Regular readers of my blogs know that I live in Černý Vůl, an unassuming hamlet some 15 kilometers or so northwest of Prague. Even longtime residents of Prague have never heard of Černý Vůl, and we live on a street that doesn't even show up on GPS, making it extremely difficult for taxi drivers or ordinary humans to visit our place.
Not much happens in Černý Vůl.
A big truck ran off the road and overturned in the village last winter while trying to negotiate a treacherous curve. And our local pub, which we've only visited once in the year and a half we've lived here, has just reopened after much-needed renovations. (It's one of those places where everyone stared at us when we walked through the door, so we just haven't gone back for more.)
But we like the village. Mostly.
Except in the winter, when acrid coal smoke belching from ancient furnaces clouds the air. And in the early spring, when our (partially dirt) road turns into a muddy, rut-filled mess. And except for the lack of basic services. The village's only grocery store is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, conveniently just while we're at work.
Černý Vůl means Black Bull. A small sign on a cycle path below our house says: "Černý Vůl is a site of rich archaeological finds. A Neolithic ceramic bull's head found here gave the village its name."
A friend of mine, Michal Pupcsik, who lives in Beloky, another small village northwest of Prague, collect old postcards of villages in the neighborhood -- Statenice, Tuchoměřice, Beloky, Středokluky, Lidice, Okoř, Holubice, et al.
He just sent me one of his latest acquisitions -- a very cool postcard of Černý Vůl, date unknown, but I'm guessing from sometime in the 1930s. The infamous backward S-shaped road snaking down through the village would tell you it was Černý Vůl, even if the postcard itself did not. (The postcard identifies Černý Vůl as a "settlement," interestingly.) There's also a photograph of the village pub, before renovations.
I took the other photograph out of my bedroom window on March 10, showing roughly the same view.
As you can see, not much has changed in 80 years or so.
Radek and Hilary in Croatia, on the way to Albania.
I want to call your attention to a fantastic blog, written by my good friends Radek and Hilary over at Motorbike Ventures.
They're the folks who helped me find and buy my own motorcycle here in Prague. They rent motorcycles for those looking for a European adventure, and also do what they did for me -- help locate a suitable motorcycle and then negotiate not only the price, but also the Czech bureaucracy in terms of getting the bike registered.
Radek and Hilary don't just help others to have fun. They also travel themselves throughout Europe on their motorcycles, and Hilary's been writing a very entertaining account of the trip they took to Croatia, Montenegro and Albania last summer.
It's amazing. Great details. Evocative descriptions. And wonderful photographs.
Check it out here. The pictures I've published with this post are from their blog.
If you have any interest in traveling by motorcycle, you won't be disappointed.
I hope Daisy and I can take a few overnight trips on my Honda Shadow 600 this summer, even if it's only within the Czech Republic.
In the meantime, I will continue to dream about riding to Albania. I sure wish I'd had my bike when they were planning that trip!
I always smile when I see this sign in the snack bar where I work.
Apparently, someone got sick after eating a sandwich that they'd left sitting on their desk for six hours or something. I guess the legal department told them to put up this sign.
I went out for a hike the other day. The sun was shining, and I needed to clear my head.
While I was walking through the snow, I came across bush after bush full of rose hips.
Now, it wasn't until a few weeks ago, while we were sledding, that I even knew what rose hips were.
Of course, I'd heard of rose hips -- used in tea, jam, wine, and soup -- but I guess I'd never really come across any, or realized that I'd come across any.
It was our good friend Tanya Kancheva who, between sledding runs, plucked a few rose hips from a bush and told us to try them.
It's pretty amazing how many rose hips there are out in the wilds of Prague.
Almost every other bush seems to be filled with rose hips. Frankly, I don't remember seeing that many rose bushes in the wild when I've been out riding. Weird.
And I guess they stay firmly glued to the bush almost all winter. Even today, the rose bushes are filled with them. You'd think they'd either fall off or get eaten by birds or something.
The rose hips were incredibly sweet. I could definitely taste the possibilities for jam or marmelade. Not sure about the wine, but I wouldn't pass a glass up, that's for sure.
I wonder how hard rose hip wine is to make.
The only problem is that each hip has about 1,500 seeds. The pulp-to-seed ratio is nothing to write home about. It's like a mini-pomegranate.
But I love the fact that you can be out walking in the middle of winter and pick a few rose hips off a bush and experience a little sweetness on your tongue.
Bushes covered with rose hips are everywhere out in the woods. I just don't remember seeing so many roses in nice weather.
