Delaying Destiny

Budapest at Night (Wikipedia)

Cliffhanger

Source: dundeetriathlon.com

Whatever future I embrace, this much I

comprehend: Never again need I roam the

slippery, rain-soaked streets of Budapest or

Burlington, Iowa, my face contorted with

angst and with trying to keep water out of

my eyes… in a torment of conscience at war

with yearning… struggling with my destiny

for what I devoutly hoped would be the last

time, since I have run out of synonyms for

angst, not to mention the uncertainty as to

pronunciation: Does angst rhyme with

bankst or bonkst?

Should I listen to my heart and follow my

desire to be a rain-soaked, angst-torn, dime-store

novelist? Should I bow to duty and

pursue a calling as a passionate,

Snake Alley; Burlington, Iowa

anachronistic, hollow-cheeked, myopic

Whig reformer, like my father and his father

before him and his father and his father’s

auntie Pru, and so forth? Or should I

surrender to the primal longing for a

double-chocolate-cherry malt at the DQ and

resolve the question of my destiny in the

night’s chill nonchalance after the wine-and-cheese

affair at the textile museum?

Ì

THE HISTORY OF BUDAPEST began with Aquincum, originally a Celtic settlement that became the Roman capital of Lower Pannonia.

Hungarians arrived in the territory in the 9th century. Their first settlement was pillaged by the Mongols in 1241-42. The re-established town became one of the centers of Renaissance humanist culture in the 15th century.

Following the Battle of Mohács and nearly 150 years of Ottoman rule, development of the region entered a new age of prosperity in the 18th and 19th centuries, and Budapest became a global city after the 1873 unification. It also became the second capital of Austria-Hungary, a great power that dissolved in 1918.

After the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, when Hungary lost 72 percent of its former territory, culturally and economically the country became wholly Budapest-dominated. Budapest was the focal point of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, Operation Panzerfaust in 1944, the Battle of Budapest of 1945, and the Revolution of 1956. —Wikipedia

SNAKE ALLEY, IN BURLINGTON, IOWA, has been called "the Crookedest Street in the World." The physical limitations and steep elevation of Burlington's Heritage Hill inspired the construction of Snake Alley in 1894. It was intended to link the downtown business district and the neighborhood shopping area located on North Sixth Street, of which Snake Alley is a one-block section. Three German immigrants conceived and carried out the idea of a winding hillside street, similar to vineyard paths in France and Germany: Charles Starker, an architect and landscape engineer; William Steyh, the city engineer; and George Kriechbaum, a paving contractor. The street was completed in 1898, but was not originally named Snake Alley, as it was considered part of North Sixth Street; some years later, a resident noted that it reminded him of a snake winding its way down the hill, and the name stuck. —Wikipedia