A hound bounds through the wet grass as I walk the park across from my house. It cuts sharply left, then right like a fleet NFL running back. Seeming to think momentarily of drawing even with its mistress running maybe 30 yards ahead with leash in hand, it instead brakes suddenly, with great force, and sets to turning in tight circles, one, two, three revolutions or more, a veritable dervish. Then it launches into a vertical jump, at the bottom of which it bursts forth into a mad sprint that overtakes its mistress at last.
Onwards it goes, resuming its diagonal cuts once more as they round the bend and go out of sight through the late November afternoon mist.
This happy spectacle played out as I’d been walking along absorbed in thought about my sister Edie, who died the previous evening, right about the time I was finishing up the newly released PBS documentary on Leonardo da Vinci. As the closing credits rolled, I started fiddling with the remote rewind button, trying to snag a few bits of particularly poetic and insightful commentary on Leonardo’s deep veneration for the human body and its microcosmic reflection of the creation at large, in all the majesty he saw in it through all his days.
It felt important to hear and note those comments again, right then, given the knowledge, humming right on the edge of my consciousness these past days, that Edie’s depleted body, its careful chemical balances askew with disease, would soon be breathing its last.
And that’s when the call came from her middle son, and I dropped the remote onto the table.
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“He has a love of the world. Nothing was dull or boring or quotidian to him. It was all a marvel. That’s the blessed state I feel he was sort of in, because the world IS that abundant. It IS that rich.”
That’s theater and opera director/producer Mary Zimmerman, one of multiple smart talking heads who offer rhapsodic descriptions of the singular brilliance that percolated through Leonardo’s life, as exhaustively chronicled in Ken Burns’s two-part documentary.
Others referred to the polymath Leonardo, who couldn’t seem to decide whether to be a painter, scientist, engineer, philosopher, sculptor, anatomist, astronomer, architect or mathematician. So he did them all.
Multiple art historians and culture mavens populate the documentary, speaking of Leonardo in almost god-like terms of veneration. For my money, no compliment could top the 20th century art historian Kenneth Clark’s homage to him as “the most curious man in history.”
His was a curiosity that matched a child’s natural predilection to turn over every rock looking for bugs, to gape at every passing plane and butterfly, and to parrot my two-year-old grandson’s most persistent question about his world: “Waz dat?”
Leonardo never lost that toddler’s sense of wonder. The wonder of that is that he never stopped voraciously following up on his own question. He seemed incapable of resisting turning up every rock that crossed his path, examining it closely, most always drawing it, putting it through experiments to determine its exact function and its connections to other rocks. Because there are always connections—if one looks hard and persistently and openly enough—to all the other rocks one ever encounters.
Nothing “dull or boring or quotidian.” Every upturned rock in every field, every star and cloud and person and muscle and bug and amoeba, “a marvel.”
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Edie was six months in utero when our parents got loaded into a cattle car in Budapest at 11:45 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, 1944. The occupying Germans were on the run as their war effort was coming to ruin, and the invading Russians were not kindly disposed to Hungarians.
Packing a small suitcase with all their earthly belongings, my parents joined a dozen other people hunkered down amidst a small stove in the middle of the car, straw for bedding and no toilet. “We stopped whenever the conductor had to go to the bathroom,” my mother told me many years later.
They would eventually disembark in Weimar, Germany, which was relatively combat-free as the resident Germans anxiously awaited war’s end. Edie was born there in March, 1945, five weeks before Adolf Hitler’s suicide with Eva Braun signaled the definitive beginning of the end for the dreams of German empire.
Life wasn’t easy for anyone in post-war Germany. Over the course of the next five years, my parents were separated for various periods as they endured the rigors of relocation, scratching out a living, my father trying to relaunch his track career, and awaiting (and waiting and waiting…), the possibility of emigration. Several years on, my brother Pete had come into the world, I was on the way, and a marital breakdown saw Edie sent to live with my father while Pete remained with Mom.
It was Christmas Day, 1950, and Edie was three months short of six years old.
Edie forgave but never completely got over the sense of abandonment she felt as the days without her mamika dragged on into weeks and months. Earlier this year, she told me that in her teen years she had asked Mom, “How could you leave me?” The answer was that shuttling three children between two residences in separate German cities in 1951 wasn’t feasible, and the infant and toddler boys would need a mom more than she would.
