Nea Fane – Un Biet Român Pripășit în America / A Hapless Romanian Stuck in The US

Once upon a time, a young family moved to Brooklyn, New York.

It was meant to be temporary, just for a year. A school year. A quick detour in the grand plan of life. They had come from Staten Island, uprooting their son from the only school he had ever known and dropping him into a new one where he was promptly bullied by two overweight Russian kids and surrounded by complete strangers instead of old friends. Meanwhile, he was pushed to study like a maniac to pass the entrance exam for a middle school for gifted children. In Brooklyn, of course, hence the school transfer.

A heroic effort, successful, but all for nothing. The family was already planning to buy a house and move to Arizona.

Looking back more than twenty years later, they’re still trying to reverse-engineer the logic behind that bit of strategic brilliance.

To complicate things further, the young mother was going through a hormonal roller coaster. Imagine Brownian motion, but with more mood swings and fewer predictable patterns, for reasons we shall respectfully skip over. Add to that a promotion at work which, in true Eastern European tradition, managed to make her both proud and permanently on edge. She was anxious at work, nervous on the way home, and then nervously anxious again while recounting the day’s workplace injustices to her family, furious that nobody reacted with the proper outrage.

Needless to say, this routine took a toll on the child. The father tried to keep him sane, but his efforts were starting to feel futile. The most common question in the house became, “I wonder what sort of mood Mom will be in when she gets home today?”

One day, heartbroken by his son’s quiet dread, the father blurted out:

“See where the little cloud is!”

“Huh?” the boy asked.

“You know, like in cartoons? When someone’s angry, a dark cloud appears above their head and just hangs there following them around with lightning bolts and thunder? So here’s the plan: keep an eye on the subway entrance. If you see sunlight and calm, great. It’s safe. But if that dark little cloud shows up, maybe just go take a long walk around the block.”

The laugh that followed was pure joy, a deep, belly-shaking, eye-sparkling, rolling laughter.

And just like that, the daily madness became a little more bearable. Or at least a bit easier to forecast.

Any resemblance to real persons is entirely intentional.