People puzzle over my last name. No one’s sure how to pronounce it. Syllables are added and subtracted, spellings are randomized by phonetics. “C as in Cat, E, D as in dog,” I’ll say, and the first letter people write down will still be “S.” It’s not a common name. It’s Slovenian.

This morning, on what would have been my grandmother’s 94th birthday, I arrived back in Prague from a weekend trip to Slovenia. I visited Bled, and Ljubljana (the city her parents were from, but a city she–nor any of her children–ever got to visit). Though I was only there for 36 hours or so, the trip was more meaningful than I could have imagined. The country’s population is half of that of the city of Prague; I am apparently one of only about 400,000 cultural Slovenians living outside the country.

Here is my grandma on her stoop in Brooklyn, circa 1922:

She’d lost both of her parents by the time she was seven. Despite having been born and raised in Brooklyn, she was a Giants fan and then, after they moved to California, a Yankees fan.  She had two signature shirts that I loved seeing her wear. In huge letters, one said “FUN,” and the other said “RELAX.” Two notions hard to come by in her childhood, but two important values I’m grateful she taught me.