Ultimately, my parents reconciled in Germany, our emigration lottery spin came up on “United States” rather than the “Ecuador” that was also in play, and the five of us crossed the Atlantic on the U.S.S. Harry Taylor, disembarking at Ellis Island in March, 1952 with not a penny in my parents’ pockets. Three more girls, now my surviving siblings (my brother passed in 2010), were born over the next decade.
Although the reason for sending Edie along with my father was rational enough, it engendered in her not only the intense desire to have a large intact family (four children, grandkids & great-grands galore), but also a not entirely rational but certainly understandable drive to so suffuse the positive Christmas spirit in her home through the rest of her life that it resembled nothing so much as a miniature Santa’s workshop and holiday emporium, every square inch of available wall, counter and tabletop festooned with Christmas items of every imaginable type.
The sheer visual spectacle of it all became one of those charming holiday traditions, the knowing nods, winks and smiles of visiting family members and friends welcoming the utterly harmless, thoroughly engaging obsession it reflected. Edie’s desire to both acknowledge and salve an ancient wound came to represent, one year upon the next, the very healing and joy that Christmas is meant to provide.
***
“God writes straight on crooked lines,” goes the ancient proverb. The crooked lines are our own lives, not one of those lives, for anyone, ever proceeding in a straight line of unbridled joy and contentment, or even behavior we’d be proud to have reflected in our obituaries. We fall, we rise, we tend our bruises, we try to heal.
But that healing most always comes with a choice. We can either crouch and brace ourselves so the injury doesn’t recur, or we can go the route of the young hound, bounding and free, open to all that is.
My sister Edie gathered up all that she was, arms wide as the world she saw in front of her, into one concentrated goal: to become the best, most open-hearted mother—and ultimately, clan matriarch—she could possibly be. It shaped her every life decision and defined her very identity all through her life. Nothing more mattered, but nothing less ever intruded to undermine the heart she nurtured in pursuit of that goal.
One of the key principles of Leonardo’s thought sprung from his intuition, borne from his ceaseless observation of the natural world, that the microcosm of any given system or organism reflects the larger macrocosm of which it is a part. He famously compared the branching of human arteries to river tributaries, one of countless analogies that to him demonstrated the magnificent design of the creation and every creature and phenomenon within it.
It’s not much of a leap from there to a sense that every individual life is bathed in the magnificence of the whole, a magnificence that Leonardo saw so clearly wherever he looked. And that an appreciation of that magnificence beckons us to a larger purpose, each individual’s particular purpose not pre-ordained but instead forged from the depths of genetics, experience, instinct, and the intentions that lie within every person to do what they can, what they feel they must, through the course of their lives.
In that sense, Edie was—and remains—a chip off the old macro block, that block helping her exude all the love that she lived for and made haste to share with all who crossed her path.
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Welcoming three-day-old great-granddaughter River into the world, early September…
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A potpourri of visuals here depicts barely a fraction of the creative output with which Leonardo graced and glorified the world…
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Check out this blog’s public page on Facebook for 1-minute snippets of wisdom and other musings from the world’s great thinkers and artists, accompanied by lovely photography. https://www.facebook.com/andrew.hidas/
Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing.
Elizabeth Haslam, whose photos (except for the books) grace the rotating banner at top of page.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Library books photo by Larry Rose, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
Hound dog by Joel Bradford https://www.flickr.com/photos/guitarcast/
Grandson Kai and Edie with River photos by Andrew Hidas https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewhidas/
Edie, Pete and parents in Germany from Hidas Family archive
Edie bedecked in Christmas regalia by her son at his “Wish Upon a Toy” fundraiser at City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte, California. Instagram: r_russek@instagram.com
What a remarkable tribute to your sister. Thank you for sharing a slice of her life with us. I am very sad for your loss of her.
Wow! This was a tour d’ force entry, my friend. My deepest condolences. There’s no more to say.
Thank you, Claire and David, appreciate it very much.
I dare say, the best article my uncle has ever written!! Thanks Unk!
I echo Claire’s sentiments. You most certainly did the pooch, Leonardo, and Edie proud. I really appreciate how you give all us readers such an intimate feel for your family as you celebrate Edie’s life and the depth of love she shared with all who knew her.
Pops, sending you love and condolences. May your memories of your sister live on. Much love, Mamoo.
