Danusha V. Goska

Missing Yesterday's Old People

This is Danusha Goska.

I recently went through some hard times; did not see how I'd survive from one day to the next. And I began to miss yesterday's old people.

I grew up among immigrants, peasants, like my mother, who packed everything into a tight bundle and traveled on ox carts to Prague or Warsaw, where they were shipped off to coalmines. They faced American racism that lynched one of my ancestors. The Depression, World War Two, the Holocaust, the first atomic bomb: their headlines, as they scrubbed floors, manned trenches, and waited on an American Dream that would never stop for them.

In the kitchen on weekday nights, under fluorescent lights and overhanging laundry, my mother and Dave, the traveling salesman who had a crush on her, would trade fabulous tales. Not about people who get their picture in the paper, but about people like Joe, Dave's father. Joe had been chased out of his village by a pogrom. A girl in a neighboring village booked passage to America, because her heart was certain that Joe was *the one.* Asking locals about this man she'd met only once, she traveled, alone, and speaking no English, to three different American cities until she found Joe, and married him.

I knew that no matter what I was going through, these old people had gone through so much more, and found cause for laughter and pride.

But now I'm all grown up, and the old people of my childhood are gone. Mom, Dad, Dave, Aunt Rose and Uncle Rudy, who made outrageous claims about his relationship to Archduke Ferdinand. I seek their like in muscle, exaltation and beauty, in vain. And so, I tell their stories. Yesterday's old people, by wrestling with the ruination of dreams, wars, and rumors of wars, and never losing their decency, or their backbone, make today seem possible to me.

For Speak Your Mind, this has been Danusha Goska.

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