Author: dallanz

July was all about cutting cots.

The Lopin ranch was ten acres of apricots and prunes, with a few almonds thrown in for good measure. Harvesting prunes was ugly work, according to my mother and aunt who participated in their collection from the time they could walk to the time they were adult enough to find valid excuses not to. Prunes are plucked from the ground. Enough said.

Production of dried apricots is labor intensive, but doesn’t involve much stooping, kneeling, or bending over, so we all participated annually until my uncle, who ran the operation, declared it done. I’m not entirely sure when or why he no longer needed family participation in production of the fruit, but I do know that its beginnings predated my consciousness by several decades. 

The apricot ripens according to the weather. A hot June and July will trigger rapid ripening, and as the best fruit for drying needs still to be firm, Uncle John’s expertise in knowing when to pick was necessarily well-sharpened. Family members would receive a phone call, “We start picking day after tomorrow, if you can cut, be there at seven.”

The apricot’s journey from tree fruit to dried fruit has several stages. The first is obviously to pick. But even that is nuanced. The over-ripe fruit was sequestered for use in producing “slabs”, thick pieces of irregular size, very sweet and soft. Under-ripe fruit needed to be left on the tree for a second, or even a third, picking a day or two later. The ready fruit was placed in large wooden boxes which were stacked in the cutting shed. That’s where we cutters came in.

The fruit was cut along its natural cleft, the pit removed and tossed into a little wooden box that sat on a single nail on one side, and on the rim of the tray on the other. Then the two apricot halves were carefully placed on the tray in rows, all pieces touching their neighbors, but always level so they would dry without forming clumps. Each cutter’s trays were stacked as they were filled, so you would begin the day seated and end it standing on a progressively taller tower made from fruit boxes.

Towards afternoon when enough trays were filled to justify, they were loaded onto a trolly that ran on a kind of railroad track between destination Sulphur House and destination Drying Yard. In order to protect it from grubs and burrowing insects, the fruit was shut into a shed where it was fumigated with burning sulphur. That process also helped the fruit keep its brilliant orange color. If you got downwind of the shed, it gave you a brilliant orange color, as well.

After several hours of fumigation, the trays was rolled to the other end of the track, and set in the July sun to dry, each tray overlapping the next by a couple of inches to keep the batch from soaking up moisture from the ground. Depending on the weather, the fruit would take up to a week to dry, then it was scraped off into the multi-useful boxes, and taken to one of the packagers in the Valley for distribution and sale.

I accompanied my mother, whose early years were filled with fruit production tasks, from before my first birthday, and went every summer until sometime in my teens. The first few years were playtime. My cousin Gail and I got Uncle John to build us a house from empty fruit boxes and trays which we would furnish with items we found, Gail (being older) ducking out to go to work as a cutter after we had settled in. Once I could reach a tray and wield a knife without presenting danger to myself or others, I too left the cozy cottage to go to work. A year or two later, I was there at seven with the rest of the family, sharing a tray and getting half the fifty cents (when I could finally cut at speed) that we were paid for each one we filled.

Gail was amazing. In my memory, she could regularly cut twenty or more trays by herself in a single day. She assumed heroic proportions in my mind. Didn’t hurt that she was also an accomplished violinist. Really didn’t hurt that when she was old enough, she learned to drive on the Maxwell touring car turned into farm vehicle, carrying the men from tree row to tree row and retrieving the full boxes of fruit. She was a kind of wonder woman to me.

Work days were filled with gossip, interesting discussion, lots of joking around, and laughter, and on a good year, vocal admiration of an especially fine apricot. When my grandmother was still living, the day was punctuated by her pitchers of fresh squeezed lemon aide, and by her lunch spreads. I would have gladly cut for free and taken the food as payment. Not that I was so bold as to offer.

One Sunday when I was maybe twelve, my folks dropped me off alone for a day’s cutting. It was the equivalent of a Bar Mitzva and Holy Confirmation rolled into one coming-of-age adventure for this kid. I cut like a demon, took few breaks, didn’t bleed on anything, and produced beautiful orderly trays for the drying yard. At the end of the day, Uncle John handed me two five-dollar bills and two more silver dollars, one Morgan Liberty and one Peace dollar. I was so excited I ran in circles until my folks came to pick me up.

I have no recollection of how those twelve dollars were spent, but it was a small fortune, and I hope I used it wisely. Probably not.

Of course, the best part of cutting was the family chatter. That’s where we got to know each other, brandishing knives and throwing pits in to small wooden boxes,where they produced a pleasing, rhythmical shplunk. That’s where I learned that these perfectly ordinary people were in fact extraordinary people, something I forgot in my mid-teens and, in some cases, failed to remember until it was almost too late. 

When Grandma Lopin died, the ten acres were divided up among her sons. I’m not sure what the arrangement was exactly, but John kept farming until he sold his few acres and the house in 1974. The trees were replaced by an electrical substation and a go-cart track. I don’t blame him, tax protections for farmland had disappeared by then, and growing fruit was no longer worth the hard work. But if it were magically possible to pick up a knife and fill a tray of cots surrounded by family, I would be there in a heartbeat. 

A small ground floor room, three people, two lamps, the scent of bacon.

On my first trip to visit cousins Petar and Stoja, but not the first evening, they told me about their life together, most notably what they did during the Second World War. 

One of the cultural events I attended at Dubrovnik’s Libertas Festival a couple of weeks before was an evening of folkloric song and dance. One genre of dance was silent. The only music was the shuffling of the dancers’ feet, an occasional finger snap, maybe a collective sigh. The literature explained that this was the dance of the refugees of war and of the Resistance, but either said no more, or I stopped understanding.

