There is a custom among Romanians where when a child is born a number of objects is set before him, like a pencil, book, or mirror that represent the child’s natural inclination. Whatever object the child touches first is an indicator of what he will grow up to be. People are relegated to categories, of course, like the learned man, or the popular man, or the vain man, so as the child contemplates the objects before him, little does he know that someone is prepared to judge him right there, on the spot. So the whole custom has more to do with the people staging the event than the actual choice the child makes. The parents want the kid to pick the book, not the mirror; sometimes sophisticated assortments are presented so as to insure something favorable about the child’s destiny—anything but that he should choose a mirror, or a comb, or a button. And if he does pick the mirror or the comb, a brooding grandmother is nearby to tempt the child with a book or a pencil so that she can bask in the knowledge that the grandchild will be a learned man who reads and writes, not a dandy who fawns over his own reflection. Little wonder that the custom has fallen out of favor on account of the disastrous consequences of the poor child opting to cram a mirror in his drooling little mouth rather than a stiff bound book. The worst thing is if the child chooses nothing but gnaws cheerfully on his own tiny fist. This draws patronizing sighs of consolation that might as well say something like, oh, a shiftless lazy fellow, or a boxer. Sometimes the array of objects is clearly stacked—a wallet of soft pliable leather to signify wealth (always good), or a religious icon or cross to suggest virtue, (if not priesthood). Add to this a pen which, as a veritable weapon most children are given to seize upon, and you are assured a writer. A spoon might be a chef, and a ring, a jeweler, perhaps—you get the idea. Naturally the trick is to make each choice attractive. Anyway, no one ever says, years later—see? I knew he would grow up to be a barber when he picked up that comb. Yet everyone cherishes a good barber.

Soarta is the Romanian word for fate. It is invoked in popular sayings like cum ti-e scris, in fruntea ti-e pus, which translates as "as it is written, so is it laid upon your forehead". But it’s more of a lament than a proper explanation, or true superstition. We also have this mystical old woman called an ursitoare, who circles around the house of a newborn babe and prophesies what life has in store for him. One example is the prognostication where a couple is told their son will drown on his wedding day. So when the young man’s wedding day approaches, great pains are taken to insure a drowning cannot occur; the well is secured, the path to the pond is blocked off, the troughs for animals are covered, and yet, the young man gets drunk, stumbles out in the yard and falls face down in a puddle from a rain shower the night before. Just imagine. He drowns in two inches of water and the whole village says, See? The ursitoare was right.

Romanians remain an obscure culture to the west though they derive from ancient Thracian or Dacian tribes, depending upon which historical source you consult. The Romans called them Dacians, the Greeks, Thracians, but they were of the same ubiquitous and disunified tribe. Herodotus, the father of history, is the first to record them. He said that were they capable of unity, they would be a formidable force, numbering greater than the Indians. It took the Emperor Trajan two wars to conquer them long enough to impose the Latin language and Roman seed, but even the Romans eventually withdrew from what is present day Romania, and the vestiges of Rome and Thrace were left to their own determination, influenced perhaps by the industrious and marauding Celts. Noteworthy, nonetheless, is the fact that Romanians were among the first cultures Christianized in the first century, and in possession of their Orthodox religion and Romance language for over two thousand years, this, despite being surrounded by Ottoman Turks, Uniate Hungarians, and Slavs.

Today we have three major claims to fame; the first being Bram Stoker’s Dracula, loosely (and erroneously) based on the historical Wallachian Prince Vlad Tepes, who fought against the Turks in the 15^th century, thus remains something of a hero to Romanians, if peculiar or controversial in some areas, like the whole impalement thing. And the second is Nadia Comaneci ,who was the first gymnast ever to achieve a perfect 10 in the Olympics. The third—well, there isn’t really a third that counts, though it made the cover of Time magazine in December of 1989, when a Romanian revolution culminated in the summary execution of infamous tyrant, Nicolae Ceausescu and his shrew of a wife, Elena, on Christmas Day. No one knew who he was before the Revolution, nobody cared. Except for a couple of documentaries and news features on abused and displaced orphans that were the product of an anti-abortion-anti-contraceptive agenda by Ceausescu, and a movie starring Anne Margaret about the horrors of adopting a discarded child, he would have been just as quickly forgotten. It seems he had this insane idea to populate the country so he would have more subjects to oppress, therefore, people were supposed to make babies, never mind that they couldn’t feed them, or clothe them, or provide adequate heat and shelter for them. So they simply abandoned them to state-run facilities that were little more than concrete rooms filled with naked, filthy, disabled or ill souls languishing in their own excrement. If anyone knows anything about Romanians, it is usually confined to this list.

