Amerikanac

I never woke up that early. I worked a late shift and followed it with a three-hour computer stretch starting at midnight, so eleven was an appropriate time for me to start the day. But that day, I had to wake up early to drive my dad to a job interview.

His English was pretty rocky (still is) and he relied on us kids to begrudgingly accompany him to such meetings. The interviewer would ask my dad something, I’d translate it for him casually - as if I were just clarifying a subtlety - and he’d give a very animated answer directly to the interviewer. I’d try to follow it with my translation as quickly as I could, and so we tried to create the illusion that my dad’s command of the English language was unimpeachable. I was just there as his assistant, really.

My dad’s family is Croatian. He lived in Bosnia and Croatia, worked in Germany for a few years, and then moved to Florida late in life. The country he was born in (Yugoslavia) doesn’t even exist anymore. His education was limited, and the one foreign language it included was Russian. He arrived in Florida in 1997, just as he was beginning to grasp German. A less stubborn man would’ve perhaps taken a deep breath and dove headfirst into a new language, but there are few men more stubborn than my dad.

This probably came in handy during the Yugoslav wars of 1991 - 1995, when our family had to flee a burning town and rebuild a life from a few grocery bags of clothes and an address book. It took flexibility, too, I’m sure. It probably took everything.

This doesn’t excuse the fact that my dad mispronounces the name of the city he lives in (something like Cleo-walter) and that he refers to pork loin as pork lion. He needs no excuse for this - he has lived a rich and productive life in America since landing in Florida with guten morgen and good morning all jumbled up in his head. (My mom did far better with English, by the way, as she had done with German. Unlike my dad, she went to high school.)

So I woke up too early that morning and found myself in my parents’ living room doing something I hadn’t done in years and probably haven’t done ever since: watching the morning news on the local TV station. Dad was running around, balancing a chicken roast and his regular phone calls to everyone he knows in the world with his version of cleaning up for a job interview (clean shorts, clean Hawaiian shirt.)

I was tasked with sitting on the sofa and checking the weather, and then I saw it, because I had to get up so early I saw it live, from the early misreports to the ensuing confusion to the literally unbelievable - not at all believable - horror to the icy, paralyzing realization at the end of it. We both stood and watched it.

“Let’s go,” my dad said. “Turn on the radio in the car.”

We listened for the fifteen or twenty minutes it took to get to the printing plant where dad was scheduled for a job interview for a press-operator position. In the HR office, they knew. It was as if previously unseen TVs had descended from all ceilings for everyone to stare at and consume the unthinkable over and over.

The job interview was still on. It was brief, it was perfunctory, but it included a written test. I have no idea what it measured - they were hiring unskilled press operators. Dad sweated his way through it. If I combine all the test-pressure I’ve endured throughout my education (my older brother and I went to college - first in the family, I just realized) I can maybe imagine the rock and the hard place my dad was between, trying to wring out all his Engleski onto the paper while wondering how much of the world outside was crashing and burning. We didn’t really know - no one yet knew.

The rest of the day is hazy, a lasting empathy hangover. At my job, we showed up that afternoon and hung out in the lunchroom for an hour or so before being told to go home for the night, two hours of work clocked. The next day, we’d return to a normal schedule. 

My dad ended up getting the job. He stayed with the printing company for eight years until the plant shut down amidst the general economic malaise of the late 2000-oughts, which hit Florida pretty bad. He printed coupons during those eight years. He’d carry the runover home and give the coupons as a semi-gag gift. He’d hand it to you as if it were worthless, chuckle, and then add, you can actually save money with these things.

My dad’s comprehension of spoken English is much better now, though he is still too stubborn to try speaking back in anything more than short phrases. My theory: part of the problem is that he hates half-assing a thing like that. I guess when you take stubborn and add the potential for embarrassed, you get proud. 

I’m not going to say something profound like my dad has too much respect for the English language to butcher it in public, but I can tell you that after all the places my parents have lived, this is the country they wish to stay in. They like it here, and though my dad has traveled back to Croatia to see friends and family, he has come back to his new home in America gladly and with no regrets. My dad likes being an Amerikanac, because in America, he is proof that a superficial language barrier need not stop you from getting ahead, not even on the worst of days. 

His granddaughter’s name is an English word. When Christa and I named her, it never even occurred to me that this might be an issue for my parents - I knew they’d roll with it. They put a Croatian twist on it, Oliva. They speak to her in a goofy melange of cute words from all the languages they’ve ever used. We Mrgans - sometimes said as a rolling Mrrrrgan, sometimes a plain old Morgan - span the country from the Northwest to the Southeast. My parents love the humid heat of Florida, I like Oregon’s misty hills. We call different places home in this country, but we call one country home.