We moved out to the country in September 2007, after having lived in the center of Prague, for many reasons -- in order to have a garden and a terrace and place to host a barbecue or two, and to be nearer to Emma's school, the International School of Prague.
The advantages are, indeed, many.
There are a few disadvantages, however.
It's a longer commute to work. It's hard to do anything in central Prague - go to a movie or dinner, for instance -- on the spur of the moment, especially if alcohol is involved. The nearest grocery store is, well, there isn't really a grocery store nearby.
At the top of the list of my minuses, however, is coal smoke.
Many of the houses out here in the boondocks still heat using coal furnaces.
Now I'm no expert, but as far as I can tell, there are two basic types of coal -- black coal and brown coal. And brown coal is much dirtier and stinkier. And that's the type of coal that seems to predominate around here.
I've seen piles of coal outside of houses around here, and they definitely seem to be in two distinct colors.
We live on the crest of a ridge, and during the winter, if the winds are just right, it's not uncommon for thick coal smoke from some of the houses below us to waft upwards and engulf our house. But we don't get it as bad as our neighbor's house, which seems to attract the coal smoke like iron filings adhere to a magnet.
A pile of, I assume, black -- not brown -- coal, outside a home near my house.
Most of the time, the smoke ascends fairly straight into the sky, but you can still see it, and you can definitely smell it -- a stinging, acrid smell that I find unpleasant.
I've heard of some who don't mind the smell -- in fact, they say the odor is tinged with a bit of nostagia for their childhoods -- but not me.
I do like the smell of burning peat when I travel to Ireland. But peat smells sweet to me, and reminds me of waves crashing on the Connemara coast.
Just one more reason to look forward to the first signs of another Prague spring.
Daisy was in the bathroom (or toilet, as they say around these parts) of the Czech Foreigner's Police in the Smichov area of Prague, renewing her residence permit recently, when she saw the sign above, which was hanging above the sinks.
She used her cell-phone camera to take a picture of it.
It's in Ukrainian, and it says something to the effect of:
STRICTLY FORBIDDEN TO USE THE BASIN AS A TOILET!!!!
This sign raises a couple of interesting questions.
1. What do the Czechs have against Ukrainians exactly? I know there are a lot of Ukrainians in Prague, working on construction sites and in hotels as maids, etc.
But still.
And more importantly:
2. How in the world would a woman -- Ukrainian or otherwise -- possibly use a sink as a toilet, even if she wanted to?
I can understand how a guy could do it, but it seems like that would be quite a dangerous, precarious balancing act for a lady.
And can you imagine walking in unexpectedly on someone using the sink in that fashion?
Would you then wash your hands in the sink after going to the bathroom?!
Daisy and me at Burns Night. My luve's like a red, red rose ...
Some hae meat and canna eat, And some wad eat that want it, But we hae meat and we can eat, And sae the Lord be thankit. -- "Selkirk Grace"
And with that old Scottish prayer, so began our first Burns Supper.
In fact, up until last year around this time, Daisy and I didn't even know what a Burns Supper was. Our good friends here in Prague, Stewart and Kathleen Moore, who are originally from Aberdeen, invited us for the first time last year, but we had already booked a trip to Venice and couldn't make it.
We made sure we were in Prague this year.
And so, on the evening of January 24th, Daisy and I attended a Burns Night, sponsored by Prague's Riverside School, in a gorgeous Art Nouveau ballroom at the Restaurant Na Marjance in Prague 6.
Burns Night celebrates the life, loves and verse of the beloved Scottish poet Robert Burns, a national hero in his native land. This year's celebration was a bit special, as it was the 250th anniversary of his birth.
To those of us who hail from the United States, Burns is perhaps best known as the author of the poem "Auld Lang Syne," which was set to music and is traditionally played on New Year's Eve, as the clock strikes midnight.
He also wrote "A Red, Red Rose":
O my luve's like a red, red rose. That's newly sprung in June; O my luve's like a melodie That's sweetly play'd in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in luve am I; And I will love thee still, my Dear, Till a' the seas gang dry.
Till a' the seas gang dry, my Dear, And the rocks melt wi' the sun: I will luve thee still, my Dear, While the sands o' life shall run.
And fare thee weel my only Luve! And fare thee weel a while! And I will come again, my Luve, Tho' it were ten thousand mile!
Thanks to my other good Scottish friend, Kenny Mitchell, I was able to wear a kilt (his) with all the fittings to the Burns Supper. Daisy looked ravishing in a formal evening dress.
