My husband is the first in our family to have the "badge of belonging" placed on him by our neighbors here on Tusu Street, a dusty country road along 2 rivers just outside of Lupeni. And it only took 11 months to happen, which is about 7 years quicker than it took in the Lupeni Communist block apartment where we lived for 8 years . Upon delivering 2 loaves of bread to our elderly neighbor – she is in her 80’s and is considered “Momarlani”* - he was bullied (if you can call a toothless woman hunched over her branch-cane, already half inebriated in the early evening a bully – you can!) into drinking 2 cups of her homemade plum brandy retrieved from a filthy barrel sitting in the middle of her living room floor with a dirty ladle into a questionable cup. I say bullied because despite every ounce of him that did not want to partake (and Dana is not so culture-shy that he can't usually find a way to politely turn down something...he's gotten out of eating raw pig's ears and lard jello over the years), refusing this time just wasn't possible. So he drank it. And now he belongs. I wonder in what form mine or Briana’s rites of passage will take?Momarlani are the original peasants from this region of western Transylvania. “The Jiu Valley was settled even in Dacian times [around the time of Christ], but before the modern era was a zone of dispersed peasants practicing stock keeping and subsistence agriculture. These people call themselves and are called by others ‘momarlani’, a term derived from Hungarian for ‘those left behind’, as they stayed in the [Jiu] Valley after the post-World War I withdrawal of Austro-Hungarian forces.” (Our friend and anthropologist, David Kideckel)
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