My name is Bond, James Bond..arescu

On November 10, I gave birth to my second son. He is seven days old now, and smiles and laughs in his sleep. I know it is just testing reflexes at this age, but Edward and David enjoy watching him smile. He also tries to grab the tortoises when placed next to him, and made a sound like a ‘ja’ when asked whether he liked them or not.  He showed no interest in chickens, Terrapins or in the dog as of yet, but the children are convinced that this is only because it’s cold and we spend most time indoors. 

A serious James

James is the first child of the family to be born in Lugoj, Romania. Andy says that the has two sons: one born in Pennsylvania and one in Transylvania. James and I were assisted by one of my mother’s former students who leads the hospital here. She and her staff were amazing. The hospital was warm and clean, and they allowed the birth to go like I wanted. I went for as natural as possible without medication, and they respected that. Once I entered the hospital, they put me on the table and started the delivery process. I did not have to fill out forms while in pain. I did that after I gave birth. The baby came sideways, which caused back pain and a slightly slower delivery.  He had a good heart beat all the way through, and we were allowed to come home a day later. More than six years have passed since Edward was born.  I had forgotten how painful it is to have a baby, and how challenging breastfeeding is in the beginning, but James and I are slowly getting over all obstacles. 

Before coming into the world: last few months of pregnancy

I had a safe pregnancy with James. I could travel and work. The lease for my apartment in Zurich ended on June 30. So, before that the furniture and most of our things left for Romania and we sub-leased a furnished two-room apartment (in Oerlikon) from some students.  Then school was over in mid July and my mother, Edward and David (not yet 6 and 9) moved to Romania, while I continued to travel back and forth.

In August I went to the US. I figured it was my last opportunity for work-only travel. I gave seminars, and drove between Cornell and Penn State. I also spent some time working with my collaborator, Prof. Jayashree Balakrishna, in St Louis, and took the bus to NCSA, where I saw Linda Lorenz again, and Cornel and Doina Costescu, their daughter, and grand-daughter. They were all as kind and amazing as I remember them if a little older. Linda and Ed Seidel had been my advisors as an undergraduate. Without her I would have never been able to graduate from UIUC's engineering program in one year and half (out of which I was a full time student for only one semester).  I, of course, also saw Ed Seidel and Gabrielle Allen,  gave a seminar on atomic clocks and started a new project with former collaborators on boson stars. I came back to Zurich for the LISA meeting in the beginning of September, which we were organizing.

 I officially moved to Romania on September 30. I could have kept things simple, and stayed in Timisoara, but instead I started renovating two houses that have not been lived in for the past 16+ years: one in Lugoj and one in Chizatau (a village that is 18 km away). Andy jokes that it only matters that they are both in Transylvania and that the children and I shared them with bats when we first moved in.

With Mihai in the school yard

We first moved to Chizatau. It took some time to get water into the house through pipes that did not leak and the power is still in a partial short-circuit, but it works. It was lovely because the summer was extremely warm and the house is on the Bega river. So, the children played a lot on the river bank and in our huge yard. They found praying mantises (green and brown; the first one landed on Edward’s neck), crickets, and some green bugs that look like thorns.

In Lugoj, we hired a neighbor to help clean the house. My grandparents had had the house painted by artists with hand-made colors. He painted some of the walls in a sloppy white, left some unpainted, and added some plugs with some thicker wire, which he did not connect to the main circuit.

my Zurich farewell dinner 

Edward and David started school in mid-September. As the rains started, it became pointless to drive from Chizatau every morning and afternoon instead of living close enough to walk to school. Also, there was no heating system, and it was cold at night and in the morning. So, we moved to Lugoj while the wood floors were being worked on. They had been damaged years ago when the next-door neighbor had a plumbing problem that had badly leaked over. There was lots of noise and dust. On our first overnight stay in Lugoj, the power blew out due to a severe short circuit. The plumbing was clogged. My mother fixed it by removing the sand and rocks from it by hand. Hot water and a central heating system were non-existent, but we had wood-stoves.

I hired an array of people. Some have been expensive and extremely unreliable (and partly toothless), while others were kind and trustworthy like Traian,  the electrician, and Ioji, who still solves most problems that come up. Edward and David enjoy following them around and asking lots of questions.

By the time I gave birth, we had electricity, heat, water, plumbing, and clean, slightly shinny wood floors. The central heating system has been flaky, and so we light an additional fire now and then and/or supplement electrically. We have finally learned how to clean a furnace, and I now think we’ll manage well enough after it will get cold.

James’ birthday and family history

James almost shares a birthday with my PhD advisor, Prof. Ira Wasserman. We missed by a day. Instead, he has the same birthday as my great-grandmother, Ana. I hope he will grow to be as smart as Ira, and live as long as Ana or more. She entered this world 138 years ago, and lived through two world wars, and the Holocaust period.  Yet my mother says she had been the most cheerful person she had ever known. She lived to 95 and kept her good humor up to her last day, when she assured everyone she felt fine, but asked if somebody could stay up with her at night because she was passing away.

