I pulled out my American passport, handed it to him, and started telling him about the last few years of my life. He listened carefully. After he gave back my passport, he glanced at the clock on the wall.

“Can you wait a few minutes?” he asked. “I have to finish the work I was doing. After that, if you have nothing better to do, I'll buy you lunch next door.”

That next door turned out to be a fancy restaurant in the Hotel Intercontinental.

While we were eating, and then for about another half an hour, the director asked me a lot of questions.

“Guess what,” he said finally, “I am impressed. You do have guts… and I am open to the idea of giving you a chance. Of course, only after a thorough training, and provided you come through fine during the training… Now, what kind of work permit do you have and how long is it valid?”

“I don't have a Swiss work permit… I was hoping…”

The man raised his hand.

“Stop right there,” he said. “We are out of luck. Without a permit I can not employ you. Sorry, that's the law.”

He called the waiter and paid the bill. He started getting up from the table but then he sat down again.

“Sit down for another second,” he said. “I have an idea for you.”

“I'm listening,” I replied.

After a short pause, he continued:

“Marry a Swiss girl… That will get you a permit. Once you have that permit… come back to see me.”

It was almost the end of August. I had been in Switzerland for more than five months and never met anyone I could have considered as a potential mate. Back in my furnished room, thinking it was time to make reservation for a flight to Los Angeles, I sure did not expect what happened just a couple of days later.

I was standing in front of the window of a clothing store in a narrow street somewhere in the center of town looking at some fancy shirts when suddenly I felt a strange sensation. I must have seen a reflection on the window glass that triggered the feeling. Since I was deep in my thoughts wondering how I should really go on with my life, it took a couple of seconds for my mind to react. Once I realized that what I saw on the glass was the image of a pretty girl who walked by behind me, I quickly turned around. There she was, turning her head to look back at me for a split second. When our eyes met, the smile on her face was warm and seducing. My legs began to move immediately. I followed her staying just a few meters behind. Soon she reached a corner and turned. After the second corner she arrived at a bus stop and sat down on a bench. Since she was the only one in that stop, I did not hesitate, I walked up to her.

“Do you mind if I sit next to you?” I asked.

She looked at me with her eyes wide open. The smile was gone from her face but this way she looked even more beautiful. I thought she was at least ten years younger than me but definitely an adult and, oh, definitely very sexy.

“What did you say?” she asked me in German. First I did not understand her because she used her Swiss German dialect. She realized that and switched to high German.

I soon learned that she spoke no English at all. My German was good mainly for reading and writing so having a conversation was a real challenge. Fortunately, she seemed to be interested in me so we managed to have some communication going.

Well, it would take a separate book to write the story of the relationship that ensued. Frankly, I am still not certain whether I would call it a romantic drama or something else but one thing I can say for sure is that it had not been just a simple love story. By the time it was over a few years later, I had evolved into a new person both mentally and emotionally.

As a result of this adventure, eventually I was able to obtain a Swiss work permit. The director at the language school kept his promise. First, he gave me a part time job in the office where I had to answer the phone, handle the cash register when students came to pay their tuition fees, and then take the money to the bank. After about the first couple of weeks, my training started. I received my 'method lessons' from a terrific teacher. After about a month of training, I was ready to enter the classroom to have my first student. Students were mostly adult professionals from banks, the pharmaceutical industry and from other local enterprises. Usually, it was one student only but occasionally I had to teach small groups, two, three or maximum four people at a time. Once again, my diligence in perfecting my knowledge of grammar paid off handsomely. Especially, after I gradually developed my own method of teaching the tenses. There were about fifteen of us language instructors in the English department working as freelancers, and I was more and more in demand by the students. There were weeks when I worked more than 50 lessons. Lessons were 40 minutes long with 5-minute breaks in between.

