society. If we waited there at the end of the line, patiently as they took their seats in the theater. If they ate French cream at the pastry shop in the main square on Sunday afternoons. If we were not our enemies, we could turn to them with respect and gratitude for the fall of the walls around us.
They have received so much in recent years that they have not been thanked, let me give you something now! It doesn’t make up for them, but maybe something matters anyway.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that it happened that way. Very sorry.
Source: Getty Images Hungary
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