Ana had one of the most beautiful voices in the county. So, when the head of the Romanian church came to visit, they'd asked her to sing for him with a boy, called Aurel Curuti, as the male-lead. She fell hopelessly in-love with him when they were both 18. While he acknowledged both fondness and attraction, Aurel refused to marry her. With the impetuosity of youth, he explained that she was too simple for him, her blood was not blue enough and her family was inferior to his. 

Ana and Teodor at their wedding in 1897.

The next year, in 1897, she married my great-grandfather, Teodor, instead.  He had piercing blue eyes and a breath-taking smile. He was also not musical and poor, but had mind-blowing intelligence and enthusiasm about most things and people around him. In school, he tutored a friend who later became one of Hungary’s ministers.  Yet throughout her life, Ana retained a fondness for Aurel. When her first babies were born (twin daughters), she named one of them Aurora. Unfortunately just like her romance, these babies did not live.

Some 15 years later,  Teodor and Ana moved to Murava (or Semlacul Mare), a remote village in Transylvania that lays close to the Serbian border. By 1918, he openly supported Transylvania’s union with Romania, and this turned him into a wanted man. When the authorities came to arrest him, he hid into a secret loft over the kitchen. So, they arrested Ana instead. Their youngest daughter, Octavia, remembered how she ran after the soldiers that were taking her mother away. One pointed a gun at her. She was four years old. She grew scared and stumbled into the mud. The village women told her that if she had cried louder, and begged more, maybe they would not have arrested her mother. It was her first time failing to stop unreasonable events. 

In prison, Ana was not physically tortured, but to persuade her to give her husband's hiding place away they started killing a person she knew in front of her every day. She would retell the dialogue:

Officer: “Tell us where he is!”

Ana: “How should I know? He never tells me where he goes. I am a simple woman.”

Then they brought in and shot Almajan, and his blood soon started flowing at my feet.

Back in Murava, one of her sons came home in vacation, and found his mother gone. His four year old sister was in the attic of a neighbor with her hair full of hay and feathers. She told him what happened. He immediately called his uncle Adrian, an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army who had studied in Paris with Charles de Gaulle. Adrian demanded Ana’s immediate release or else he'd come with his battalion of soldiers and demand justification for the arrest of an innocent woman from an army that should have a moral code above this. They took her home the next day in a beautiful carriage and apologized for her arrest and any inconvenience caused. Her release was more efficient than her arrest had been at convincing Teodor to surrender. He did not want other people to suffer because of his beliefs or choices.

Teodor and his children in 1922

While Transylvania's union with Romania happened soon after, Teodor’s guilty verdict did not change. For two years after he surrendered, he was imprisoned on a ship. There he developed tuberculosis. He returned home ill. Under treatment he lived for another 8 years. He used to say he wished to live to see his youngest child, Octavia, in highschool. He died in 1928 when Octavia turned 14.

Ana and Teodor on the livingroom wall

 When Ana and her now grown children returned to the Lugoj/Caransebes area, they met the next generation of Curuti. One of them offered to marry Ana’s daughter, Octavia. She refused. Octavia did not like the idea of being married to somebody called “Curuti” (the name translates to small butt; and people referred to his musical performances as “curu-ti canta” or your butt is singing).  

my pipes in the basement

When I returned to Romania this year, I was 8 months pregnant with James. In Lugoj, I moved into the house where Ana had spent the last part of her life. It had been my grandparents home after their retirement, and Ana was living with them. Out of the array of people I hired, the plumber turned out to be a Curuti. Interestingly enough, he inherited the musical talent of his ancestors and offered to sing at James’ baptism. I do not believe Ana's story was passed on to him. He did do the plumbing and the water pipes for my second bathroom. The cold water pipe is bow-shaped and tied with a wire, and the warm water pipe leaked. The latter was installed by a friend he recommended.

I am not having a baptism for James and I am not paying for musicians. I consider such events come with too many people and viruses for a small baby.  I would, however, like to have a functional second bathroom soon, and will try to make this happen.

I do worry over the future with Brexit and the US election results. I hope my children will be safe, and not have to live through the kind of experiences that Ana and her children had.

Rewarding talent and competence more than aggression?

The main message my friends (mostly male) and I get after applying for jobs is that we were not aggressive enough in presenting our achievements. But is this the most desirable quality? It seems to be rewarded across all fields ranging from politicians to professors. If you look at the US elections you get a prime example of the system of values that permeates our society.

As a physicist I often read sexual harassment stories that made it to the news and sometimes hear about those that did not get that far. Is such behavior the fault of our selection process more than of anything else? Do we take other qualities like talent at face value only when they are coupled with an aggressive presenter? Do we often become blind to the lack of content when the presenter is aggressive enough?