Disputes are not uncommon in people's lives. When I have conflicts, I try to resolve them in peaceful ways which, of course, is not always easy. Whether or not I think I am right, I don't like persisting friction, and being the escaper type I am, I never hesitate to make abrupt changes in my life. I left Switzerland twice. First, I moved to Karlsruhe, Germany, where I worked teaching English at the Idioma Sprachschule for about a year. Another time I went back to California to continue working in sales. The last time I left Switzerland was in 1989. By then my stormy relationship with the girl who stirred me up and made me keep moving back to Basel was over.

1989 was not a very good year for me. I felt I invested the most important years of my youth into a relationship that did not pay off. I was already forty years old, past the age when one is supposed to establish a family. I realized that at least partially everything was my own fault, and I also knew that even at forty I was still not mature enough to reach the level where I would have liked to exist. Of course, I blamed this mainly on my humble beginning, the family I grew up in, the Hungarian communist system that did not prepare my generation for life in a free society, and the fact that I was far from being perfect for which, of course, I forgave myself.

The success I had in teaching could not make up for my failure in my personal life, and for the first time I felt really desperate when I though about the future. For some time, I felt I had no direction in my life at all. This clearly showed in my return to the States in 1989. I did not feel like moving back to California because I knew nothing more would be waiting for me there than work and loneliness. Just like in Switzerland. I dreaded the holidays. While others were happy to have time off so that they could be with their loved ones, I had to get on the train and go to Monte Carlo to bury myself in the excitement of gambling.

I booked my flight to Miami, Florida. A new challenge might help, I thought.

I arrived at the Miami airport around midnight. I put my luggage into the trunk of my rental car and headed north on 95. I stopped at the first Red Roof Inn and checked into a room. When I woke up in the morning and stepped outside, I felt the Florida sunshine filling me up with new energy. Passing Orlando, I ended up on Highway 75 and I still had no idea of where I was going. When I got to Highway 10 and saw the signs Jacksonville to the East, Tallahassee to the West, I just closed my eyes and let my car decide. When I opened my eyes again, I was in the lane that split off to the left. Not much later I arrived in the capital city. I checked into a Travelodge, had something to eat and bought the local newspaper. Next day I rented half of a house on Falk Drive, close to Lake Jackson. My house mate was a young marine biologist who was often gone for days.

So, now I was in Florida. It felt great for a couple of days, but then I had to start making plans. First of all, I made a down-payment on a somewhat used Ford Festiva, the smallest car I have ever driven, and returned my rented car at the local branch of Enterprise. Second, I made the horrible mistake of stepping inside the office of a brokerage firm, opening an account, and putting most of my money into the stock of a company I chose at random. About a week later, the price of the stock plummeted, I panicked, and cashed out what little I still had left.

After my bad experience with the stock market, I started looking for a job. I found one rather quickly. Perhaps things would have worked out differently if I had taken my time to find work I could have enjoyed. I became a salesman, or rather an order taker, for a frozen meat company that had its plant in Orlando. I had to drive down for a few days of training and then I was ready to call on customers.

My very first appointment was on a Sunday morning. The customer had a Havana address, near the Georgia border. Driving to Havana took me about twenty minutes, but then finding the customer out in the middle of nowhere was another half an hour. There were about five small houses on one side of a dirt road and the second one was where my customer lived. I rang the bell several times but nothing happened. Looking around, I did not see a soul anywhere. I was already leaving the porch, going down the broken wooden steps, when I heard the squeaking of the door. I turned around and saw a young black woman sticking her head out.

“What do you want?” she shouted.

“I called you in your office a couple of days ago. I'm from the meat company.”

“Oh, all right then, don't go away.”

Inside the house she offered me a chair at the kitchen table that was full of unwashed dishes. She made room for my folder at one of the corners so that I could complete the order form. While I was asking her the questions, she just stood there leaning against the sink with one of her breasts hanging out from beneath her bathrobe. I could tell I woke her up. Her hair was shaggy, she was barefoot, and she looked like she was still half asleep.