But the list could be longer. For instance, the first electric public lights in Europe were turned on in the city of Timisoara, in the Banat region of Romania. Honest. Generally, though, whenever a Romanian admires a celebrity, or an invention, they are prone to say, "you know, so and so is Romanian" or "the Romanians invented that a long time ago." For instance, Petrache Poenaru invented the fountain pen and Henri Coanda designed early jet engines. I have to wonder, though, about the timing of Anastase Dragomir’s invention of the ejection seat for pilots not long after the Romanians starting designing jet engines, particularly when sticking them in dirigibles. I know, because I am one of them. I admit it, I love telling people that Dustin Hoffman’s grandmother was Romanian, or that Edward G. Robinson was a Romanian Jew. And Cold Mountain was filmed in Romania. But it never really commands any genuine surprise or delight, because somehow, it’s not enough. Take Francis Ford Coppola, for instance, who is returning to directing after a ten-year lapse with an adaptation of Mircea Eliade’s Youth without Youth. It’s all about Coppola, forget the whole business about Eliade being a highly regarded scholar who hails from Romania. Then again, Francis will have some explaining to do when it will get out that Eliade supported the fascist Iron Guard in Bucharest. Oh, yes, Romania has seen some pretty dark days even before the communists took over.

The thing is I grew up in two languages and cultures simultaneously, before scholars and social architects interfered with labels like multiculturalism. By day I attended a school where half of the students and teachers were black and the other a mixture of Anglo, Polish, Italian, Greek and other Eastern European ethnicities. Most of the non-Black, non-Anglo kids were first generation, like me, which meant our parents were from the old country. It also meant that we spoke English in school and some other language at home. We knew about Jewish holidays, on account of the weather always changing during their holy days, this, according to my grandma. We knew the Catholics would start their lent with jelly donuts, and we knew what chittlins’ were. It’s true that then, like now, no one knew or cared about the Eastern Orthodox. We were a mysterious group, especially to the Blacks. Every year at Easter, which according to our calendar fell a different times from the western Christians, we had midnight mass on the night of the Resurrection. Our church was on StateFair, in a racially mixed area, but predominantly Black. An alley ran behind the church. We started our services at midnight in total darkness, then one by one, we lit candles off of each other while the priest chanted. After the whole church glowed we filed out behind the priest, deacon, cantors and acolytes, in a solemn procession. When we spilled into the alley with our candles and chanting, the poor Black people thought the Ku Klux Klan was invading. I don’t think they ever got used to it.

The point is no one had to come in and give a speech about how to get along. No sir. A word like tolerance would never have captured the social dynamics of those days. Rather, as I recall, it was a kind of playground acceptance that guided our behavior. Sure, there were problems and tensions, the usual tribal biases, grouped by the following general categories.: jerk, creep, bully, and weirdo. We were entitled to express our disaffection with these types, regardless of color or economic background. But if we picked on someone who was just different, we were scolded. There was a fat kid named Leonard who played the piano really well, and could actually read whatever sheet music someone put in front of him. He wore a bow tie and red suspenders every day, so it was merely a question of time. I started snapping his suspenders, like all the other kids, but not because he was fat or talented. It was those red suspenders. They asked for it, I swear. And there was a giant albino girl who used to scare us at first, especially the black kids. She was very tall and had red rings around her eyes like rabbits. They would call her whitey, and I said, I see what you mean. There were occasional insensitive remarks, but we didn’t shoot at each other. We all lived above Seven Mile Road and got along so well, in fact, we were all of us shocked when the 1967 riots broke out. Years later my colleagues in university would argue about how naïve we were—Blacks and white and ethnic minorities who thrived in common brotherhood above Seven Mile Road. We would have to suffer the consequences of other people and their disagreements whether we were part of it or not. This was a pattern that dominated the rest of our lives.

After school and on the weekends, however, I lived in a Romanian world. We listened to Romanian music, ate Romanian food, went to Romanian church and social functions, and generally ran around with Romanian kids. My parents liked it when we hung out with other Romanians—they felt we were safe, in terms of numbers and shared family values. We had the same interests, same culture, same religion and same angst. What held us together was an unimpeachable sense of identity. We had the same adolescent and teenage conflicts as everyone else, but we loved and respected our families, our countries—both of them—and our Orthodox faith, even if we remained obscure.