In fact, everyone looked fantastic. It's a dress-up affair, with most of the men either wearing kilts or tuxedoes, with the women also dressed to the nines.
Me, Stewart (right) and Kenny, all in our Scottish finest. Kenny's wearing a more formal Scottish outfit, called "trous," which are basically tartan pants.
The evening begins with the Selkirk Grace, and then, accompanied by a bagpiper, a ceremonial plate of haggis is paraded into the hall. See my short video clip below of the Entrance of the Haggis:
After the Entrance of the Haggis, Robert Burns' "Address to a Haggis" is read aloud, as the haggis (a sheep's stomach filled with offal, spices, onion, oatmeal, etc.) is sliced open with dramatic flair.
Here's a taste of the poem's first three stanzas (there are eight in all):
Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face, Great chieftain o' the puddin-race! Aboon them a' ye tak your place, Painch, tripe, or thairm: Weel are ye wordy o' a grace As lang's my arm.
The groaning trencher there ye fill, Your hurdies like a distant hill, Your pin wad help to mend a mill In time o' need, While thro' your pores the dews distil Like amber bead.
His knife see rustic Labour dicht, An' cut you up wi' ready slicht, Trenching your gushing entrails bricht, Like ony ditch; And then, O what a glorious sicht, Warm-reekin, rich!
And here's a translation:
Fair is your honest, cheerful face Great chieftain of the pudding race! Above them all you take your place Stomach, tripe or guts Well are you worthy of a grace As long as my arm
The groaning platter there you fill Your buttocks like a distant hill Your skewer would help to repair a mill In time of need While through your pores the juices emerge Like amber beads
His knife having seen hard labor wipes And cuts you up with great skill Digging into your gushing insides bright Like any ditch And then oh what a glorious sight Warm steaming, rich!
That's real haggis to the right, and vegetarian haggis to the left.
Then we all sat down for a traditional meal of cock-a-leekie soup; haggis (which has such a horrible reputation, but it's really delicious); neeps and tatties (mashed turnips and mashed potatoes); and some Scottish beef stew.
All washed down with liberal amounts of whisky.
Then there were more toasts, such as the Toast to the Lassies, and then the Reply of the Lassies (both of which got quite ribald), and then the tables were cleared away for some traditional Scottish country dancing.
It was a glorious evening.
I'm one-eighth Scot, and wearing the kilt felt completely natural. Kenny showed me how to put it all together, from the flashings on the hose to the ghillie shirt and ghillie shoes, to the sporran -- the original "man bag."
I was even packing a real metal sgian dubh (pronounced, I believe, skee-uhn dew), a sharp little knife that gets tucked into the knee-high hose.
I felt like a million Scottish pounds.
My plate runneth over.
More importantly, Kenny showed me the proper way to sit down in a kilt without displaying my Lock Ness Monster for everyone to see.
I love Scotland. I love my Scottish friends. I love haggis and whisky. And I loved Burns Night.
Thanks, Stewart and Kenny. I can't wait for next year.
Slàinte!
Our wonderful Prague friends, Kathleen and Stewart Moore.
Our other wonderful Prague friends (we're doubly blessed), Tanya Kancheva and Momchil Blagoev, with whom we'll be traveling to their native Bulgaria in April.
Stewart and our friend Mark Baker share a laugh.
Stewart regales our friend Nancy Bishop (Kenny's better half) with some tall tale.
Looks like Stewart and Daisy have something to hide.
Tanya won a bottle of Ballantine's whisky, which she was gracious enough to share with our table.
The memorial at the top of Prague's Wenceslas Square, in front of the National Museum, where Palach committed the ultimate act of self-sacrifice.
On January 16, 1969, a 20-year-old Czech student named Jan Palach (pictured) walked to the top of Prague's Wenceslas Square, emptied a can of gasoline over himself, and set himself on fire.
He died three days later in hospital.
Palach's self-immolation was an act of protest against the complacency of his countrymen in the face of the August 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Others followed his example -- student Jan Zajíc in February of 1969, in the same place, and 39-year-old Evžen Plocek in the Czech city of Jihlava in April.
Acts of self-sacrifice that are difficult to comprehend, but which continue to resonate 40 years later. Their acts of martyrdom were designed to inspire, to motivate, not to maim or kill.
As a colleague of mine, Luke Allnutt, wrote so eloquently in a piece in "The Wall Street Journal" this month, "[Palach's] protest...was true to the original meaning of martyrdom -- a self-sacrifice designed to save others, not to kill them. And so his legacy still endures, remarkable not just for its altruism, but for its spiritual and intellectual significance."