I almost finished completing the form when a tall, muscular black man emerged from the bedroom. He wore jeans, a pair of slippers and a black leather jacket that left his chest uncovered. His hair was shaggy, too, and he had a cigarette hanging from his mouth. I greeted him with a nod but he did not respond. He just reached into a drawer and pulled out a long knife that looked pretty much like a dagger. He walked to the entrance where he leaned against the wall and started picking under his fingernails with the tip of the knife.

I don't know whether it was the knife in his hand or his unfriendly attitude toward me that made me feel somewhat uneasy. I was glad the woman already had my pen in her hand ready to sign the order. I was hoping to be out of there as quickly as possible.

I heard some kids outside. I glanced out the window and saw a couple of boys checking out my car. The entry door squeaked again and another black man entered the house. The two spoke quietly. I could not hear any of what they said. Finally, I had the signed form in my folder. I said good bye to the woman, stood up, and headed for the door. The guy that had just arrived was half way blocking that door but I tried to show no hesitation approaching him. Since he would not move, I stopped for a moment, looked at both and said:

“Have a pleasant Sunday.”

At the same time a rather strange thought flashed through my mind, something like 'Well, if I never get home, no one would be looking for me anyway.'

The guy moved out of my way without saying anything and I could leave.

I was able to get into my car and drive away without any problem. That afternoon, I was thinking about sending a letter of resignation to the frozen meat company, but then I changed my mind.

I did not stay in Florida too long. Other than having a short relationship with a very kind and generous Hungarian woman, a few years older than me, not much happened that I could call worth remembering. That woman was divorced with a beautiful teenage daughter, owned a very nice new house in a desirable part of the city, and worked hard at maintaining an apartment complex she also owned. I earned very little working for the meat company, and when I went broke, she helped me out. I guess I could have stayed with her but my mind was too scattered. I was still reeling from my affair with the Swiss girl who, I can probably sum it up this way, rejected me.

After making a phone call to the company I had worked for in California, and getting a promise that I would get a good territory, I returned to Ventura.

On my way to the West Coast, driving somewhere in Kansas, I had some scary thoughts. I remember asking myself: “How long can I continue driving to the edge of the cliff before Life gets tired of sending guardian angels to rescue me?” At the same time I tried to console myself as I recalled my earlier realizations regarding my limitations: when you only have lemons, you can only make lemonade.

So, I was a sales rep again for the Canon dealership. Working closer to the office, no longer driving to Simi Valley every day, I had more time left for prospecting and my commission checks reflected that.

I watched the news as often as I could because I was interested in the changes taking place behind the Iron Curtain. And finally it happened! The wall came down and the former Soviet block nations had free elections.

Of course, I was very curious what the collapse of the communist system meant for Hungary, so I took some time off from work and traveled to Budapest. My flight back to the US was on the last day of June in 1991, the day the last Russian soldier left Hungary. During my stay, I had the feeling that the country was, indeed, dismantling the old institutions and opening up to embrace western values. What I had no way of knowing yet at that time was that adapting capitalism as the new model would not prove to be a blessing for the whole society.

Having the positive experience during my visit once again ignited my desire to live in my homeland and as a result I began thinking about resigning from the company. The only thing that kept me on my job for another year was the promotion I received. I was put in charge of the color copier division. Digital technology was evolving fast, and Canon Color Laser Copiers were in the lead. Of course, this meant increasing stress because digitalization forced me to learn continually. Now I had to be able to communicate not only with purchasing agents and office managers but also with IT professionals as they became part of the decision making process. Connecting the copiers to computer networks so that they could also function as printers and scanners required excellent knowledge of software.

It was not enough just to know the new technology well, competition was getting more fierce. Representatives, and not only from other big names like Xerox, Sharp, Panasonic, etc., but also of other Canon dealerships were fighting for the same business.