Our particular Romanian gang centered around a Romanian folk dance group. There were eight boys from Romania, and eight girls from America, seven of Romanian heritage, including my sister, my cousin and me, three other sisters, the priest’s daughter, and one Polish girl who was my older sister’s best friend. We met once a week to practice dancing and singing, had a birthday party once a month for somebody, and otherwise went to Transylvania park on Sundays during the summer for picnics, where we danced more Romanian dances, ate more Romanian food, and practiced being boyfriend -girlfriend with each other. All the boys fell in love first with my older sister. She was pretty, had a nice figure, knew the latest trends in clothes and makeup, and had a cool personality. But she also had an American boyfriend, so when each Romanian kid struck out with her, they half-heartedly considered me. Romanian boys were not much different than American boys when it came to making it with a girl, although their techniques always left us hysterical with laughter. A lot of it had to do with the Romanian words for things. There were two brothers—Ghighi the younger and Sava, whose mother worked in a factory that made leather seats for cars. Once she made them matching leather belts, white ones, the width of a seat belt. This set off the rest of the chic ensemble that typically included bell bottom pants, preferably with some kind of pattern, a long sleeve shirt with yet another pattern, like paisley, opened at the collar two-button’s worth—sufficiently deep enough to allow for a turtleneck or ascot (of yet a different pattern and color), one of those navy blue berets called basca, and a light blue and white checked sport jacket. I still have a picture of the two of them when they took my sister and me to see The Graduate. I remember the looks we got as we fumbled our way to our seats, loaded down with candy and popcorn, the brothers on the inside, the sisters on the flank. Half way through the movie I wondered why they seemed so tall in a sitting position. Maybe it was an optical illusion produced by their apparel, like gazing into a multi-colored pinwheel or something. Then, I realized they hadn’t folded down the seat. Between this and the diversity and quantity of snacks they had purchased the movie was really much funnier than it actually was. When we returned home my sister pulled Ghighi’s hair into a pony tail on the top of his head and we took a picture.

Then there was Vasilica Jichin. He was as sleezy as he was handsome, but he had a short neck. This is significant because whenever we told stories at home in our family, we somehow felt the need to provide voice and gesture. We got this from my mother who, to this day, goes into voices and antics when she is relaying a third-party story. Once a friend of mine brought a guy to a dance and he had a huge overbite. My mother, who is really a gentle soul, but given to extreme honesty, said to us when no one was looking, that you could open a bottle of pop on his front teeth. For a while after, whenever she would see my friend she would say remember that guy with the teeth? And then she would screw up her mouth like a bottle opener. So when we talked about Vasilica, it was automatic that we hunch our shoulders so as to shorten our necks and gesture by slicking back our hair the way he did. Nick, on the other hand, was really cute and sweet. He had a disarming smile like Matt Damon, only Romanian, and his cheeks turned red when he smiled while talking. He was shy and ended up dancing with my cousin Leonora, something I always envied. Nick was one of three brothers who came to America when he was fourteen with his mother. His father was a jerk and abandoned them. I couldn’t believe it when he joined the 82^nd airborne. He was only seventeen. I used to write letters to him because I thought he was very brave to fight in a war. Even today I think it was very brave of him. I guess I was the only one who wrote to him because one day I got a letter back that started with "Halo Hony" and I knew I was in trouble. He drove a Dodge Valiant that his mother painted bright blue by hand with a paintbrush. When he came home from the Army, he took me out in that car, and drove it twenty-five miles an hour on the Chrysler freeway because he said he was used to driving in a tank. We went to Riverside Park in Canada, just across the Detroit River, and he was a good deal less shy than when we danced in our group. I always regretted that there was no spark there. He was cute, sweet, and wearing a uniform, for Pete’s sake, but it just wasn’t enough.

