Nobody else who’ll be suiting up inside Lucas Oil Stadium tonight has made anything approaching the odyssey that Mesko has made from an ancient city near the Hungarian border to Queens to Twinsburg, Ohio, to Ann Arbor, Mich., to Foxborough.
“This is something I dreamed of when I was a kid in high school watching Tom Brady, that it would be amazing,’’ he said. “Now that I get to do it, it’s something really mind-blowing.’’
Twenty-two winters ago, Mesko and his parents Mihai and Elizabeta lived through the upheaval that accompanied the collapse of the Ceausescu regime and threw the country into turmoil.
“My parents told me about us lying down on Christmas Eve and bullets flying through our apartment,’’ said Mesko, who then was 3 years old. “That’s what I remembered from stories and I started visualizing that. So, is it a memory or not?’’
When hyperinflation set in, his parents’ upper-middle class lifestyle vanished. “They were making $100 a month each,’’ Mesko said. “The first couple of days you’re just spending it on groceries and that’s it.’’
America was a fantasy until his father got lucky with the green-card lottery in 1997. “He came in with a huge envelope saying, ‘Hey, Elizabeth, I’ve got to show you something,’ ’’ Mesko recalled. “My mom thought it was another cockroach in the kitchen or something. It ended up being our chance to get interviewed in Bucharest and have the opportunity to come over and become citizens. Right off the bat I thought, I’m going, there’s no question about it. I had this image of America from the movies watching the Ninja Turtles and Rambo and all that. All dubbed in German, by the way.’’
