A Remembrance from his Youth

To Ring the Bell Backward

Libby and Gabor, Philadelphia, ca. 1969

It was the summer of 1969. I was 19, subleasing an apartment in Philadelphia at the corner of 44th and Spruce just for the summer. As I headed back from the neighborhood laundromat late one afternoon, my arms loaded with freshly washed, folded towels, instead of continuing past me on the sidewalk, an approaching figure abruptly stopped just before me. “What beautiful colors,” the tall man exclaimed, glancing down at my stack of bold oranges and golds. Then, with penetrating eyes and a reassuring smile, he looked up and introduced himself: “My name is Gabor,” he said.

We spent the rest of that evening together. We walked for blocks, talking as the sun went down and as the sky darkened. He insisted on carrying my towels, shifting them easily to his outside arm. He told me he was from Hungary, that as a teenager he had fled during the Hungarian Revolution. He seemed less interested, though, in talking about himself than in taking notice of the sites around us, remarking especially on the shifting patterns of light as the elongated shadows stretched across the cityscape and the evening sky darkened. When almost no natural light remained, he said he wanted to show me a space inside a building at the university, a space that was very beautiful. We climbed the dark stairwell. He had a key to a locked room, a large studio with windows that showcased part of the sky and looked out over part of the campus and beyond.

Gabor lived then in an upstairs rented room in an older home that had been made into apartments. The shared bathroom was down the hall. Newly returned from a trip abroad, he had a suitcase that held bottles of nuts, seeds, and raisins—safe food, he said, for traveling abroad. He grilled a few cubes of meat and vegetables for us on a little 4-inch square hibachi, carefully placed on a plank extended out the raised window and then held level by the weight of the lowered window sash. Once during that last part of the summer he suggested we dine at a very elegant restaurant, one much more expensive than I knew he could afford. There, he ordered only water and soup for us both; our experience and the beauty of the place were to be savored. We walked outside some evenings, wandering even as far as the riverbank. 

Four weeks later, I left the city to return to North Carolina, where I was beginning my second year as a philosophy major at my Quaker college and where I later attended UNC-Chapel Hill as a graduate student in English.  Retired now, at the end of a long career as a college professor, I think of that very striking man I once loved and recognize the same expansive thinker and deep soul I met so many years ago. In The Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot says, “The end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And to know the place for the first time.” When I read the other narratives here and learned something of Gabor’s life in his later years—and of the accident that changed the course and hastened the end of his life—it seemed only right to balance these later snapshots with a portrait of a much younger man just as truly remarkable.

Libby Broadwell