During the war, the Croatian government became complicit with the Nazi occupational forces, a faction among the Serbs, who never got along with the Croats anyway, took that as an opportunity to cast their fellow Slavs – all of them – as the enemy. The selo of Gaic, where Petar and Stoja lived, was extremely remote, and Serbian Resistance were scouring the countryside, terrorizing the inhabitants, and leaving much blood in their wake. For my cousins, staying put was not a option. So through the help of an underground refugee movement, they escaped. They didn’t know where they were going, or how they were getting there, or when they would arrive. All they knew was that their lives and those of their children depended on leaving Gaic immediately, and so they did.

So, Petar, Stoya, Petar’s sister-in-law, and their combined eleven children (one still a babe in arms) set off one night on a walk with little or no preparation. They walked for months. Their destination was always the next safe house (or farm, or factory, or cave) but they never knew two destinations in a row. Nor did they know when they would be able to stop walking. They only traveled by night, and carried no illumination.

There was, and perhaps still is, an ancient tradition among the southern slavs, that when traveling by foot, if you meet other travelers you share food, drink, and dance. And when Petar and his family meet other families along their route, they upheld the tradition. What food they had to offer was little, and the dances were silent. The only music was the dancers’ shuffling feet, an occasional finger snap, maybe a collective sigh.

The family crossed into Austria by and by, at an unpatrolled section of border. They were directed to a farm that had several large barns, and there they stayed, working nights for their keep and staying hidden during the day, for the duration of the war. 

“What happened when the war ended?” I asked, almost breathless from what I had just heard.

“We walked back. It was easier then, there were protected zones that were relatively safe, so we could travel by day most of the time. We even got rides in autos and wagons… Well, some of us did.” He translated for Stoja. She laughed and said something in Croatian. Petar translated for me. “She says, ‘I was a good-looker in those days’, and it’s true she was. That meant we had to be extra careful, but now and then some young guys who missed their sweethearts, I guess, just wanted to be nice to a pretty girl, so she’d climb aboard with five or six of the kids, and the rest of us would have to walk double time to keep up.”

“What did you find when you arrived home?”

“Things were in sad shape, but we put them back together. Everyone in Gaic had taken a journey. Ravno was practically empty, too. But here we are,” he breathed in deeply. “Well. Tomorrow we take in the hay!”

Petar was up at dawn. He took his cow on a twenty minute hike to good grazing, every morning, while Stoja made bread and stew. He was eighty years old at the time.

“I’m slowing down. I walk into Ravno and have to wait until the next day to walk back.”

When he returned from grazing the cow, the three of us sat for breakfast; a glass of plum brandy with bacon and cheese and bread, and a large pastry with the strongest Turkish coffee I had ever tasted. The brandy sent me for a loop, the coffee wired me, and didn’t know whether to yell or fall asleep. (They did this again at “tea time”, mid-afternoon.) Then they left for the hay field. I followed best I could.

It was a plot of land that measured maybe a quarter of an acre, not large, that had been planted in alfalfa. Once I had caught up, he explained that rain was expected the day after tomorrow, and that rain would spoil the hay.

“So, we do this right now.”

“Great! What can I do to help?”

“Sit right here on this rock.”

“Okay.”

“Watch. Tell your father and uncle what you see.”

“I’d love to work if you show me what to do.”

“Sit. Watch.”

So, I sat and I watched, feeling guilty as hell. 

Petar had sharped his scythe the previous evening, and now displayed an almost balletic mastery of the tool. The grass fell into neat rows, Stoja raked it into piles with all stems lined up with each other, and onto a large cloth with a loop at one end, and ties on both. Together, she and Petar rolled the fabric into a large burrito with the hay inside, tied it off, then Stoja put the padded loop onto her forehead, and carried the roll on her back to their hay barns. They were not far away, the barns, but this was clearly the most efficient means of filling them.

While I sat and watched my cousins work, five men on horseback rode past. They were dressed like the dancers in the folkloric festival I’d seen, only they looked, and were, real. Petar and Stoja waved, the men waved back, a few words were exchanged and the group moved on.

“They’re from (the forgotten name of a nearby town). Muslims. Good, honest people, excellent neighbors. They’re hunting today, small game. They raise sheep, actually a kind of goat suited to this terrain, but they look like sheep. The best cheese!”

After another hour or two, Petar sniffed the air and announced that the rain had changed its mind and would come a day later.

“No need to hurry, now. Time for lunch.” The scythe and rake were leaned against the barn, and we strolled back to their house.

Photo: a modern, town version of the silent dance.

After holiday dinners (and Sundays of any kind qualified as holidays) I would wait until Aunt Mary was comfortable on the well-worn couch upon which Grandma Lopin gazed from her photographic portrait, chrysanthemum on her head, and beg for a story. Aunt Mary told the best stories around. One sentence into one of her stories, I was enthralled.

“I just say whatever comes into my head,” she laughed. “They’re not real stories.”

But they were to me. And on occasion of my having child guests for the afternoon, if I could wrangle a story from my melodious aunt, my friends agreed; her stories were transportive.

Then one Sunday after a bit more effort than I thought should have been necessary, I convinced Aunt Mary to begin one of her improvisations. And I was bored. She just said whatever came into her head. What was so special about that?

Thus ended a childhood enchantment.

Was it something to do with the ranch? The orchard of broken spells?

One of my best friends as a child was a boy of about my age named David John Pace. For both of us, our friendship brought our middle names to the fore; when we were with parents, it was the only way anyone could specify who was being yelled at.