On the 40th anniversary of Palach's self-immolation, many in Prague stopped to lay flowers and light candles at a memorial to Palach and Zajíc at the top of Wenceslas Square.
Emma and I joined some close family friends on Sunday for a little sledding (or sledging, as they say over here).
We joined Momchil Blagoev and his wife, Tanya Kancheva, and their son, Victor, as well as my biking friend Stewart Moore and his wife, Kathleen, and their two sons.
We ended up sledding down a long hill near the village of Únětice, northwest of Prague, near our home.
We had a blast, all of us. We enjoyed hot tea, bacon sandwiches and tomato soup in between runs, thanks to Kathleen and Tanya. The kids got to expend a lot of pent-up energy. And the adults got to act like kids.
I've also added a sledding video that I found on YouTube that made me laugh so hard the first -- and 18th -- time I saw it. Enjoy.
That's Emma taking the lead:
Here's Momchil and Victor:
The kids try to get a "train" going, with mixed results:
Even the moms get in on the action:
And here's that very funny (at least to me) YouTube video I happened to run across:
Emma and Daisy in front of the fire on Christmas eve. Note Emma's note to Santa hanging to the right of the fire.
We had a lovely holiday, just the three of us.
There's something to be said for a quiet Christmas, and for celebrating with a youngster. Emma is 8, believes in Santa Claus, and couldn't have been more excited.
We had a fire in the fireplace, good food and drink, and even shared the holiday spirit with our neighbors out here in Černý Vůl, a hamlet no one has ever heard of, northwest of Prague.
Our cat Zhenya strikes a pose.
On Christmas eve, we took some home-baked chocolate chip and Italian almond cookies to Petr and Jirina Hlavaty, who live on one side of us, and about whom I wrote a few weeks ago in this blog.
They came over on Christmas Day and delivered some of their own homemade Czech Christmas cookies.
Czech Christmas cookies.
Then we delivered more of the same to our other neighbors, whose names we still sadly don't know, more than a year after moving in. But we do say hi to them all the time.
Only the husband was home, cooking away in the kitchen, and he came out, all smiles, and took our cookies, then went inside, grabbed some shot glasses, came back out, went to the trunk of his car, brought out a bottle of what I believe was Stará myslivecká (Old Huntsman), a sort of herbal Czech liqueur or cognac, and we had three shots standing out in the driveway.
Merry Christmas indeed!
Our other cat, Chicho, gets in on the act.
Emma hung her Christmas list from the fireplace mantle for Santa. She asked for a spy kit and a Polly Pocket doll house, among other things. Overnight, Santa drank the milk and ate the cookies that Emma left out for Santa, and it appeared that the reindeer also enjoyed their carrots.
For Christmas dinner, we decided to go for roast beast, as Emma likes to say, thanks to "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas." Or roast beef, ordered from the English butcher in Prague, Chris Robertson. (Last year for Christmas we had an unbelievably delicious ham from Robertson's.)
Unfortunately, when I arrived on Christmas eve to pick it up, there was a slight mixup in my order. (In fact, my order wasn't there. But there was a roast in the display case, albeit about twice as large as the one I'd ordered.
Even though they offered to cut it up to my liking, I decided to take the whole damn thing.
We ended up with a 2.2-kilogram (5-pound) top loin roast for about $80 (1,542 CZK). Not cheap, but Christmas dinner comes once a year.
I'd never cooked a roast before, amazingly enough, and so I consulted both "The Joy of Cooking" and Craig Claiborne's "Kitchen Primer" for some tips.
I'd purchased a meat rack and an instant meat thermometer for the occasion (both ordered from the U.S.; I couldn't find a meat rack in Prague to save my life).
In the end, I was talking to my parents on the telephone and lost track of the time, and I ended up with a medium roast after about three hours in the oven at around 350 degrees F, or 177 C, when I was shooting for medium rare. Oh, well.
It was still delicious (and also made for great leftovers), especially with a little horseradish on the side.
I even made my own gravy from the drippings, which turned out better than any of my previous gravy attempts (again, thanks to "The Joy of Cooking").
Daisy made some fantastic side dishes, including maple-glazed carrots, mashed potatoes with celery root, and an unusual -- and delicious -- celery-fennel salad with freshly grated parmesan and lemon juice dressing.
We ate well. And did so for quite a few days afterward. The leftovers were even better.
