I Am Changed Forever

I am changed forever. How do I know? I cannot finish a class in International Finance without thinking of my father and crying once I’m in the safety of my car. I cry all the way home. This kind of thing will happen forever.

I was feeling like I was inching closer to my dad in class. Analyzing international currency exchange rates…felt oddly like he was there. It felt like something he would be interested in. I was so excited, I didn’t want to go on break. I wanted to crunch numbers in my father’s name.

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The first time I went to Croatia, I felt like I was going home. I can’t explain this feeling. For the longest time when I was a child, I used to say to my mother, “I want to go home.” I’d be standing at our kitchen counter, at home, but I’d ask her impatiently to go home. She didn’t know what I meant, I could not put words to what I was feeling.

And then, years later on my first visit as an adult to “the homeland,” I stood on the white hot rocks on the Croatian coastline, looking onto the Adriatic. I felt at home. Unreal. Done, finito, solved. It must have been the trip to the Olympics in Sarajevo when I was 4. The parties, the snow, the sounds, the food, the people. I wanted to go back.

Just prior to going back, I had spent a whole year studying Slavic culture in preparation. I took a Serbo-Croatian language course, Slavic film course, studied and performed Russian and Czech classical music, pursued an independent study in Serbo-Croatian and Slavic folk music, helped edit a book on Czech diction for a Janacek opera, found anyone who would do kolo dancing with me. Of course Ann Arbor has a hippie population who does folk dances of various countries in barns on the outskirts of town - they knew how to dance the kolo better than I did!!! It was unreal. That year I danced in aisles at a concert meant more or less academic enjoyment at Hill Auditorium, met Esma Redzepova, the Queen of the Gypsies, waiting for her after a concert, then absconded with her gypsy band to an Irish Pub and they tried to mack on my friends who didn’t understand Macedonian, but I did.

The point of all this is that I’ve always sought ways to be closer to my family. Because I love everything that my family is about. My grandfather, grandmother, father, mother. They are artists, dancers, singers, philosophers, bakers, philanthropists, poets…and still are. My family is crazy creative. We are wild, and it comes from our roots. And I love those roots. I’d never change a thing about this family. There is so much cool stuff about Croatia and Serbia and Bosnia. And it’s coursing through my veins. I can’t explain stuff like this.

What does this have to do with International Finance? I flipped out when I saw that we got to choose our paper topic in the emerging markets. I nearly jumped out of my seat to ask the professor if the former Yugoslavia was an appropriate choice.

I imagine talking to my dad about it. We could talk about the political influences on the economy in the former Yugoslavia. He’d even tell me about the Russians buying up Croatian real estate this summer. He was there. Just this summer. He would sit back, arms behind his head, he’d twist his moustache now and then and provide me with all sorts of anecdotal history to pepper my paper with.

I’ve got write it without him…it’s now a love letter to him wherever he is.