As if “Dates with Destiny” (Geist 67) didn’t speak to coincidence eagerly enough, I stumbled upon it during my waitressing shift. Thanks to a steady shortage of customers, or perhaps people’s aversion to the slightly odd food, I have time to contemplate things like heritages more than orders at my place of employment, and eagerly eat up pages of Geist to get me through the shift. Wouldn’t you know it—at the moment I flipped through No. 67, the word Fiume jumped out to meet me—the short-lived city Fiume, my own father’s birthplace. Growing up, I have been subject to embarrassment over the linguistic barriers between me and other people. Not only was I unable to explain where my parents came from in grade three classes (where, somehow, multiculturalism became yet another barometer for coolness), but also my given name seemed indefinable: Sasha, my nickname, was not comprehensible as a short version of “Alexandra” (notwithstanding one of our own former prime minister’s sons, whose name underwent the same shortening). This problem never sorted itself out, and in grade nine I began to let people call me whatever they wanted. Several swim team members called me Sasha, and to student council members I was Alexandra. I knew this would pose a serious problem for my psyche when one morning the love of my life approached me eagerly to proclaim, “Sasha, you and your sister Alex are so similar!” In attempting to explain my father’s birthplace and my own uniqueness as a first-generation Canadian, things were no simpler:
“Where was your father born?”
“In Fiume.”
“Where’s that?”
“Well, it was Italy, and now it doesn’t exist. The closest approximation is Rijeka.”
“Where’s that?”
“Croatia.”
“So your father is Croatian?”
“In theory, yes, but he doesn’t speak Croatian.”
“Why not?”
“It’s sorta complicated.”
“Yah, sure.”
Ultimately the conclusion was never satisfactory, as I didn’t find the history of Adriatic port cities worthy of fifteen-minute explanations. I just ended up looking more and more like a liar. Now that I’ve grown older and arguably wiser, I take the time to tell the story of Fiume and my father, and thankfully, people know me as one person, not twins. As Daniel Francis writes, the “tenacity of the past appears in the most unexpected places,” and I was thrilled to find it on the pages of Geist. Thanks for taking the time to tell it, and for inspiring me to share mine.