David and I loved to play stories. One of us would begin with a setting or a character or a circumstance, and between us we’d make a movie – fabulous special effects, cast of thousands, heroic protagonists, a plot that twisted itself into knots. We could go for hours this way, and the Ranch offered endless location shots – barn, chicken coup, rows of trees, and clothesline became aircraft hanger, crocodiles in a swamp, enemy lines on a battlefield, and telecommunications HQ. 

The miracle of childhood.

As with many rural houses in warm climates, my grandmother had her regular kitchen with windows and doors, and her summer kitchen on a screened-in porch. Adjacent to the summer kitchen was a concrete slab that was home to a six-lane clothesline. As far as clotheslines go, it was a deluxe model. The slab was surrounded by oleander bushes, and beyond those, rows and rows of fruit trees.

“Jack MacMillan calling Bronco, do you read me Bronco?”

“Roger Jack, read you loud and clear.”

“Get the enemy in your cross hairs, Bronco, we’re going in for a dive.”

Silence.

“We’re in an electric substation that we’re going to blow up so the enemy is without power while we booby trap the presidential palace.”

“We’re in a plane about to riddle the enemy coast guard with shrapnel.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“It’s a fight to the end!”

“Okay, hand to hand!”

And we switched narration to take us into the orchard on a dramatic chase scene, ending back at the clothesline. Dueling heroes, each intent on saving civilization, destroyed themselves on a concrete slab, both narrating the action like would-be Howard Cosells. But each narrating a different action.

It felt weird. Like we were trying to sustain something that was over. We ratcheted up the drama, rose the stakes to dizzying heights, but we were aware of the gears and springs that usually kept us in motion. And they weren’t meshing. The magic we never even knew was a part of our play was gone. Not ones to accept defeat or progress, we held onto the drama, but in our hearts we knew that this was the last childhood story we would weave that actually captivated us. We were growing up. 

Or were we just becoming self conscious?

The cardinal rule of improvisation, I was later to learn in college (Dad: We sent you to college to learn what?) is Yes And. Yes, I accept the reality you just depicted, And I add this to it. When two kids start arguing about basic plot, the game is in trouble. When it happens twice in a row, there is no game. When the argument becomes the game, there are no kids left to play it.

Last I checked (and it has been many years) David John took over his father’s wholesale business. Our paths last crossed when he visited to advise on my upcoming first journey to Europe, having himself recently returned. Or maybe it was when we found ourselves both in Santa Cruz, and did a little beaching while taking other kinds of trips.

So, I don’t know how his sense of fantasy fared when confronted with wholesale. But I have a feeling that awful dawning outside my grandmother’s summer kitchen only increased my resolve to keep the game going in some way. My subsequent personal struggle involved lots of enthusiasm for invented possible realities, and a strong need to involve friends in getting them to sign on to my fantasies.

Eventually, I found semi-acceptable social structures (theatre and its offshoots) in which to plant my love of improvised narrative, and although forming theatre companies could be viewed as a brand of hucksterism, in the main the theatre arts channelled my need to improvise in directions useful to the community. And for all the things in life that I missed because of my singular dedication to the stage, I got a nice handful of ephemeral magic in return. And developed a huge admiration for those who have managed to keep the improv rolling along while raising kids and doing business. That, to me, is real growing up.

Photo: The orchards of Santa Clara Valley during a long ago spring.

My visits to Cousin Pete Zarko in Gaic were coupled with visits to the Lopin side of the family in Dubrovnik and our ancestral village of Zuljana. My Lopin grandparents were third cousins. My grandmother’s maiden name was also Lopin. They even grew up in the same selo. A Croatian village can be made of several selo, groups of houses build on rock, fertile fields separating each selo from the other. Good soil is rare in much of the country, so you don’t waste it by building. The selo my grandparents grew up in is called Pozerina, and consisted of a dozen or so two and three story houses structured around a common cistern. Water is the other precious commodity.

My first trip, in 1972, began in Dubrovnik. My cousin Zejlko was expecting me, but as was typical of my communication skills at the time, only “sometime during the summer”. I had his address, but when I arrived tired and hungry after traveling by train from Istanbul, I couldn’t gather the intelligence to find him, so with the help of the tourist office located a room in a private house. The host noticed my last name.

“You’re Croatian, yes?”

“My family.”

“And does your family live in Dubrovnik?”

“A few, and the others in a village not far from here.”

“There are lots of villages.”

“It’s called Zuljana.”

“Are some of your family called Lopin?”

“Yes! My mother’s cousins!”

“Zejlko is a my friend. He has been expecting you all summer. Why are you staying here?”

Within thirty minutes, Zejlko had come to claim me and I was installed in the guest room of an apartment that was essentially a part of the city wall.

Dubrovnik was like another world. A perfect walled city almost surrounded by water so blue it looked fake. Libertas was (and is) Dubrovnik’s summer arts festival, and despite my temporal nonchalance (or maybe because of it) I was there for the heart of it. I saw world-famous pianists, performances of folkloric dances, ballet, Macbeth on the ramparts (in Croatian), orchestras, jazz, and more. At the end of the week, Cousin Maria and her son Niko, were taking the ferry to Zuljana, and it was suggested I join them.

Niko was about ten at the time. He was overweight, sputtered, yelled, whined, and was – like me – an only child. I tried very hard to like him. I don’t remember succeeding. Maria was a worrier, fussy, emotional, and a chatterbox. She was a fabulous cook, so I liked her better. Her husband Miho was a man of infinite patience and calm. I thought him a saint.