I was back in Budapest by the end of summer in 1992. I rented an apartment in the fourteenth district and took it easy for a couple of weeks to get rid of my stress. When I saw that language schools were opening up left and right, I decided to start my own. I registered it under the name Boston Studio and then I started designing my poster. I found available classrooms for afternoon and evening classes at a high school in the inner city not far from the famous Vaci Street. I made hundreds of copies of my poster and, armed with plenty of glue, I started displaying them all over Budapest, often doing this work during the night. The poster showed the dates when people could register, and, of course, the address of the high school. I designed a simple but clever method to decide what level a certain student should start at. The idea of putting an ad in a newspaper to recruit English teachers in case I had more students than what I could handle myself turned out to be necessary only for my second trimester.

For the start, I had almost sixty people in six groups and that occupied my days every week from Monday to Saturday. Renting the classroom was very expensive. Quite a few of the students, some of them mothers with kids, were not able to pay the full registration fee in advance. The companies they worked for demanded that they learn English if they wanted to keep their jobs but did not reimburse them. They complained to me that their earnings hardly covered every day necessities and asked if they could pay in installments. Of course, I agreed, and when they could not pay me what they owed I told them not to worry about the money.

I hired two teachers for the second trimester because I had over a hundred students in ten groups. I also needed to rent a second classroom. Now that I had to pay the teachers as well, not receiving the full tuitions from everybody began to hurt: I made hardly any money on the venture. Nevertheless, I continued operation until the end of 1993. It was way too much work for me: running the business, doing the bookkeeping, doing the advertising, and doing most of the teaching as well. In addition, I spent my whole summer writing English Express, my own grammar book, mainly because the ones available in bookstores did not match my method of teaching. (The electronic version of this book is still available on the Internet.)

By January of 1994 it was clear that the second free election would return the socialists to the government, so it was time for me to go back to America.

At this time, however, I did not want to go to California where businesses suffered from a downturn in the economy. I flew to Las Vegas because I heard many people were moving there and business was booming. I rented a car at the airport, checked into the Gold Coast Hotel for 29 dollars a night, and next day I called a Canon copier dealership. I knew the sales manager there, we met years earlier during a week-long training at Canon's Irvine branch, so I was hired immediately. After staying only two nights at the Gold Coast, I moved into a studio apartment that I rented on Viking Road. I returned my rental car after making a down-payment on an almost new Geo Metro and I was back in business.

I guess I do not have to mention how much I felt at home in Vegas. Entertainment anytime I needed it, cheap lunch buffets, plenty of black jack and poker tables. Naturally, my main focus was on my work and if I had the desire to try my luck, I did that only during the evenings or on weekends. Now that gambling was available around the clock, it did not excite me so much anymore.

Well, Las Vegas weather was fine in February and then during the spring months but when summer arrived I began to dislike it. The Canon dealership was owned by a Mormon businessman who had his main branch in Salt Lake City. He visited the Vegas branch in March and told us what a great company we worked for. “You guys have several branches to choose from in case you need a transfer,” he said then, so when the almost unbearably hot weather arrived in July, I called him and asked if he had a position for me in Salt Lake City. “Come anytime,” he said.

My six-month lease on my Las Vegas studio was up at the end of July. I was able to rent a one-bedroom apartment in Murray, a suburb of Salt Lake City, over the Internet. It was ready for me to move in when I arrived on the first day of August. That day it was 104 degrees F in the Utah capital and people were complaining about the heatwave. After the 118 F in Vegas, I found the weather pleasantly cool.

I remember one day some years earlier, thinking about leaving California I was looking at the map of the USA to see if it could give me some ideas of where to move. When I saw the Great Salt Lake and the city nearby, I just smiled and thought: what an awful place that might be out there in the middle of nowhere. As it turned out, it was not awful at all.

Most of my colleagues were Mormons. In the beginning, a couple of them approached me with the idea that I should check out their religion. They gave me a Book of Mormon bible, and invited me to Sunday services. After I told them I grew up in communist Hungary and that I was glad I finally had a free mind and could not possibly join anything, they gave up on me.