It's kinda cool living out here in Cerny Vul, west of Prague, at Christmastime because we can walk from our house to a very nice garden center, called T.R.E.E.S. (believe it or not), buy our Christmas tree, lift it up on my shoulders, and walk it right into our living room.
Feels like an old-fashioned Christmas.
What's not exactly old-fashioned is the fact that they put the tree into a cool little gizmo and wrap it up all neat and tidy in some fine plastic mesh.
I've coveted this painting since I first saw it, and now I am very pleased to say that I own it.
It's titled "Mosor Morning," and it was painted by my good friendStewart Moore, aka Booda.
Stewart hosted an art showing at his house a few weeks ago, and we purchased a couple of works, including "Mosor Morning."
It dates from the summer of 2006, when our two families spent a couple of weeks together in the Adriatic village of Brela, Croatia, about an hour or so south of Split.
Stewart arose before the sun one morning, his easel on his back, and hiked into the hills. He returned four or five hours later, as we were all having breakfast on the terrace, a few splotches of paint on his hands and face and shirt.
And he was carrying this painting in his easel on his back.
I thought it was amazing, and captured the vibrant light of the Croatian coast perfectly.
We've been to Brela five years in a row now, and I'm sure we'll be going back again this summer. It's a magical place, of which we have so many fond memories.
And now I have this painting to remind me every day of those good times. It makes me happy every time I look at it.
Seems laughable now, but I was young and energetic and full of ideas. I wrote short stories and poems and radio plays like I write e-mails today. I hadn't yet learned to criticize my own work so viciously. Now, I find myself frozen in a kind of creative paralysis, afraid of putting any halfway imaginative thought down on paper because before the ink is dry I know I will have concluded that it's crap.
But I digress.
I once had hopes of becoming a filmmaker. I even remember sending off a letter and resume to some B-movie film studio I seem to recall was in North or South Carolina at the time, in the hopes of landing a job. I figured Hollywood was out of the question, but that I had a chance in North Carolina.
I never heard back.
When I was in my mid- to late teens, I, along with a good friend of mine, Tony Bezich, wrote and directed four short films, each about four minutes in length. To say "wrote and directed" is a bit of a stretch, since each of the plots could be summarized in one sentence, and our direction consisted of yelling "Action!" and "Cut!" and nothing more.
We were obsessed with horror stories, and so we made horror films. (Now, with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, they could best be called horrific.)
We made the first film, "Scenes of Horror," in 1977, and cranked out another one each summer for the next three years.
We used an old Kodak Brownie regular 8mm movie camera that belonged to my parents. I still have it.
"Jesse Black: Bounty Hunter"
We had no editing equipment, so each movie was a series of one-take shots. If we screwed up, the movie was screwed up.
We'd wind up the camera, film two minutes of footage, and then we'd have to open the camera and turn the spool of film over so we could shoot for another two minutes. Then we'd take the exposed footage to the Foto Shack in the parking lot of some strip mall. They'd send it away for processing, where someone would cut the film down the middle and splice the ends together to make a four-minute movie.
We'd have to wait a couple of weeks to get the film back. It was excruciating.
The movies were silent, so we'd usually make up some cassette tape of spooky music roughly timed to coincide with crucial parts of the plot. We'd hit the play button on our Radio Shack cassette player as soon as we'd start the projector and hope the timing was OK.
(I've added some music to these YouTube version to try to achieve the same effect.)
We made four films, three of which I was able to salvage by taking them to a camera shop here in Prague and having them transferred to DVD. Amazing that places still do that, really.
The three films are "Madman," "Night Visions," and "Jesse Black: Bounty Hunter," which is more of a surreal action-adventure film than horror, but what the heck.
I've uploaded them onto YouTube, just for fun.
I think "Night Visions" is the most accomplished, if I can use that word. I think it was our last one, which means it most likely dates to the summer of 1980.
It features some crude stop-motion animation and a disappearing and appearing man. The animation was created by duct-taping the camera to a tabletop, pointing it at a bookcase in my room, and then flicking the shutter so that as few frames as possible would be exposed. We'd then rearrange the items on the bookcase ever so subtly, and then expose a few more frames. The end result is, well, not too bad for a first effort.
"Madman" is pretty damn boring, even for a four-minute 8mm amateur movie, but it does contain a cool shot of an ax blade slowly being lifted in front of the lens, while the Madman's victim can be seen in the background. Let me tell you, it wasn't easy holding the camera and activating the shutter with one hand while wielding a full-sized ax in the other.