Zuljana is on the coast, and has a little artificial harbor that was provided by the Austrians. The ferry slid through the inlet, a group of people excitedly waved, and I was welcomed back to the homeland.

To be honest, memories of my two trips to Dubrovnik and Zuljana tend to conflate, as do memories of my trips to Gaic and Ravno. What I am clear about on the first trip is visiting Pozerina with cousins Pero and Navenka and seeing the houses my grandparents grew up in, by then abandoned and in ruin. On the second floor of my grandfather’s house I found a box, almost the only thing in the room, and inside the box were postcards and letters. Two of those letters were from my grandfather, but only the envelopes had survived. My grandmother’s house no longer had a second floor. The cistern was overgrown with blackberries, and mosquitoes were rampant. 

Being American, I imagined a full restoration of the selo and conversion into a heritage hotel. Being me I shared the dream with everyone, and never did a thing about it. Well, my language skills that trip were pretty slight, so describing my developer’s vision was unlikely to convince, anyhow.

I had taken Russian in high school, all four years, with the hope that it would help me learn Croatian. Grandma Zarko died a year into that experiment, and though my folks both spoke fluently, it was awkward trying to speak at home. In Zuljana, I began to pick it up, but it was all about the dictionary, and conversations – if you could call them that – were painful for everyone.

Still, when a group of Czech tourists befriended my cousins, they could often not quite understand one another even though the two languages were close, but somehow I could understand both and became an imperfect, and totally thrilled, translator. It was one night on the pier passing around a bottle of local sweet vermouth that I cracked my first joke in a foreign language. Someone made note of the full moon, and riding on the US moon landing of a few summers prior, I informed them that moonlight was now subject to an American tax. Okay, not exactly Mel Brooks, but they laughed.

Pero and his dad, Marko, were busy that summer with blasting caps slowly carving out a cistern from the granite outcrop their house was built on. They would spend an hour drilling a hole by hand, place the explosive, pack it, stretch the fuse, light it, take cover, and… boof. Not “boom”, boof. The charge would blow a toaster-sized section of rock into a loose amalgam which Pero and Marko would clear out with pickaxes. The two weeks I was there saw an increase in volume for the cistern of about the size of a carry-on bag. No one was perturbed by this timeline. It was the way it was.

And all that while, Veronika, Pero’s mother, carried five liter jugs of water down from a well high enough on the mountain that the water wasn’t brackish from infiltration of the sea. It was still slightly too mineral for good dental health, however, and was used mainly for cooking and washing. Water and rock shaped their lives.

When I returned three years later, the ferry had stopped running and Zejlko took me by car. We arrived very late. The whole family was in Veronika’s kitchen to greet me. I had not spoken a word of Croatian in three years (Zejlko spoke English) and was groggy from travel. People asked lots of questions. I answered them. About a half hour into the conversation, someone remarked how much my Croatian had improved, and they were right.

“It was a struggle for us before, we’re glad you’ve been studying.”

More amazed than they were, I left it at that.

The big news was water. Veronika went to the sink, and turned on the new faucet full blast.

“Look! We have as much as we want, now!”

“You finished the cistern!”

“No,” said Pero, “we might turn it into wine storage, though.”

“Where is the water coming from?”

“Canalization!” cheered Marko.

The government had given them a grant that included training a villager in basic hydraulic engineering (basic?) then everyone in town either signed on to provide labor, or paid a kind of tax if they opted not to. They build a ten thousand liter reservoir on a hill, dug a fifteen meter well down to a reliable source of good water, and laid pipe to connect every house in the village.

“Main lines, service lines, all professional!” enthused Marko.

As close as I now live to them, and as many times as I’ve vacationed in Italy before I moved here, I’ve never been back. I regret that.

My first Fourth of July was at the Lucas’s house that faced Washington Park. The field directly across from there was launch central for the Sunnyvale fireworks display. Sitting in their front yard, comfortably bunkered in lawn chairs or lounging on picnic blankets, my adult relations admired the colors almost directly overhead. I was three, and had no idea what to expect, and when the first sky rocket whistled into position and burst noisily above us, I wasted no time running, screaming, into the living room where I sought out furniture high enough off the floor for me to hide under. 

The bangs kept coming, muted only slightly by the walls and windows of my grandparents-on-loan’s tract house. But the capacity for humans to adapt is remarkable, even for three-year-old humans, and I apparently crawled out of hiding, watched the show through the front window, and eventually decided that the noise was not a threat, for I spent most of that evening’s festivities on a blanket. I don’t recall if parental intervention helped get me there or not. It was an intensely personal progression – abject terror to aesthetic appreciation – and even if adults seemed to help me through it, I was actually on my own.

My later attraction to acting caused me to face the same transition from terror to pleasure on purpose and regularly in both rehearsal and performance for decades thereafter.

I don’t know if the location of our pyrotechnic parties changed because the civic display was moved from Washington Park as the city grew, and other less crowded venues became available (which eventually was the case) or if it was a family event, like Grandpa Jess’s passing, that caused the Fourth to be celebrated elsewhere. But after those several years across from the park, my memories of fireworks are mostly set on the Lopin ranch in Cupertino.

My mother was the eldest of five children. They were raised on ten acres of fruit orchard their father planted around 1904 and in a house he put up in 1920 (and that replaced an earlier structure less modern). In the dining room hung formal portraits of my Lopin grandparents, pretty and handsome, my grandmother with a strange white mound on the top of her head that was identified by my Aunt Mary as a chrysanthemum, but only after years of my wondering what it was. My grandfather’s portrait revealed a face and upper body completely out of kilter; shoulders, ears, and eyes dislevel with each other in ways almost random, and nose out of alignment in the other direction. But he was nevertheless a pleasant looking man.

