On Finding a Grave in Cleveland

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My grandmother had died in Cleveland, and nobody in my family most of them living in Croatia and none in the States knew where her grave was. I couldn't find the records in the downtown library in Cleveland. I visited the old house on Carry Avenue where she used to live, between 55th and 60th Street, one block toward the Lake Erie from St. Claire Avenue. Before the second world war, the block had burned down on one end of the street because the gas tanks there exploded and many Slovenes and Croats who lived on the street were killed. Now, at one end of the street, there was a new park, Grdina Park, after a Slovenian priest by the same name who had buried many of the industrial victims. Grd means ugly, so the park has been appropriately named Ugly. Even twenty-five years ago, when I visited the States for the first time, the neighborhood, as the first sight of the glorious country for me, a Balkan provincial, appalled me. Rusty factories with shattered windows, orange-brown rails overgrown in weeds, houses with caving porches. The old Croats and Slovenes spoke a strange language, a mixture of English and Croatian, and both languages were ungrammatical, or in a way, they had their own grammar: Cronglish, or Slonglish, one could name the language if there were enough people speaking it. And there, in that neighborhood, my grandfather had worked and wasted his health, acquiring chronic bronchitis in a screw factory, along with many of his compatriots. According to letters Cleveland immigrant workers sent to Croatia at the beginning of the century, the smoke arising from more than a thousand chimneys was so heavy that one could rarely see the sky. My grandfather of course did not have a car, and he walked home from work. On one such walk he saw a girl playing in a yard, liked her, walked up to the door, rang the bell, and asked the