My dance partner was Viorel, who seemed like somebody’s uncle. His calves were so thick that his leather dance boots looked like umbrella stands when he wasn’t wearing them. The last guy to join was Ilie, from Banat Yugoslavia. Banat is a region in western Romania. A combination of war and the contiguousness of Romania and Yugoslavia sort of blended the two nationalities. They were a distinct presence in Detroit on account of Tito letting everybody and anybody out of communist Yugoslavia. They used to joke and say the last person out of Tito’s Yugoslavia should remember to turn off the lights. We used to laugh at Michael Jackson’s brother whose name was also Tito. Did he know he was named after a communist dictator? Ilie was nice looking too, but had bad teeth. One thing I learned about socialized medicine was that everybody in the old country had teeth like the front grill of a Studebaker—rows of teeth capped in silver and, occasionally, gold. Finally there was Mihai, the dance instructor who escaped from Romania where he was a professional dancer with the National folk ballet company, Ciorcirlia. All the girls had a crush on him but he eventually set his sights on the oldest sister of three other girls who were in the group, named Lillian. She and Mihai were over 21, while the rest of us were still teenagers. Vasilica would tell us how Mihai told him how many clothing obstacles he had encountered trying to make out with her. When they slow danced together they never actually moved, and hardly swayed. They just stood there and sometimes they kissed. Once he asked us to take a picture of them kissing. Such drama.

Whenever the brothers Ghighi and Sava came to visit us, usually accompanied by Vasilica, (mostly to position themselves for a date with my older sister), my father would encourage them to spend the night in our camper. (???) My father had such fond memories of his early days to this North American continent with his Canadian friends, that he enjoyed watching us carry on the tradition. Not that they had campers, but he used to tell us how a bunch of Romanian kids would go to Katita Ponta’s cottage on Lake Erie, and go swimming at night. My mom was there too. That’s how the legend about people meeting at the cottage later getting married got started. He ended up buying the cottage in 1969, and proving the legend was true. More important than this, however, was the fact that my father was the most hospitable man I have ever known. He was the most hospitable man anybody ever knew, for that matter. The camper, which was the type that sat on top of a truck, stood on four jack stands in between our brick house and the garage on a cement slab when we weren’t travelling around in it. My sisters and I slept in the upstairs bedroom, so we had a bird’s eye view of the camper the night Ghighi, Sava and Vasilica took my father up on his offer to board them for the night. Overhead we had decided we could not let the night pass without ceremony, so we contrived to scare the dickens out of our trio of suitors. We found in the cedar closet a pair of minx complete with eyes, limbs and tail that my father had acquired from Mrs. Capudean. She was an old woman with a bun who used to turn cartwheels on the beach at the cottage, though we didn’t understand what the hell she was doing. It wasn’t like she used to be a gymnast. Still, it was a sight to see. My grandma even thought it was funny. One time Mr. And Mrs. Capudean came to church in their big black Buick with suicide doors, the kind that open from the center. In the middle of the church service someone noticed a chicken running around in the street, and Mrs. Capudean said it was hers. Apparently it had stowed away on the axle under the car (they kept chickens, of course), and it took a few people to corner the frighten fowl and put it in the back seat. Anyway, my mother never wore the minx, but we kept them in the cedar closet with important coats and sweaters, including my grandma’s big fur coat. When I was younger I made a gorilla costume out of it without asking permission. I still have a picture of me on the garage roof, wearing the modified coat and a gorilla mask with my father and Phillip Acqua. But back to the minx. We fastened a wire to them long enough to reach the camper below, and waited until three in the morning to drag them across the aluminum top and alongside the windows. I had the idea to sprinkle a box of raisins across the top reasoning that it would sound like mink-poop scattering in the wake of the sleek beasts attacking the unsuspecting guests. In no time the camper rumbled and rocked and then suddenly Ghi Ghi, Sava and Vasilica burst out of the door in their underwear, yelling Romanian obscenities. We howled up above and reeled the limp, shiny mahogany-furred creatures back through our window. When my father appeared in his underwear also to see what the hell was going on, he roared with laughter too. My mother still has those minx. Unfortunately, there was no picture that time.