He died when I was six and my cousin Gail, his only other grandchild, was about ten, and I recall very little about him. The house was of a peculiar design that required passing through bedrooms to get to other bedrooms, and in which it never quite felt that any room, except kitchen and bath, was being used for its intended purpose. My grandfather lay dying in a small bedroom immediately off the kitchen – on the way to the bath, master bedroom, and other rooms of puzzling utility – and I remember clearly visiting him there. Gail did, too. She later told me that the day before he died, she came to see him and he kept pointing to the corner of the room.

“What are you pointing at, Grandpa?”

“He’s waiting there for me. What joy.” He wasn’t, by any report of his children, a religious man.

I was offered the opportunity to attend his funeral, but declined. When my mother returned home, she mentioned that Gail had asked after me, if I were okay, were going to come pay my respects. I felt a bit ashamed for not going.

“Gail cried.”

“She did? Why?”

“Because she missed Grandpa.”

“Oh.” I was too embarrassed to admit that I had thought she’d cried because I hadn’t come to the funeral. Always the center of the universe. Or maybe it was just a problem of syntax.

The yard behind the house was shaded by a huge pepper tree and two huge figs. The area beneath them was paved with concrete, and my uncle had built a rudimentary fire pit over which he grilled spicy sausage and chicken of his own production. It also served as a perfect staging ground for fireworks-stand pyrotechnics. They were simple confections – a little color, bright light, and sometimes a gentle whistle – but when Aunt Mary oo’ed, and Uncle Jack chuckled, and Dad said “that was a good one! Let’s see what this one’s like…” the Roman candles and sparklers took on epic proportions. They seemed in their simple, homey sincerity more than a fitting celebration of a nation’s bedrock principles.

But simple and homey didn’t come cheap, and the box I aspired to cost six dollars. It was worth it. It had Silver Fountains, and Vesuvius Volcanoes, Magic Serpents, Color Cones, and Cosmic Sparklers. So around Easter, my parents would start crediting my fireworks account ten cents for each time I did the dishes after supper, and if I was diligent, by July Fourth I could afford the six, maybe even the seven dollar collection.

Of course, although they pretended it was only for my amusement – those sparkly entertainments – and that was why I should earn the pleasure, I knew I was working for whoever showed up to share in shade and sausage while we waited for dark. And that was okay. Our collective enjoyment was always worth the suds and hot water. It brought us together, and the memories of those summer evenings of aromatic smoke and easy conviviality are priceless.

“And this is my grave. What do you think?”

“It’s nice,” I said admiringly of the sizable structure of polished stone.

“It’s big enough for the whole family. And look at the view.”

We turned together to admire the valley, rugged and dramatic. It was a fine panorama to lure and reward surviving family to come visit my cousin after he died.

I visited my living cousin twice in the 1970’s. He passed in the early eighties. Panorama notwithstanding, I never made it back to admire his grave once his body had taken up residence.

Pete Zarko was my father’s name. It was also the name of his first cousin who lived in California’s Santa Clara Valley for twenty years beginning in 1909. Both my father and his elder brother Tony adored Cousin Pete. In family circles, he was the stuff of legend.

Tony (aka Bill) and Marian, world travelers by disposition, went to Herzegovina in 1967, I think it was, to see Pete. Bill (aka Tony) could talk of almost nothing else for a year.

Petar Zarak – as he received his mail in Ravno – returned to Yugoslavia in 1929 to find a wife. The economic crash probably kept him there. He found a good partner in Stoja, however, and when I first met them in 1972, they radiated contentment. I had connected up with their son in Dubrovnik, and together we took the train to Ravno. The name of the town means “flat”. It’s a joke. The town clings to the side of a mountain.

In Ravno, we were invited to snack with other cousins, to whom I was related in ways too complicated for me to retain, then we went to a little park where a trail into the mountains began. The trail wound through the rocky landscape for about a kilometer, then it turned to a slightly beaten track, and finally it disappeared. At that point you had to have someone with you who knew the way, for no path could form on such terrain.

I had written Pete from the United States saying that I was going to visit “sometime after Easter”. It was now mid-July, I think. Technically, my estimated time of arrival was still correct, but there was no reason he should have been expecting me at that particular time. I had just contacted his son a couple of days before, and my cousins of unknown provenance had mentioned that Pete had not been to Ravno in almost a week. So it was that our group of three rounded the last bend in the invisible trail to the tiny village of Gaic, and there in its first of six houses, stood Pete in his front door and Stoja at the door to her summer kitchen.

“Well, now,” he said in perfect English, “who the devil might this be?” Stoja, to whom all English was jabber, and probably profane, wrapped me in an embrace made complex by the shawls and aprons she always wore. She smelled sweetly of wood smoke. She treated me to an embrace every few minutes the whole time I was there. By sunset I understood why Uncle Bill had made the trip, and why Pete was so adored.

Gaic nights were dark in 1972. There was no electricity, few people. The sky showed more stars than I thought were visible. The sound of silence was intense. Pete lit a lamp in the winter kitchen, and Stoja prepared a dinner of fried cheese preserved in olive oil, salad, and a kind of sausage. Pete sat with me on the sofa and asked questions.

“Is that vineyard still there, the one on Stevens Creek and Stelling?”

“No, that’s a community college now. In fact, I went there my freshman year.”

“That was the Beaulieu Winery, very beautiful place. I worked there sometime. Is Le Petit Trianon still there?”

“It needs restoration, but it’s still there. Behind the library.”

“Library?”

“It’s a college?”