"Night Visions"
There's also a fairly imaginative shot in "Jesse Black" of the bounty hunter's boots stomping through a forest, shot from above.
That's about as good as it gets here, folks.
Tony and I were living on opposite ends of Pennsylvania while we made these movies -- he in the tiny burg of Slickville, southeast of Pittsburgh, me in Bloomsburg, in the north-central part of the state. We filmed "Jesse Black" in the backwoods of Cuyler, New York, southeast of Syracuse, where my family moved in 1979.
The films have deteriorated markedly over the years, with mold being the primary culprit. But the mold has produced a cool effect on the film that you'd probably have to pay big money for today.
The mold is so bad on "Scenes of Horror" that it's not even worth posting, however.
It's been a lot of fun to see these movies again after all these years. I have no pretenses about their artistic merits. They're awful, but in a fun sort of way.
I hope you get a kick out of them.
And if you know where Tony Bezich is these days, don't keep it a secret. I've lost touch over the years, and reconnecting would make a nice ending to this story.
I've always been interested in architecture. I really enjoy being in a building (the Tate Modern in London, for example) or a house (Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater comes to mind) that makes you feel something.
I enjoy being in a building and letting the building have its way with me, to let it influence how I'm thinking and what I'm thinking.
I might not like them in the end, but I admire buildings that elicit a reaction of any kind.
So many of the buildings and houses built today are so, well, boring. There's no imagination, no effort to instill the structure with a soul or personality. Does it really cost that much more to add a little whimsy to a building, or a detail that is pleasing to the eye?
I live in Prague, so I'm never far from some amazing architecture -- 1,000 years of architecture. In Prague, we have everything from the 14th-century Charles Bridge, to Frank Gehry's so-called Dancing Building, to the Art Nouveau masterwork Obecni Dum, or Municipal House, one of my all-time favorite buildings in the world.
Lately, I've been interested in apartment buildings in Prague. I've noticed that a few the apartment complexes being built around the city have a certain style that I admire. They're not cookie-cutter buildings.
A few months ago, I took some pictures of what I believe are two separate apartment or housing complexes off Evropska, toward Divoka Sarka, that I admire. I think they're cool. They've got clean lines and splashes of color and I really admire them.
I'm not quite sure what style of architecture these buildings would fit into. Post-Modern? Functionalist?
Take a look above and below:
On the flip side, I discovered a couple of houses in a new neighborhood in the village of Roztoky that seem to take the same general idea and totally botch it up. They can only be described as black cubes.
I use to think that they were not quite finished, but now I'm convinced that this is the way they're supposed to look. Why someone would design such an ugly house I do not know. I wonder what it's like to live in them.
An amazing photograph of Petr Hlavaty and Jirina taken sometime in the mid-1940s.
I want to tell you about a man I know who defines the word "gusto."
His name is Petr Hlavaty, and he's my next-door neighbor here in Černý Vůl, the little village I live in, west of Prague.
Mr. Hlavaty doesn't speak any English, and I don't speak any Czech, save for a few pitiful words and phrases, so we've never had a chance to talk, which is a damn shame. Because I've admired Mr. Hlavaty from a distance ever since Daisy and I moved here in September 2007.
Mr. Hlavaty is 84 years old, but he looks -- and more importantly acts -- at least 20 years younger. He's got a wonderful vegetable and flower garden surrounding his house, and I've never seen a man work as hard at it as he does, all year long.
The happy couple today.
He is always outside -- digging or mowing or planting or weeding or pruning or laying paving stones. His energy is breathtaking. If I'm not mistaken, he also built the large house we both are living in -- he on one side, Daisy and I and Emma on the other. His son-in-law, Svatoslav Gosman, told me he dug the massive cellar himself, by himself.
And the results of his labor are something else. He's been kind enough to share some of his bounty with us over the past year -- a massive zucchini last year (that's Emma holding the monster at right), and earlier this year a huge basket of what were the sweetest strawberries I've ever tasted, along with a delicious strawberry cake baked by his wife, Jiřina, herself a marvel at age 83.
The couple recently celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. They were married in September 1948 in Podivin, in south Moravia. They met while Mr. Hlavaty was serving in the Czechoslovak Army. He retired as a colonel. She worked as the assistant to the general manager of the Czechoslovak State Archive until her retirement.
I had the pleasure of being able to congratulate them as they were leaving for an anniversary party at Mr. Hlavaty's son's house in the country near Křivoklát, and I got to see a wonderful framed photo of the two taken in the mid-1940s, shortly before their marriage.
