Last night I walked into a bar, the Hideaway West, to celebrate the end of a nice, tough workweek in which I racked up some needed overtime. At the bar was one of my neighbors at Northern Chateau Apartments, and someone I’d never met. That someone was doing parlor tricks on the bar surface. He had an accent that sounded Russian-but-not.

He took a cigarette, drew three circles around it with his finger, and then drew his finger away from the cigarette–and the cigarette followed the finger. (Trick: gently blow on the cigarette.) He put a quarter under a glass and got it out from under without touching the glass. (Trick: ask, “Is it still there?” and when the unwitting accomplice lifts the glass to see, THEN move the quarter.)

But some time later, after the tricks and puzzles were played out, he told me about his escape from Romania in 1989 to Yugoslavia and then a refugee camp–and then later returning to become a “coyote,” helping others escape.

I told him I’d once had a co-worker who grew up in post-revolutionary Cuba, who had memories of the family huddled around a barely-audible radio, listening to broadcasts from the “free world,” knowing that if caught their punishment would be severe, perhaps fatal. “I too,” said the Romanian, sadness in his eyes.

What is “freedom,” anyway? Sometimes we can only look at examples of repression and reprisal and know what is not freedom. But last night it became clear to me that I can learn more about freedom from those who have taken fate in their hands, regardless of possible consequence, and pulled themselves free.