stamp 202605092050
Recently (as of May 2026) I participated in a first aid course, part of getting my first driver’s licence as a 40 year old woman, together with mostly 16-18 years old baby-faced youth.
I felt really old, when the teacher asked if any of us remembers the infamous Red Mud Disaster at Devecser. I looked around, all of them were shaking their heads, no clue. And I thought… gosh, I was a working woman back then.
We were collecting donations for the mother of one co-worker whose house was strongly damaged. (She survived camping in the attic.) I was talking to the chief postal officer on the phone, and I remember she was livid, because her postal workers were continuously delivering mail after the town was devastated by the toxic mud flood, and we in the back office “made their job harder”, because we couldn’t get our rigid digital systems to cooperate to quickly reroute parcels, etc.
Meanwhile some of my classmates probably weren’t even born back then, and the rest were probably toddlers.
I felt my age quite heavily.
Related
- Fascinating tho that we came to the same life event (getting our first driver’s licence) at such different ages.
- Most of them probably could be my children.
- But since I’m a childfree woman (childless by choice), I don’t have so firm of a grasp on who could or couldn’t be my child. Not like “he is the age of my child”, etc.
- We measure time by tying it to events - life events, world events. We lump memories together to get a better grasp of time.
- On the importance of stories: 5b1-stories-are-so-essential-that-without-it-we-wouldn-t-even-be-human-harari-says
- I remember my dad and mom sharing a story, when my dad arrived home pale and upset. My mom asked what happened. My dad recounted that on his way home he checked on a young woman, noting that she’s very attractive - and then the girl smiled at him and greeted him with the formal “csókolom”, reserved for people of one’s parents’ age or older. My dad, father of toddler girls back then, wasn’t quite ready to see himself as a man of respectable age, he still saw himself as a young buck.
- My aunt worked at the military compound in Sopron, and she used to say with a seemingly serious disbelief: “I can’t believe it, every year, the boys they recuit are always younger and younger!” The mandatory recruitment age was of course always the same, but she refused to acknowledge that she got older and older every year.
- For more family stories, start jumping from here: 3f1a1-growing-up-behind-the-iron-curtain-created-a-gated-community-and-fond-memories-for-my-dad
- The Ajka-Kolontár-Devecser Red Mud Disaster happened in October 2010, in the neighbouring county to mine. The waste reservoir of the Alumina Plant in Ajka was neglected and its dam collapsed. The highly alkaline red mud flooded the village Kolontár and then the town Devecser. There were 10 confirmed casualties and 150 injured. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajka_alumina_plant_accident