Unfortunately for the Romanian boys, my sister was content with her American boyfriend. His name was Sanvig but we called him Sandpig. He was Swedish. Mihai had his own complexities with Lillian and her rigid clothing, and Lillian’s sisters were too American to even think of dating anyone in the group. The priest’s daughter was thoroughly off bounds. Vasilica was into all kinds of shady deals, Nick was too shy, which left Sava free to write me love letters. He wrote poems on the outside of the envelope so even the mailman was given pause when he delivered them. I was only fourteen, but I appreciated the romantic gesture fine enough. It was on onion skin paper and he wrote with a fountain pen—ta-da! Ghighi was still lovesick for my sister, so I didn’t discourage Sava from writing his lyrical letters and poems. The truth was, both Sava and I were willing to settle at that point for whatever we could get. One day, though, he kissed me in my grandma’s basement and I had to reject him right there and then. Maybe it was the smell from the fruit cellar, or the scent of freshly made lye soap, or the greasy log that served as a chopping block for chickens we bought live from Eastern Market that spoiled the mood. My grandma used to keep live chickens like Mrs. Capudean, but once one tried to peck my baby sister’s eye out—we have it on a super 8 silent movie reel. IT got a death sentence, naturally, so now we had to take the bus to Eastern Market and buy our live chickens there. So Sava’s bold move was doomed. More likely it was simply the total disappointment of the first kiss. He was a decent sort, but he wasn’t the one. He used to say pa-pa-ra-pa-ra, that must have been a kind of bada-boom-bada-bing, only Romanian. He played the violin and told me that I didn’t need glasses; I should just concentrate in my mind that I could see, and I could see. Looking back, he was remarkably intuitive, even with all his talk about extraterrestrials. He ended up taking a good job as a brilliant engineer with a company in Kentucky. Then he went to Romania and brought back a wife—a blond who wore white go-go boots. They went with the white leather car belt, I suppose.

The trip to Romania was important for two reasons. The first was that my sister had been corresponding with a Romanian medical student for nearly six years. His aunt, a portly woman with a shape like the Tazmanian Devil from the Bugs Bunny cartoons had approached my father about which of his daughters he would be willing to match up with her nephew, the obvious objective being matrimony. At that time no one left Romania except if they ran by swimming across a river into another country, hanging from underneath a train to another country, or running across any point of the frontier without being shot. I should explain the running part. It doesn’t mean running like in someone’s chasing you, though people trying to escape from Romania were definitely chased. It means escape. When I think of how many people risk their lives to get into America these days, I think about how many others risked their lives trying to get out of theirs. The other opportunity for a life in a free country like America was—as it still is—matrimony. But green card marriages were not so easily achieved as they had later been. My father had to bribe a few communist officials just to get my future brother-in-law out of Romania. The bribe was justified by standing as reimbursement for the communist-funded medical education. Our trip, therefore, was to size up the groom. The second reason for going, though no less critical, was so that my mother could meet her sister for the first time.

My grandfather had come to America years ago to work and make money needed to purchase land in their village, when Carol was King of Romania. At one point he (my grandfather, not King Carol), sent for my grandmother and their daughter Raveca, who was eight at the time, and they lived here together for four years. Raveca went to school and learned English, and probably how to write, in general. Sadly, she had contracted measles and it left a tiny speck in her eye. My grandfather thought it would affect her chances for a good husband, so he took her to a doctor who ended up piercing her pupil, leaving a horrendous eye deformity for the rest of her life. After four years they returned to Romania and as fate would have it, Ravecca married a local villager, despite the disfigurement. When my grandparents seized the chance to immigrate to America permanently just before the outbreak of World War Two, Raveca’s husband refused to leave. He said Romania was America for him, but then that quickly changed. My grandparents were now safe in America while the Iron Curtain snapped shut, trapping my aunt and the rest of my mother’s family in the malicious grip of communism. My grandparents had lost a son of three years before they left the old country, and another son of three years in America. Twenty-five years after the birth of their first daughter, however, they had my mother. My grandma was 42 years-old and literally embarrassed that she was even pregnant. Her own mother died when she was 12 of consumption. She remembered her dying mother trying to strangle her on her deathbed because she was leaving behind an orphan. My grandma’s life had been hard enough, but happily, my mother was loved the instant they laid eyes upon her. She would write letters to the sister she had never met because my grandparents couldn’t write. Now, after a lifetime apart, they would meet for the first time. Don’t stare at Tusa Seca’s eye, we were told. But honestly, after that first hug I didn’t notice it at all.

The whole adventure had changed me in many ways. I felt happy in the villages and filled my guitar with sand from the Black Sea when we left. But I had also realized that I was next in line for a Romanian doctor or engineer, and concluded I wouldn’t accept the same fate my sister had yielded to. When we landed at the airport, Ghighi was waiting. Little did he expect that I would spurn him as quickly as those six weeks in Romania had passed. I decided to explore Americans rather than settle for a husband of my parent’s choosing. And the only American boy ever to ask me out on a date was the one I fell in love with. In the end he broke my heart. As he walked out the door I caught his arm and said he should wrap his car around a tree, because better I should be a widow than divorced. I found out, however, that I didn’t have a white liver, so divorce it was. And at that point I began a journey much like the one James Joyce had in mind when he wrote the shortest way home is the longest way ‘round.