Meg Ury has a well written article in Scientific American on how to end sexual harassment in astronomy. She proposes speaking up, taking allegations seriously and dealing with them. I agree that a transparent process that deals with such allegations is necessary in all companies and universities, but I don't think that's enough. I also believe that our selection process has to change its bias.

This is an email I received from one of my friends with a Cornell PhD, who is talented as well as empathic and kind:  "All is well at my end. We recently had a baby girl. She is about 7 and a half months old now.  I have a 3 year research grant from the government, but after that things are again a bit up in the air. The money for this 3 year cycle has also not been sanctioned - so all my work currently is unpaid!  Pay or no pay, academia is pretty ruthless - so one has to keep working." She goes on explaining that she likes the work she does, but that she would still like to be paid. I see the grant application process in science as another form of harassment rather than as a way to promote talent. It's just too complicated to be functional as are many other rules. 

I am not a physicist or astronomer, so why should I care? 

Problems in the world are related. Our indifference to global warming, to the mistreatment of animals and of the humans who manufacture the goods we use is related to how we select our leaders, and to how we educate our children. 

Without the make-up?

 

Instead of selecting competent leaders, we obey CIA's manuals on how to sabotage the productivity of our companies and universities almost perfectly. We make rules that contradict each other and are too complicated to read in one sitting. We design official channels that cannot be followed without serious threats to one's sanity. We select leaders who are aggressive, but too old and too connected to oil money to change a heavily dysfunctional system for the better because we've heard of them before and because they have been taught to take advantage of our hatred in presenting themselves.

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the images in this post. They are randomly picked from the web.

Moving again: my life as a scientist

Me temporarily parked in a handicapped spot at Cornell

Most positions are temporary, but in science positions come in a particular class of finite. There are so few permanent positions and each selection process is so biased that the probability of getting one is almost non-existent. Yet most young scientists hope that they are special enough to make it. This keeps them going together with the love for what they do and a certain lack of flexibility, which comes from the fear of change.

There are some benefits from traveling, but what comes to mind now as I think about moving again are the questions and the stares I get from people on the street.

I have a lousy German accent, and had a strong accent in English when I was first in the US. So, I have never been considered to belong to any of the places I lived in. The typical questions I still get are: where am I  originally from? how many siblings do I have? how (on Earth) did I succeed with my (inferior) background to work in a university?

In light of our fear of migrants from Syria, it makes sense to answer these questions in writing.

0.1 Is my background really inferior? Mircea Zaganescu guided my brother through his first attempts of understanding relativity when he was in his teens. The physics wing of the university in Timisoara is now named after him. There is also a physics contest that bears his name. The primary school nr. 6 is named after Anisoara Odeanu, a writer who lived across the street. The street I was walking to school on and the national theater are named after the brother of a family friend, Olga Grozavescu. She was the first woman from Romania to receive a PhD abroad, which even then had to be recognized by the university in Bucharest. She had to take an exam with Nicolae Iorga (Romania's greatest historian), who asked Olga: "Tell me about your brother".  Traian Grozavescu had been so talented and handsome that soldiers stopped fighting when they heard him sing. So, he would sing when the injured had to be carried out. When his body was taken home from Vienna there were more people on the streets to mourn his death than there had been for the prince whose murder started the first world war. While these are all fairly minor historical figures, I grew up with their stories and they played some role in shaping my life. Mihai jokes that Lugoj is small enough that they may add a memorial plaque for us some day.

Grandpa and Grandma

0.2  What about my family? When I think of my time in Romania, I think of family and friends.  My grandmother was the best Mathematics teacher I have ever known. She had been my ideal for strength, stability and common sense. My mother is an outstanding doctor. She represented intelligence, strength and beauty. Tusa Tavi (my great-aunt) was gentleness and propriety. She had a degree in Mathematics, too. Grandpa was persistent. He had been a silvic engineer and had the courage to shape and save lives. My father was a doctor like my mother. He has a more tumultuous personality. Tanti Keti (Ecaterina Zaganescu) and Tanti Mia (Maria Sacalus) matched my mother in both kindness and beauty. Mihai and I thrived on their stories and on their cookies.

Back to the original questions:

1. Where am I  originally from?
I am from Romania. It's a country in the middle of Europe - next to the Black Sea. If pressed for details I would add that the story of Dracula was inspired by a Romanian prince, and that we have also had a good football team, outstanding gymnastics and more recently very talented tennis players.

2. How many siblings do I have?

I only have one brother. His name is Mihai and he is a Caltech PhD.