“Oh yes. And there was Seven Springs Ranch, Bubb’s place, they’d hire me to prune. Wow, such a beautiful valley. Perfect conditions for agriculture. Spring water everywhere, rich soil, ideal climate. What a paradise.”

“Things have changed in the last twenty years.”

“That’s what Tony said. Hard for me to imagine.”

“For me, too.”

“And the winery on… what was it? They had a fire in October, 1923.”

And so it went every evening until we could remain awake no more. When he would run out of questions, he’d tell me stories from the Old Testament until a memory appeared, then ask more questions. Most I had no answers for. His knowledge of the valley was perfectly preserved from twenty years before I was born.

“Who do you speak English with? Someone else in Gaic, in Ravno?”

“I subscribe to Time Magazine. By the time it arrives, the news is a month old, but it tells me how the language changes, and helps me to remember it. Those were wonderful times. Your father and uncle, wonderful boys. Your grandmother, my goodness, the best cook in the world…” then, in case Stoja had somehow understood, “…except for my girlfriend, here,” and Stoja pretended to be annoyed and, in Croatian, accused him of swearing.

“Swearing! Hellfire and damnation! There, that’s your swearing!” and he laughed, and she laughed, and so did I.

I stayed four or five days that time. There are so many astonishing memories from that short visit, and I will parse a few out in subsequent posts. I returned in the spring of 1975 and stayed another few days. Electricity had arrived. There was a road in the village, vehicle-worthy, but a short way out of town it lost itself in the ruggedness of the terrain.

“They didn’t ask if we wanted to go anywhere,” mused Pete, “and they didn’t make it possible for us to go, even if we’d wanted to.”

My first trip to Europe in ’72 was largely by thumb, though I also took trains, planes, and boats when needed. My second in ’75 was spent mostly in Firenze, and I dropped down to visit family for a month towards the end. When I departed on that second journey, I left my Uncle Bill quite ill with cancer. He had been in the hospital for awhile, and when I saw him at home to say goodbye, I was convinced that we would not meet again in the flesh. As I was leaving, he called after me.

“You’ll see cousin Pete, won’t you?”

“I’m going to try.”

“See him. Tell him I said hello.”

“Okay.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

“And I want a hello back. Bring one back with you, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’m serious.”

I left home in late February, saw Pete and Stoja in May, returned to California in June. Uncle Bill called hours later.

“When you coming over to see me?”

“Tomorrow, maybe later today?”

“Right now, okay?” I could hear my aunt in the background, “He’s just off the plane, you know what that’s like, let him come tomorrow.”

“Okay, I’ll be right over.”

He looked good that day. He was dressed, and met me in the little unused, unfinished stump of Iowa Street that abutted their property to the north. The weather was beautiful. I imagined that he’d recovered. We shook hands, he smiled. “So, tell me all about cousin Pete,” and he took me into the backyard where we could sit, and I told him what I could remember while he asked questions.

A day or two later, he died.

Photo: amazingly a search on Gaic yielded a photo! The two levels of red roof to the far right was Petar and Stoja’s house. The road to nowhere was obviously extended and changes the look and connectedness of the entire village, but Gaic is essentially as I remember it.

My father build his own auto repair shop shortly after the war. It was quite a grand structure with an impressively engineered single barrel vault made of timber, and with room enough for six active repair bays. In front was an office, but as my mother performed official tasks and preferred to work at home, it was never used. Instead they rented it to Fred Brackenbury who repaired radios, then a bit later, televisions. Brackenbury had a sign painted over his entrance. Dad never painted a sign, but by the time I was about eight, I was pretty convinced that he was waiting to put one up that said “Zarko and Son”.

My parents bought the lot on the corner of Mathilda Avenue and El Camino Real in 1945. There was a house on it, built in 1925, and a large garden, probably a few fruit trees. They moved the house a half block away not long after to free the property for commercial use. My mother rode inside the breakfast room during the move, because as she said, “When else will I have the chance to ride a house?” She tried to get Dad to join her, but he thought that would be silly.

My father loved mechanics like I loved theatre. In about 1920, when they were in their teens, he and his brother, Tony (aka Bill) created a functioning motor vehicle out of discarded farm equipment. His first job was as a cleaner at Redwine Ford dealership in Mountain View. Maybe he couldn’t get his hands greasy pushing a broom, but at least he would be in the company of those who did.

By the end of the decade, he had formed a business partnership with a man named Frazier, and together they opened a Ford dealership of their own on Sunnyvale’s main street. Not bad for a farmer’s son. I’m sure that Frazier had a first name, but even though he was talked about regularly in our household, and years after the partnership dissolved in deference to performing war-essential work, I don’t remember ever hearing it. Willard! Okay, but hearing it was rare.

I suspect that being both a dealership and a repair shop encouraged a certain degree of order and cleanliness when there was a Frazier and Zarko, but once it was Pete Zarko’s Garage, he could revel in grease, and he did. I loved it, too, as a kid, all that caked, black goo. He’d put me to work scraping pans of some automotive purpose, and it was so satisfying to feel the thick resistance of a heavy layer of coagulated oil give way to the tool’s stout blade. Waste oil, and I believe even the goo, was stored in large cans and picked up weekly to be recycled. Oil was the gold of his enterprise, and he treated it with serious respect. He also thew the stuff that was too filled with particulate matter to be cleaned onto the ground behind the shop so he wouldn’t be bothered with weeds. I imagine that when the City turned the corner into a park, they had some serious environmental cleanup to do.