Perhaps because many young Mormons spend time in Europe as missionaries, and upon returning they bring with them some European culture, I felt quite at home in Utah. Owners and managers of businesses I came in contact with doing my work were all Mormons but I never felt any discrimination. Most of the representatives working for other dealerships were also Mormons, however, I was sure I never lost any business because I was not one of them.

Salt Lake City is at an elevation of about 4300 feet above sea level and has a rather dry climate, especially in the summer. The surrounding mountains look beautiful with their snow covered peeks under the blue sky. I enjoyed the climate, I enjoyed the scenery, and especially when I drove up to Park City or to Robert Redford's Sundance Mountain Resort on weekends, I really thought I would never want to live anywhere else.

Once again I became active playing in chess tournaments. Most of the Utah tournaments were held on weekends. Occasionally, I flew to Los Angeles and to Las Vegas and a couple of times I competed in the famous World Open in Philadelphia. The only thing missing from my life was the family, and not being a Mormon did not increase my chances of getting married in Utah.

I lived in Salt Lake City for fourteen years, the longest anywhere other than the village I grew up in. As the years went by, I got more and more used to being a bachelor as well as to the idea that we can not get everything from life.

Taking care of myself was like working a second job. Although I usually had lunch in restaurants, often with co-workers or customers, I always prepared breakfast and dinner for myself. I kept my apartment clean, I did the laundry, I did the shopping, I cooked, washed the dishes, so I never got bored. I did not need a TV, instead I spent what little free time I had on the Internet.

I probably would have stayed in Salt Lake much longer if it was not for a pretty woman from Shanghai. I met her through an Internet dating service. During the first couple of years, we maintained our relationship with the help of Skype. Her English was rather poor at first but improved significantly after the many lessons I gave her over the Internet. Finally, we met in person in 2008. We both flew to Singapore where we spent a beautiful week together in a hotel room, close to Sentosa Island.

A year later, she received a fiancee visa and came to stay with me. Well, she did not come to Salt Lake City because, after she told me she was not sure about living in a place where winter is cold, I requested a transfer to the Austin, Texas, branch of our company which by then was owned by Oce (and later by Canon USA).

I rented a nice apartment in Austin. The woman from Shanghai, who was only a few years younger than me, also liked living there. By immigration law, we had three months to decide whether we wanted to make our relationship permanent. Two months of living together made me realize I was not ready to give up my independence. Not getting married meant she had to return to China.

After Canon USA purchased Oce, we had plenty of new technology coming our way. A new era of stress began for me. The economy was declining which meant I had to work harder to meet quotas. At the same time, I had to start learning our new Canon models. I often stayed up late at night studying at the Canon website to be able to pass a whole lot of exams. Without passing all the tests and obtaining the certificates for all the models, I would not have been allowed to market them, and I would have lost my job.

Just in time, I turned sixty-two in 2011 and I was able to take early retirement.

I never invested in real estate, I always rented my apartments. With my limited social security income I could not continue living in the USA. I moved to Hungary where the cost of living is lower. From time to time, I get homesick for my second homeland which is probably normal, after all, I lived all my adult life there. I have some very nice memories, and whatever was not so pleasant or enjoyable has already faded into oblivion.

Close to the age of seventy, there is one more escape I will have to 'perform'. I strongly believe that all the struggle, all the learning, and whatever this earthy existence means, can not just go to waste. Religion and science also teaches that the soul never dies. So, I have reasons to be optimistic. Of course, I am very patient now, this final escape is not something I would want to hasten.

And since I happened to mention religion and science, and our existence in the Universe, I would like to end my story with a short 'poem' I wrote recently:

At some point on the endless scale of time

somewhere in the frozen emptiness

next to a ball of fire

on a spinning sphere of rock

some creatures with their three pounds

of jelly-like substance in their skulls

try to make sense of this incomprehensible

'nonsense'

And by the time the freeze of the Universe extinguishes

the fireball – in an instant compared to infinity -

the creatures disappear from the planet

as if they never existed

Or?

...