3. How did I succeed with my background?
At first, through tests and exams, and later through more work and more exams. I took the SATs and Mathematics GRE when I was 18, and scored well. I was accepted to a number of universities in the US including the University of Rochester, Reed College, and Washington College, but decided to go to Illinois because of Ed Seidel, who was visiting NCSA for 3 weeks. He and Paul Saylor helped me enroll full time in Parkland College, and part time in the University of Illinois. Ed decided to complicate his vacation with me because my brother had told him "Ed, if you think I am good, my sister is even better". With more help from Galina Wind, Linda Lorenz, Mats Selen, Gary Gladding and others, I obtained a teaching assistantship. It came with a tuition waiver and the stipulation that I graduate in a year.  With help from Mark Williams and Linda Lorenz,  who arranged exams for me and advised on which courses I should take to make the fastest exit, I graduated from the University of Illinois with a major in Physics, and a double minor in Mathematics and Computer Science. While in Champaign-Urbana, Doina Costescu and her family made me feel at home, and Greg Daues and Jayashree Balakrishna were the best collaborators a person could hope for. I then went on to pursue a Cornell PhD. I took my last exam and obtained my doctorate degree at 25. I still work long hours, and hope that the world (and the physics community) finds my work interesting.

Mihai and I were almost always surrounded by outstanding people.  But most of the people we knew when we were children are now dead. So, did they matter? what did I learn from them when I was growing up?

When things get bad and I lose faith, I think of them and of their stories. They believed in me and trusted me, and this gives me strength. I learned to ask questions, and trust my instinct.  They loved me unconditionally, yet taught me to be humble. They tried to always give their best, and ask for nothing or as little as possible in return. They also used to say that it's OK to turn when there is no way forward, and it's OK to fail, and it's OK to quit. When I fail, I think of them. After Tanti Keti's parents parents died when she was 14, she moved in with her aunt.   Then the house where her aunt lived was bombed, and Keti was left alone in a trench in a night-gown. She decided to join the war as a nurse to search for her twin brothers. Whenever I'd get hurt, my aunt would ask her (or Tanti Mia) to come. When she would hear "there is blood", she imagined waves of it reaching the door and my injuries were always minor by comparison. She was not able to help her brothers live through the war, but she moved on and continued to love and help people throughout her life. My troubles always seem so little relative to what they all went through.

 Yet, I often feel alone. All my colleagues and friends are busy. There are no friends to visit with my children. They won't have the kind of guidance I had, and I feel that I have failed in some fundamental way - I don't have a network of people who are close enough for them to meet and learn from.

Moral: Avoid drawing conclusions about people you don't know just because they come from a certain part of the world.

When a man is lonely, all he needs is a chicken ...

It was close to midnight. I was trying to persuade Edward to sleep by telling him that all the birds (including the chickens) have been asleep since sunset. We walk outside to check that everything is quiet, and suddenly see a chicken walking under the street lights. Edward was eating an apple, and excitedly shared it with the chicken who had trouble falling asleep just like him.

Edward and the black and white hen

Edward: "When a man is lonely, all he needs is a chicken. Then he has a small friend." I pointed out that I was also there. So, he pragmatically agreed that he can cuddle with me, but not with the chicken, and concluded that I was needed as well. He then accepted to get in bed, and he was soon asleep.

The next morning he was passing by a sleepy-looking chicken and feelingly said "Frumoaso ... poate esti in ocluzie" ("Beautiful one, perhaps you are in a state of intestinal occlusion"). The statement is not so unreasonable as it might seem. If chickens are not treated for parasites regularly, the parasites block the intestinal tract and the animal dies. No chickens died in the two weeks we were there.

Edward really liked the black and white hen (pic above) because he thought she looked just like his father - I personally did not see the similarly, but I suppose it's a matter of imagination. I cannot imagine how either Andy or I would look as chickens, but Edward thinks he can. His favorite hen was Codchi. She was of a reddish color and had a really long claw nail. She had been rehabilitated in our garden after being sold out from an egg farm because she was no longer producing enough eggs. She was there in our February visit, but did not make it till May.

Codchi, Edward and David

In addition to chickens our next door neighbor also had two puppies. We borrowed one for a day, and the children named her Siri. We do have a dog there with a reddish looking fur. Edward thought him very fox-like. He referred to him as his "Barking, walking, personal flea bag" and to himself as the "Walking, talking flea bag". We did use some solution against the flee, but the dog has such a thick fur that I am not sure it accomplished much.

Piki and Kiki & the Romanian flag

We were in Romania in February and May. Each time we stayed two weeks. These are pictures from that period.

With the tortoises

Edward will be six in August. For his birthday he wants to get two chickens, two ducks,  two pigeons, and a goat. His dream is to train them so that  they can accompany him everywhere. He also wants two terrapins, but for that we would need a pond-like aquarium - not that any of the other animals would be easy to take care of. David was nine in February. He is more interested in drones and other forms of electronics.

We already have two small tortoises. The tortoises are named Kiki and Piki.