So, it was at about the age of eight that he first began inviting me to work with him when the family Ford needed mechanical attention. We started with simple things like cleaning spark plugs and distributors. Eventually, he taught me how to adjust timing, clean carburetors, change oil, and top off brake fluid. By the time I was twelve I was under the car with him when the clutch needed changing, adjusting brake drums, and doing other gloriously greasy work that I remember the fun of, but not the purpose.

Still, I knew in my gut that the sign Dad wanted to paint wasn’t going to happen. I enjoyed those times peering into engines and rolling around under a car. When he gave me clean up jobs, I did my best to exceed expectations, and tried my best to hide my disappointment at how quickly everything got messy again. And I admired the garage, loved my father, and was proud of his good reputation. But I didn’t relish mechanics. Didn’t even really like riding in a car all that much, let alone fixing one.

I started taking walks as soon as it was physically possible. I still remember exiting Grandma Zarko’s yard on the Waverly Street side, pushing open the white gate, and heading for parts unknown. A bemused neighbor asked where I was off to.

“I’m taking a walk,” I proclaimed. And I accomplished three houses before my mother discovered I was gone and came running after me. I walked to school in first grade. My grandmother’s house was a short distance from Adair Elementary, so it began with lunches, and quickly advanced to trooping home on my own, as well.

I vividly remember hiking after school – it had to have been first or second grade, because Mom was still driving the 1936 Ford Victoria – about to cross Iowa Street, when she pulled up, rolled down her window, and with a radiant smile offered me a ride.

“No! Can’t you see I’m walking!?” And I truculently crossed Iowa and stomped the few blocks home.

My love of walking is in my DNA, I guess. The same way that love of a humming engine was in Dad’s.

So, here we are, I’m maybe seventeen, and we’re giving the car a tune up. I am perhaps not pretending enthusiasm as strongly as I may have done a few years prior. I had been strongly lured by a theatrical siren, and grease was losing its charm. I harbored hopes that something besides my saying it would convince my father that I was not meant to follow in his footsteps.

We drain the oil pan. I take it to a waiting recycling barrel. Dad hands me the five-quart oil can to be filled from the new-oil barrel across the shop next to the restroom. I go. I fill it. The oil is transferred to the Ford engine. 

“Let’s top this sucker off just a little, I think it wants another half pint.” That’s his polite way of saying that I’d not filled the can. I sulk back to the new-oil barrel.

“Oh, my god! Oh, my god! Oh, my god!”

That was me. My Dad never got excited like that. However, this one time he did join me at trot.

I had left the tap open. There were now several gallons of liquid gold covering the floor from parts shelves to grease rack. Dad picked up two sheets of tin, inserted a funnel with a filter into the barrel, and without saying a word or casting blame, we scooped up as much oil as we could manage. The rest was sopped up under a layer of sawdust, and swept into a trash can.

I could see the sign saying Zarko and Son falling into a disorderly heap in front of my father’s garage. It wasn’t a sin, what I’d just done, but it sure as heck was a signal, and Dad read it as clearly as I had hoped it would.

There were still many hours spent together leaning over fenders and scooting under transmissions, but now we did it because… well, that’s what we did together. When Dad retired early so he could work on his antique autos, he sold the business to his longtime employee, Louie, and no sign of any kind was ever painted for Zarko’s Garage. When Louie retired, the City bought the land, and for a brief period before it was a bank (for a period even briefer) I imagined what an interesting theatre it would make.

I never knew my paternal grandfather, Vito. 

There is a tradition in the part of Croatia my family has its roots in. The first born son is named after his father’s father, the first born daughter after her mother’s mother, then you switch sides and do it again. Child number five’s name is therefore left up to the imaginations of the parents. My mother was first of five and duly named Ann. The youngest, unbound by tradition, was called Dragutin. He hated the name, and went by Martin from his high school days on. His siblings didn’t much care for it either and called him Babe until the day he died.

So, it was expected of my parents to name me Vito. My father suggested that if I were a boy I be called Marko, and if a girl, Zorka. He was joking, which was not very helpful. So, my nomination was basically up to my mother. She took this quandary into the hospital with her, gave birth to my nameless self, and remained undecided right to the last minute. Desperate for inspiration, she turned to her roommate who had also just given birth.

“What did you call yours? I just can’t come up with anything!”

“David Allen.”

“Oh, that’s nice. How many L’s?”

“Two. It’s my maiden name.”

It was thus I became known as David Allan.

A few days later, my parents were faced with the task of presenting me to my father’s mother, a strong woman and a traditionalist.

“What did you name him?”

“David,” my mother gulped.

“Good. I was afraid you’d break the rule.”

Something my folks had both missed growing up; Vito is the equivalent of Dave.

Vito, the elder, died a few months after my parents married. His widow was so distraught, she reportedly begged her usually pliant son to move in with her – oh, bring the wife with you – for a few months while she adjusted. Ten years, a depression, and a world war later they finally were able to move out. I believe it came down to my mother’s giving Dad a choice between her and her mother-in-law. 

Vito was, by all reports an exceptionally kind man. He was tall with flowing mustaches and wore a white ten-gallon hat. When his wife would deny one of his sons some spending money, the boy would find a gold coin in a shoe the next morning. I recently wonder if Dad moved Mom into enemy territory not because his mother need comforting, rather because he did. His younger brother already lived at home, my grandmother – who was a strong woman – had the company she needed. Many of us carry our parents with us long after their death, but I’m not sure he ever reconciled the grief he held for his father.

