“Son, America is the country of all the peoples on earth!” he told me right away, “and she takes them the way they are! Son, America is greeting me the way I am — a Croatian peasant!” I couldn’t argue with his point.

During his visit, he met an old American Indian from Oklahoma. This Indian lived on the same block I did: 73rd Street and 6th Avenue in Brooklyn. Without the ability to converse with each other, but with my free translation service, they became friends. Mr. Changikook (the Indian) would often join us at dinner. Those were better moments in the old Indian’s life; he lived alone in a one-family house. The American incidental experience with my father’s strong hands was taking place over a period of three months, right in the dining room on the first floor of 644-73rd Street, Brooklyn. As my father would be eating his soup, bringing the spoon to his mouth, Mr. Changikook, sitting on the opposite end of the table, would stop and look at my father’s large hands: “Oh, Mighty God, I’ve never seen such strong hands and thick fingers in all my life!” I took personal pride in the translation for my father. After all, it was credible, coming from the Indian who worked in the New York harbor as a longshoreman for most of his life. My father took that as an honorable compliment, too. He had a question for the old Indian.

America is the country of all the peoples on earth!” he told me right away, “and she takes them the way they are! So, America is greeting me the way I am — a Croatian peasant!” I couldn’t argue with his point.

“Ask the Indian if I would qualify for a chief of his tribe?” my father demanded. The old Indian answered my father’s question with a hearty laugh, showing his two front teeth capped in gold: “In my tribe you would be a sure winner!” said the Indian, bumping his large, pointy nose — his personal trademark — with his right hand, while taking his woolen hat off.

Many years have passed since then. My father went back to his village and continued doing what he knew best: farming and house building/fixing. I visited him from time to time. On every visit he seemed to be growing a little older. New creases would appear on his cheeks and forehead. His posture was somehow losing its original strength. His eyes required glasses more often than not. But his hands were always showing that unusual strength, vitality and speed.

On one of those visits, I remember watching him reading. A buzzing fly started pestering him, landing on his wide-spread newspaper. When his patience was exhausted, it took a fraction of a second for his quick hands to punish the unintelligent fly. Its lifeless, tiny body rolled down the newspaper’s columns. He continued reading peacefully afterwards.

My father’s strong hands and their size were as cut in my memory as an epitaph in white stone when I was far from him, living in America and reminiscing on life in the village. And when a drunken driver hit my father while he was getting off the bus on one of his daily strolls to his corn and wheat fields — and snatched his life out of him at eighty — I cried my eyes out, thousands of miles away from him, here in New York.

I still do not believe that those strong farmer’s and builder’s hands of my father drained all of their strength in passing… taking the last chance with them — for me — to shake them one more time at the Kennedy airport…

— FROM The Blue Moon Across the Fence