Re-creating my life

...an excerpt from a journal of July 7, 1990, because some moments are worth remembering. My husband and I unlock the tandem from its spot on the front porch, carrying it down the front steps. The day promises to be a hot one, but we’re out early. It’s a great day for a ride. We head down the alley, take a left on 25th, and then a right on Capitol, which has a decent bike lane. At 16th, we take a right and head north towards the bike trail access point. While we’re on the city streets, it’s difficult to get a rhythm going with our pedal strokes, but once we’re on the bike trail, we stretch out. I feel myself relax into the pace of our journey. On a one-speed tandem, it sometimes takes more effort to go up a hill than a bike with gears would, but no matter. We aren’t racers and are out this morning to enjoy the day and each other.   So much history for us on this trail. As college students at Sac State (CSU Sacramento), we lived first at Riverbridge Apts., right off the Guy West Bri...

  Who am I? Where did I come from? What am I experiencing now? What do I hope for the future? First things first. Where did I come from? It's been a 40-year project, finding the answers to that. No, I wasn't adopted; I knew who my parents were and my grandparents and I was even lucky enough to meet my great-grandparents on both sides. But that amount of information made me wonder: who were their parents? In the late 1980s, when I was in my teens, I asked my paternal grandma, “Who were our ancestors and where did they come from?” Of course, I knew that that side of the family was Czech, but I wanted more detail. What were their names? Where in Czechoslovakia did they live? When did they come to the U.S.? She told me, “The records are all behind the Iron Curtain. Many of them were destroyed in the war, so we’ll never know.” I remember feeling so disappointed.  The war she was referring to was World War II. The Iron Curtain referred to the fact that the Soviet Union (the Union o...