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My church was having a food-and-clothing drive. In the church hall, beneath a crucified Christ on the wall, volunteers sorted old jeans, shirts, and blouses on long tables and loaded canned goods into boxes. Then my dad and I got in our station wagon and drove down Detroit’s Grand River Avenue. He told me that we were bringing good to a family of Yugoslav refugees who’d escaped across the Adriatric Sea in a small boat. They’d fled the communist government, my dad said. I was ten and had no idea what he was talking about.
We arrived at a two-story brick house. Through the screen door I could see an old couch and some nonmatching chairs. We knocked, and a large man in a sweaty T-shirt and suspenders answered. Behind him in the kitchen, a woman stirred a pot on the stove. The man smiled and said something in a strange language. Then he pointed to himself and said, “Yuri.”
My dad pointed to himself and said, “Marr,” then to me and said, “Georgie, my son.”
Yuri pointed to a boy my size behind him and said, “Tomas.”
My dad and I unloaded the boxes from our car as Yuri laughed and called to his kids. Two girls, a little younger than I, helped their mother organize the boxes in the kitchen. I wanted to hurry up and go. These people and their house full of castoff furniture were too foreign for me.
After the car had been unloaded, my father, his golf shirt now smeared with dirt, stood on the porch, smiling and declining a bowl of soup as we prepared to leave. I looked at Tomas and imagined his journey from Yugoslavia like something from a movie: His family riding in a car, afraid they would be stopped by authorities. A tall soldier in uniform with a clipboard and a cigarette. The family crossing the dark ocean at night, praying to the same Jesus whose image hung on the wall of my church.
Tomas went on to learn English and attend high school with me. I saw him around the campus, tall and stocky like his father. When I passed him on the steps, I didn’t think, He’s the refugee from Yugoslavia. He had thoroughly arrived in American by then.
Thirty years later Tomas spoke at our high-school reunion. His name tag identified him as a doctor. Later he stopped me in the hall of the hotel, where we were both escaping the noise of a loud band covering (badly) the hits of the mid-‘60s. “My family still prays for your father,” he said to me. “For your family. For what you did for us.”
-- George Taylor, “Readers Write: Immigrants,” The Sun, November 2008
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