Each and every year it feels like we get a fresh start and at the beginning of the 12-month calendar. It is easy to be bogged down in trying to be and do better. We use the past year as an example. Trying harder is not a bad thing but it can be well, hard. Sometimes when I try to get things in life and club together, I reflect on what has worked and what has failed in the past. Inevitably, I realize that things seem to go the most smoothly when I have time, and inspiration, to write articles, editorials, and entertainment reviews about everything and anything we do.
There is the age-old complaint many have of “writer’s block,” which more often than not, for me, is really just an excuse. The truth of it all is really about discipline and committing to write down the things that I have already listed above. We German Hungarians have always had a resume of available records that we scribble down, add to, every few years revise, and reprint often. What I forget, only to be reminded by my mother and grandmother, is that these things we write and print in the Monthly Progress are the records that we use in those epic histories that make up those “resumes.”
When I got married last year, my father urged us to do everything well so that the story can be written well in the end. When it comes to the German Hungarians as a club and a family, we must ensure that the story be not only written well in the end but that we continue to live as a club and we continue to record what we do. There will be a time when those of us that are here now will be gone and a new generation of German Hungarians will be bearing the torch. As they move forward, they will have our records, our writings, and our story to use as an example. They will stand on our shoulders and they will learn from our successes as well as our mistakes.
So, we will keep doing, and we will keep trying, and we will keep writing about it. You know the line, and recording what we do is a tradition as well.
Michael N. Fricker
