A photo of Melvina McCormick's parents, Veronica and Eli Morrison, on their wedding day. Both immigrants from Romania, Veronica was 15 and Eli was 24 when they were married.

“Gabriel’s leather shoes slapped along the pavement as he strode swiftly out to the docks, his ticket and suitcase clutched in his hands. He reached the queue with but moments to spare, passing his ticket over to a surly attendant for inspection before walking up the gangway and stepping foot onto the slightly swaying deck of the large steamer. He made himself comfortable on the port side, leaning on the railing there and passing his eyes over the metropolis that had been his home for the past few years. It was a glorious, busy, decadent city, one that he had grown to love, but one that never completely felt like home. It lacked something and there was no mystery as to what…

His wife.

His son, Nick.

His two beautiful daughters, Anna and Veronika.

He had planned on bringing them here, but his most recent letter and any his wife may have sent as well weren’t making it through the blockade of the Balkan War with the Ottomans.”

“A few miles from the Statue of Liberty, a woman, Eva, clutched the hands of her two daughters and kept a close eye on her son standing next to her as they all took in the sight of the stately woman rising from her island and announcing their long-awaited arrival to America.

The new land of prosperity.

And her husband.

Father of her children.”

Melvina McCormick, 83, of Warren, said “Two Ships,” the story her grandson, Andrew Sisk, wrote is “strange because it was true.”

McCormick’s grandmother, Eva, never found her husband in America, and her grandfather never came back. After making the trip from Daia, a small village in Romania, in 1911, Eva eventually settled with her three children and remarried.

McCormick’s mother was 4 when they made the trip.

“I’m a first generation American,” McCormick said. “I’m grateful beyond measure that my grandmother came here to this country. It means everything to me.”

Sisk, 25, of Wisconsin, usually writes anything from fantasy and science fiction to romance and drama, often doing writing prompts from social media site Reddit. He wrote “Two Ships,” the short story of his great-great-grandfather departing New York as his great-great-grandmother arrived, for McCormick, who always encouraged him to read, he said.

“She really enjoys reading what I write, so I wanted to write something for her that is unique,” Sisk said.

He said an aunt recently mentioned the story of his great-great-grandparents, and he researched the time period to create the short story of passing ships and chasing the American Dream.

“I think it’s the enduring part of the American Dream. No matter how bad things get politically, whatever the case may be — COVID-19 — we’re still here. People keep coming. (It’s) the American sense of always doing better, whatever the case may be,” Sisk said.

THE AMERICAN DREAM

Even without her maternal grandfather, McCormick’s family lived the American Dream.

McCormick’s father also came to America from a different small village in Romania. Elie Manarazan became Eli Morrison at Ellis Island. He met McCormick’s mother, Veronika Ghiorghin, at the boarding house her family ran, McCormick said.

Veronika went to grade school. Eli came to America at 17 and had no schooling here, but learned to speak English nonetheless, McCormick said. Eli worked at Ohio Corrugating.

The Morrisons raised their five children on Romanian food and in the Romanian Orthodox church. Romanian was spoken in the house until McComick’s oldest sister went to school and couldn’t speak English, McCormick said.

“I think that’s when my parents began to speak the (English) language, I think for us,” McCormick said.

Still, she grew up enjoying picnics at a place called the Romanian Gardens, where there would be Romanian music and her parents would meet up with their Romanian friends.

Romanian weddings were “legendary,” McCormick said.

“When I got married, my father started three weeks before the wedding and he had this big barrel in the basement where he put the cabbage leaves and every three days he would go down there and he would take the lid off and that smell would just permeate through the whole neighborhood. It was Godawful,” McCormick said. “But, he made the best stuffed cabbage you’ll ever taste in your life.”

McCormick said she was never discriminated against for being the child of immigrants.

“There was no discrimination — none whatsoever. I think everybody just wanted a part of the American Dream and was willing to work as hard as they could to get it.”

When McCormick was 6, her only brother, Nickolas, 19, was killed in action in Italy in June of 1944, during World War II. The “total devastation” of the loss changed the family forever.

“That’s one of the reasons it means so much to be an American,” McCormick said. “Why shouldn’t I embrace it and love it and wish everybody else did too?”

LEGACY

“They may not have reconnected in life, but their children lived on and had children of their own, becoming a part of the American Dream…

They would reunite in the next.

Happy and proud as they watched their line grow and prosper.”

McCormick and her husband, Dan, now deceased, had three daughters and a son, and now McCormick has four grandchildren as well — all boys. Her family lives all over the country, and she visits them often.

“We’re all grateful,” McCormick said. “I tell my kids I’m the luckiest person on the planet. I think I am.”

McCormick first read Sisk’s “Two Ships” out loud this Mother’s Day. She said it was an “emotional” experience.

“I couldn’t believe that he took a true story and put such a spin on it,” McCormick said.

McCormick said that while they didn’t know what happened to her grandfather, the family always assumed he went back to Romania.

“Where else would he go?” McCormick said. “Sure, he went there thinking they were there, thinking they hadn’t left yet.”

Sisk said he hopes his great-great-grandfather is “watching on with some pride.”

“It’s a good way to look at the future,” Sisk said. “We don’t necessarily get to see it — he obviously wasn’t around to see it, but we’re here, and my grandma and family…it all started with him, obviously.”

“Two ships, one departing, one arriving.

A family split between the two.

Hope alive in both parts, for the future, for their children.”

avugrincic@tribtoday.com