Attachments
an excerpt

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Nicholas was born and raised in Long Grove, Illinois. His father, Andrej Stopec, came from the coastal municipality of Koper in present-day Slovenia. In Andrej’s early adulthood, after the end of the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia and Tito’s establishment of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, he returned from a period of time in nearby Trieste, which had been recently annexed by Italy, to his father’s farm outside of Koper. His father had passed away the day after the Luftwaffe had begun bombing Belgrade, on Palm Sunday in 1941, and the neglected farm had fallen into unrecoverable disrepair, the worst loss being that of his father’s numerous Carniolan honeybee hives, apparently stolen. After a short time, Andrej moved back to Trieste to find work, and soon met the young woman who would become his wife: Anke, a German student on vacation. Andrej fell immediately and deeply in love with Anke, and on the very same day they had met proposed marriage to her, or begged to at least return with her to Germany. Anke, who was quite different than the type of person who made such bold and swift declarations, and who never admitted, until years later, to feeling any sort of love towards Andrej, merely told him that returning to Germany with her was not possible, because she planned to move to America, to live with her cousin in the state of Illinois. Somehow, Anke didn’t strongly object to his joining her on that journey, so Andrej sold his farm and the two were on a ship in the Atlantic within a month. Six years later, on a farm northwest of Chicago, their only son Nicholas was born.
If there existed a person who could have closely watched Nicholas’ life, from earliest childhood through to the present, that person would have no doubt noted the unbelievable steadiness of his personality. Despite the large changes in society, in political and popular culture, the steady explosion of technology amidst which he entered the world, the weave of chance personal relationships and the entire giving and taking of learning and aging in the evolving world through the length of a lifetime, his Person, evident as a baby, changed remarkably little, even less-so than most people’s.
This theoretical observer would have watched a toddler running straight to the small lawn at his parents’ vegetable and honey farm, plopping down and picking blades of grass to stick into his mouth or drop into the breeze, only to be distracted by a cat, or a nearby bird, or his own feet. He or she would have seen how a boy left alone for hours in a room entertained himself, something his parents had never been able to guess. And that omniscient person would have seen a young student’s grades suffer at times, despite an intelligence that exceeded his classmates’, except when by chance some subject would excite him into an impressive bout of studiousness and an instant and deep understanding beyond his age and education. But no such observer existed.
Andrej and Anke died within a year of each other when Nicholas was twenty years old, leaving yet another population of Carniolan bees to disappear unguarded, stolen from their Long Grove farm during the second funeral Nicholas had attended in eight months, this one his widowed mother’s. After finishing a Bachelor’s degree in Biology, with a minor in English literature, at Western Illinois University, Nicholas found employment as a clerk in the City of Chicago Department of City Planning after a short but intense foray into the history of urban planning, which had been ignited by a casual browse of his local library. Chicago government jobs required Chicago citizenship, so he rented an apartment in the northwest neighborhood of Norwood Park. Though his interest in urban planning was abandoned for one in Japanese etchings, followed by World War I era aviators, then turn-of-the-century anarchists, Spanish cuisine, the letters of John Muir, heirloom tomatoes, innovations of the Incans, Russian literature, Baron Corvo, the Golden Ratio, and countless other personal fads of study, he remained employed by various City departments for nearly three decades.
Nicholas met Catherine at a museum photo exhibit of the Irish famine and Irish immigrants to Chicago and the two were married two years later. Nicholas had immediately proclaimed his profound love for her in the midst of gaunt Irishmen boarding ships in Galway Bay, and she, in essence, shrugged and spent her life with him. The striking similarity of this beginning to his parents’, and coincidentally to Catherine’s parents’, was known by nobody.