“To That Bounding, Swirling Dog in the Park, and Leonardo da Vinci, and My Sister Edie” is one of the more moving blogs you’ve written to date. The struggles your family faced during the last years of the second World War demonstrates the strength of a family to overcome even the most dire of circumstances. Edie’s ability to turn an extremely painful separation into decades as the matriarch of a loving family is a testament to her character. Even Leonardo in all his greatness would have struggled to create a canvas or sculpture that would do her justice. Oh, maybe he could get her smile down. Unfortunately, Edie is the only sibling whom I can’t recall meeting.
As we entire this holiday season with energy of your bounding Durham dog, one can’t help but feel how central family is in making this season the most special of all. Soon our home will look much like Edie’s had for so many Christmases. Strings of colored lights will wrap around the trunks of my front yard’s twin oaks. Claire’s Santa figures will populate every square inch of indoor space. No room is left untouched. Our Christmas tree, though artificial, is adorned with sentimental ornaments (some date back to the 50’s) and red and white poinsettias. Candles guard every window. Wreathes hang on the doors. In this time of such division, it feels good that for a few weeks my neighborhood comes together in a common celebration.
Rick, I thought surely you were over the moon with my political posts, but I suppose I can see how you’d prefer this even to them…Love you, Neph!
Kevin, I’m reminded of that quote often and variously attributed to Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, the great sportswriter Red Smith, et al, true author unknown: ““There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” In cases of homage, it’s a good and comforting kind of bleeding, and I am the better and more gladdened that I got to spend this additional deep and intimate time with Edie, even after her body had left this mortal coil. Thanks for noting it.
Thank you, Mamoo; you & your heart remind me of Edie in more ways than I can count!
Robert, so glad to hear of your holiday decorating madness—my own long-held practice is to do as much as I can for as long as I can on Thanksgiving weekend to get my yard, gutters, & porches set with a suitable glow. And I wait till January 6—the Feast of the Three Wisemen—to finally take it all down. Tradition must be honored and strictly enforced!
I’ve been researching and writing the history of both my mother’s and father’s families recently. Likely due to the upcoming Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays I have been reflecting on the great courage and hardship faced and overcome by my ancestors to make my life experience possible. Along the way from Norway, Denmark, and Sweden as they crossed to the New World elements of Da Vinci’s curiosity and ingenuity surely came into play from them to arrive to parts unknown, to settle, and to ultimately thrive. As I continue to research their lives, I am renewed with a desire to know them better and to draw from them the grit, courage, and love moving forward in my own journey( I will be a first-time grandpa in May!). Your tribute to Edie touched deeply, especially since I was with you on a visit to her earlier this year and privileged to witness your love for one another and her extraordinary effort to recall some of your family’s remarkable history. This post enhances my already-high gratitude for the upcoming holidays with family. Thank you for enriching all of our lives.
Yeah, Jay, what would you pay for a few letters from your ancestors who came to the new world and wrote their family members and friends back home? This where the virtues of pack-ratting/hoarding really shine—where would we be in history, in literature and the other arts, that were informed and inspired by people who saved letters, private diaries, yellowed newspaper clippings, etc. if our ancestors didn’t save them in the long-ago? Edie’s passing has inspired me to pick up a thick old file “labeled “Family History” that has traveled in my file cabinet over the years from one residence to the next. Hoping to soon launch a more concerted effort to lasso all its disparate elements and make something comprehensible out of it. Wish me good luck, fortitude and generous time to keep after it amidst all other shiny baubles competing for attention in this world!
Dear Cuz Andy,
I am so saddened to learn of Edie’s passing. My sincere condolences to our Hidas clan and of course to the Russek family.
I just had a thought as I write this that our dads were once known as the Hidas (Hikisch) boys and then there was you and Peter! I feel in my heart that my sons Adam and Spencer continue to carry the torch. They are both athletes, very close just as our dads were, and just as you and Pete were. I see so many similarities between the 3 generations and I guess I just wanted to tell you that our dads’ spirits live on.
Forgive me as this is more about Edie but I felt compelled to say this. By the way, please disregard my sentence structure, I was always stronger in math!
Love you Cuz,
Kristóf
Glad you brought this up, Chris, hadn’t really put it together before how your two boys resemble the original Lou & Ed show, which Pete & I seemed to carry on as well, even though I didn’t think much about it at the time. I think the old guys would be proud—I know this old guy is!
No worries, your sentence structure is fine, but look at it this way: with your soft spot in language and mine always in math, at least the two of us combined add up to one complete student! Love you back, Cuz!!