I love wood and tools. I build things just as if I am writing a poem or painting a picture. I am the way I am because my father was a carpenter. It is natural to see me with nails tucked between my lips and saw dust sprinkled in my long coarse hair. My hands are shaped by the tools I use, my fingertips bruised and nicked, my palms padded by calluses years-old by now. I gaze fondly at wood I fashion by purpose or caprice; I know the ringing tunes of every nail I drive, or every screw that hums as it fills the space it sinks its heart into with ambition. The world, for me, is a world in constant creation, resolute innovation, a world of need and fulfillment in turn. I am the carpenter’s daughter, an initiate of a vocation I would quickly embrace even had I had the choice to make. My father used to say learn how to do this. You might marry a stupid man who doesn’t know how to swing a hammer.

My father was born in a region of Romania called Bucovina, in the village of Stanesti de Jos. He was one of five children, and he used to say they were so poor that they had had but one soup dish, and the youngest brother, Vasile, who died before I was born, would blow his nose into the soup so that no one would eat after him. This offends many people, but if you’ve ever known hunger, it makes perfect sense. Their father had left them years before for Canada, eventually sending for them when my own father was sixteen. The voyage by boat took six months and they eventually settled in Windsor. My father’s father, whom we called moşu Pete, was a rough character who abandoned his family twice—once in Bucovina and again in Windsor. Nobody liked him; he was a chronic smoker so he had a gurgly breath and wheezed instead of laughed. Every time we got together he would provoke an argument. My father’s mother, whom we called Bunsa, was a small woman with a strange vocabulary that included odd sounds, perhaps specific to her region and dialect, that made my sisters and brother and I shun her company. She would make this growling sound and clasp her hands together when she saw us. The unfortunate effect was that we were terrified of that noise. She made scatter rugs out of old nylon stockings on a loom in her basement, that looked like an instrument of torture. One time she asked my baby brother if he wanted some toast, and when he said yes, she opened a drawer and handed him a dried piece of toast. But my father always reminded us that she was his mother, and therefore, we must respect her. So we did.

Until my baby brother was born I was the middle child, with all the particular attributes of the second born. My older sister, by two years, Mary Ann, was named after one of my father’s favorite Romanian songs. He and my mother would sing it together in harmony: o Mariana, micǎ dulce Mariana…te-aştept ne-seara la rendevu. When I came along he decided to name me after Doris Day because she was one of the first American celebrities he admired; she had a beautiful singing voice, he would say. My older sister was accorded a violin, because my father always dreamed of playing one himself. In fact, he used to admire violins in shop windows and eventually bought one when he had saved enough money. He went on to collect a number of violins after that, though we used to giggle when he played them. Still, he played them with such love and passion that it was clear he had a natural talent for the instrument. When my sister resisted taking anymore lessons, she took up the piano, like my mother. My mother was also the child of immigrants who could not afford a piano when she was young, but she took lessons anyway and used to practice on a sheet of paper with the keys drawn in pencil. She too had a natural proclivity for music and could play beautifully. I used to envy my sister when she practiced, and wished I could study piano as well, but my father had other ideas. He had seen Connie Francis playing the accordion on the Lawrence Welk Show one time, after which she was discovered (according to my father). I remember strapping on that weird contraption for the first time and thinking it was another instrument of torture. I attribute my strength and survival skills to the years I spent playing the accordion. For one thing, it’s heavy. You have to hold it, carry on your chest, pump the bellows to make it say something, move your right hand vertically on the one side with the keys, like a sideways piano, and feel for the buttons on the left side like those candy sugar dots on adding machine tape. I think it’s the only instrument whose one whole half you never get to see when you play it. Plus your left hand must move vertically, while the fingers move perpendicularly for the various chords. Just describing the way it works sounds insane. But as a middle child I was hungry for approval and praise, so when I saw my father’s eyes light up each time I took the accordion in my awkward arms, I was determined to make it mine. It must have done the trick because my younger sister, by two years was allowed to follow piano studies. She’s the one who hit me with the hammer.

New Fiction

Bucovina Mica