Another Croatian tradition; the man rarely marries before age 35, and his bride is usually about 20. In a rural society, this generational overlap works to everyone’s advantage. The man has a younger wife to help him in old age, the woman has grown children. My grandfather was 38 when he married, my grandmother was 18. Perhaps in asking my parents to move in with her, she was merely claiming her expected prerogative. Her twenty-seven year old childless son came with a wife who could be pressed into helping around the house. Her elder son already had two daughters. Her youngest son was in his early twenties and modern. She chose the most practical alternative. And the path of least resistance.

She seemed to have had a good instinct as to which son would be the most compliant, and which would feel Vito’s absence most keenly, which would do his best to fill the hole that was left behind by his father’s passing.

Or maybe Dad offered to move back in with his mother and represented it to his new wife as a request. And maybe he heard a request when it was no more than a widow’s lament – “I will be so lonely”. History is hard to unravel. Family history all the more so for everyone believes themselves to be primary source.

In 1910, while still working as a tenant farmer for the Willson family, Vito entered a contest and won a bicycle. His six-foot four frame and tall hat was enhanced in its romantic stature by state-of-the-art transportation. “He rode it until it wore out,” my father reported. “I was three when he won it, and still remember how proud he was.” Ten or twelve years later Dad and my uncle Tony created a motorized vehicle scrapped together from discarded farm equipment. I imagine Vito was proud of that, too, and that he provided his sons the cash to buy the few parts not rescued from a neighbor’s junk pile.

I wish I had known my namesake.

As a lad I was quite dedicated to the Blessed Mother. Even though I’m no longer a practicing Catholic, I still experience a devotion to her, it’s just different now.

My parents rarely went to a social function without me, and when they did, it rarely lasted beyond my bedtime, so a sitter, usually from the family, would be all that was necessary. On January 20, 1962 my parents went somewhere unusual or far away, I guess, and I was invited to spend the night with Aunt Marian and Uncle Bill. When I spent overnight time with relatives, it was almost always with Aunt Mary and Uncle Jack, so this was special. 

Their house was also special – or maybe all houses are when you’re a kid. It was a sprawling “U” shape of Marian’s design that embraced a courtyard with a brick barbecue and a hanging light fixture made from an old wagon wheel. There was a large living room with a grand stone fireplace and a picture window, an ample dining room, and a huge eat-in kitchen. The master bedroom was in front (the house was generously set back from the street) while Shirley and Linda’s bedroom was in back, and included a number of really cool builtins. My cousins were living on their own by then, so I got to stay in their room. I can still remember Marian tucking me in that night. I can still remember how happy I was to be there. And I can still remember praying to Mother Mary for snow. 

What prompted that particular plea, I don’t know for certain, though I do have a dim memory of Marian (who hailed from Indiana and knew about such things) saying to my folks as they departed on the front porch that the air felt like snow. But everyone had laughed, so that I took it at all seriously… Well, maybe it was just the idea; staying over in a special place, then to wake the next morning to a winter snowscape, well that would be just fine.

And so I prayed like I’d never prayed before that it would snow. In Sunnyvale, California that had not seen snow in thirty years.

I woke early, just as light was beginning to glow. The color of the dawn seeping through the shades was distinctive, odd, exciting. My pulse picked up. I wondered if anyone else were awake. Should I go into the living room, see what lay beyond the picture window? Would that disturb anyone? If my prayer had been answered, would it matter if I woke the rest of the household? I mean, that would be a very big deal. 

I was still debating the ethics of a guest being the one to herald the day, when my aunt cracked the door open.

“Are you awake?”

“Sort of.”

“Well, you might want to get up, now. There’s a surprise.”

I bounded out of bed and into my robe and probably almost knocked Marian over in the hall as I ran to look outside. There it was. Their vast lawn was a sea of sparkling white. The trees looked like a Christmas card. The street was still pure and untrammeled.

“Call Mommy and Daddy!”

“They called me. Your mother likes to be up early. She thought you’d want to see this.”

I crossed myself a dozen times once Marian left for the kitchen (she was Congregationalist, I wasn’t sure she would understand). 

Uncle Bill was already outside, sweeping down the driveway so when my folks got there, they’d have a place to park. Marian made hot chocolate. That morning was, like, the best a kid could ask for. 

Marian and Bill took regular trips – well, to all over the world, but that’s a future story – to Lake Tahoe, so even though Bill was a Sunnyvale boy, he knew about driving in icy conditions and such. For Mom and Dad it was the first time for snow since 1932.

I’ve since lived in the northeastern United States, lived there for thirty years. I imagine myself as being over the thrill of snow, though – especially from inside a warm house – I must admit it as one of the most extravagant events nature has to offer. And it’s good to remember being a kid, and what it was like for a meteorological anomaly to be so extraordinarily exhilarating.

We drove all over town. Everything was transformed. Marian pointed out houses with melted patches on their roofs. Their occupants were up and stirring; they had turned on the heat.

“Now see, how wonderful it is to have someone with us with experience of snow,” cooed my mother. Marian was a teacher, and a good one, too. Mom could not have issued a better invitation. We were, from that point, regaled with stories of horse-drawn sleighs and of skating on frozen ponds back in Indiana. The magic for this boy was thick.

It was still early when my folks and I got home. We lived across from the city hall, a modern complex of handsome, shed-like buildings surrounded by artificial hills and valleys of lawn. Snow sat untouched on all of it, except for one set of footprints that ran up the steepest hill and down again at an angle.

“Maryanne.”

Our neighbor’s granddaughter was about my age. We were old friends, and I liked her a lot. But she was so infuriatingly impulsive. Could she not have waited a few hours at least before she marred the pristine beauty of our view?

An hour later we were both on that lawn throwing snowballs at each other.

Photo: snow at the Lopin ranch, 1932