Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

Catherine Hoffman

BROKEN HERO: LITTLE FLUFF A TRAVEL MEMOIR

May 20. 2015

Sopron, Hungary. Lövér Hotel. What luck! A trump from fate! This return to my birth zone of Hungary, the anvil on which I was struck! Then to have wangled just this leaf-embowered room of the hotel on the forest’s edge. The fluke of it! That I can afford it at all in my life as a ramble-around vagabond, which, yet again, turns out to be the Fortuna Bella of my existence. Vagabonding is how all I see makes sense. Out on the roam, I don’t have to fight my vanity at a life-work done under inspiration having gone to waste.

Though, of course, nothing wastes in the Cosmos, Schatzi!

Only ego.

May 21.

So, out the window, I now see, I must have come for this, the arms-open oak tree waiting golden outside the window of this 3rd floor room. It stands aureate, a grand gold a-glimmer and mute, a botanic quirk. Can transcendence shine through a swish of leaves? It did for the Druids in their oaken groves. Those Celts were here in Sopron too, and this tree tells ... life doesn’t have to be successful, requited, or even understood, for it to be happy: that song The Fool on the Hill says it all. Still this afternoon. 2015. So I write now, down to the end of it, sitting cushy on one of the couches of the Lövér lobby, plumped here by a life-long affliction of wanderlust. It was the magnet to which I’ve been zapped as to lust, just to go, go-a-roving, sally forth. Wandering was my gravity pull to Reality – but it wasn’t to hog it, have clout with it, prevail, or win. What I wanted from that gorgeous, May 21

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