My eyes were dimmed by the shadows cast in the monastery. Such small places pop up unexpectedly in Symi The island, Odysseus’ stop, or should have been if Homer had spelled it right before they changed it that is; the name of the island in other words wasn’t Symi during the time of the Trojan War. The island had a king and a royal family and they lived in the Castro probably according to what I figured out, but who cares. I come from Symi and I wish the place was swallowed up by a volcano. Such absolute beauty unearthly beauty has no right to exist, right? You’ll have to bear with me reader, you see I was also I believe abused. By my mother, but does that matter? Do I have the right, since I feel so completely put upon, do I have the right to tell the world that my mother abused me. Emotional abuse because of my brother’s attempted physical abuse, retaliated by my mother’s behavioral customs dictated by eons of civilization.

I’m here in Symi praying in the monastery of Saint Nikitas, high, higher in a mountain grotto, away from all civilization, built by saints; they had to have been saints, unbelievable to have built such a place without roads, rough terrain that billy goats have trouble navigating. The doors that shield the altar have a strange pyramid on the top. In the center of the pyramid is the eye, an actual eye, the eye of God. I am mesmerized. I accept it, without question, I am questioning it now because I am old and tired and burned out with civilization.

Mati, that’s what we call it. The eye. Is it mother’s eye, is she God. No, of course not, God is male. The eye of God on the altar is God’s eye. It isn’t mother looking at you, spying on you, catching you being weak. Language is ridiculous!

Today we went to Xysos. Xysos is a rather large tract of land situated between the monastery of Michael and the monastery of Myrtayiotissa to the Virgin. My uncle, my mother’s younger brother, who also shares with me ambivalent feelings about his sister, my mother, acquired the land from his wife who got it from her family. It was like most of Symi is, a large tract of granite, boulders, rocks and walled terraces. Walled by saints, who else would have such patience, stone laid upon stone in perfect metric harmony surrounding acre after acre of land. My uncle has worked single-mindedly on that land for the past fifty years. You should hear my mother berating him for wasting so much time on that land, worthless she said it is. He, on the other hand, says that he toiled for forty-eight years to cultivate, build on it and to improve it. For him it was like showing respect to his wife. My mother was just jealous of his obvious love for his wife. You see, he was given other property by his father and mother, that he could have devoted so much time to improving.

His main source of income from Xysos was his harvest of honey. At first, he read about the bees, and, of course, being in competition with his older brother Vasily, who also kept bees as his father, and grandfather before him. My uncle Nicholas, the owner of Xysos, keeps bees in straight paths in Xysos. He built a refinery to process the honey. He has the bee suits and the cannery. It’s amazing how the bees swarm around him as he deprives them of their food. Since I am spending the day here, he treats me to the actual process of harvesting honey from mountain, sugar fed bees. I was impressed and very respectful in distancing myself from his precious bees. His wife and I kept company in front of a very American looking fireplace, practical and functional. My uncle Nicholas, the owner of Xysos, that my mother puts down, has tilled, planted trees and his newest addition has been a modern compact yet impressive monastery dedicated to the Archangel Rafael. Also a separate building, similar in design, square, compact, precise, providing a comfortable dwelling including a private shower and bathroom were added on to the house. He has kept both the monastery and the house closed and boasts that they belong to his son who lives in Rodos. The rest of Xysos which also includes his home, a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom, separate warehouses for his bees, and, of course, a separate carpentry shed is nestled within his terraces of almond, pear, plum, grapes, fig, prickly pears and other trees and spices native to the island. This part of Xysos belongs to his other son George, who drove us there in his pick-up truck, and, of course, helped his Dad to cut the honey, our main reason for agreeing to this excursion. I stayed safely far enough watching as they smoked the bees by igniting pine needles and cone. The smell was comforting even for me as it was really meant to subdue the bees and to keep their swarming to a manageable height. The honey was delicious. I got some. I talked to his wife, I noticed she wore a mati, a round blue stone with an eye pressed glass, really. Why didn’t I think to look for the Eye of God at the doors to his altar to the archangel Rafael? Because the whole island is merged, quiet grottos masquerading as shrines to the Virgin Mary, or to Archangels and occasionally another male saint, like a George pops up. But I am searching for my mother, the one who dragged me without my permission I might add across the world to Ohio of all places and left me like an uprooted fig tree to fend for myself. I looked home. I went home to find my mother, where she came from, what made her what she was. They were all my relatives and they were not my relatives. They were a poem. Oh, by the way, I do write poetry. I came back from Greece with a poem titled 29. My husband was born April 29, if that means anything and. of course, it must mean something, doesn’t it?

The sea was having fun in the twilight of the sun.
Father, do you beckon? My mind Yearns to
Relinquish years of childish chains and reason.
Father if only you had not thrown us aside at
Birth, made us leaves your wide cool breast, forced
Us on to Mother to Feed and rest, treating us like guests,
Fearing your anger, welcoming your mirth.
I could join you if you swear a giant fin would soon appear.
At the touch of water, I Would again be your daughter.
It would be sad, I think, to release myself only to find Sinking
Like a boulder, deep into your bowels, meat for salmon and lovely trout.

I looked home and I became as deeply hypocritical as all the other Greeks, am I Greek? I was born there. Predestination that leads the Greek to the American is an oddity in itself, but that road that leads from Symi to Campbell, Ohio, USA, and there to the beaches of Clearwater, Florida, USA. and the fountains waiting to be touched by an angel is the creation of the new from the Elgin marbles of the gods. The totality of who we are can never be measured: detract our nakedness and day soon, and you will perceive the blushing seeds of a love that began in Symi, centuries ago, rise like a godhead in Ohio.

The desert nurtured the seed of our annihilation and the elixir grew quietly on a mountain and the rock cast into the pit. We were haunted by a tenth street beggar because a German molester went untried. Our breathe is the culmination of forty years in the desert. It bears fruit that decays like the droning of bees from death into honey. A puff crystallized mirrors eternity. This is a crystal. A Greek man named Sam Katronis, which he later changed to Kartton (a concession probably in fear of American discrimination) having come to New York from Symi in 1949 on an ocean liner immediately after trying to exist on the profits of his cashed in gold coins, miraculously made his way to Akron, Ohio, USA, where he barely escaped with his skin after being attacked by a group of irate Greek cooks and their whores. Always fearful of contacting a contagious disease (you see, readers, he had miraculously been cured at the Monastery of Panormitis while cursed with crabs, I guess, since he wasn’t talking, after he painted the entire monastery for free) he fled from the Brown Top Inn and took refuge in a bustling Greek mill town banked by railroads and the Mahoning River. Being of an adventurous, fearless sort amidst the turbulence of ungrounded Greeks, drifting like vagrant sages in a sea of dark places and barbarian dialects, he soon settled in a home run by a Kalymian Greek and her husband.

Within four years from his arrival from Greece, he had mastered the English tongue well enough to get his citizenship and send for his wife and four children. In the meantime, he had charmed his fellow Greeks with his gift of storytelling and his flair with painting. Being a master painter with a precarious temper from his home island, his new friends swallowed him up whole because he was also a gullible egotist and a profound adherent of fair play at the point of endangering his own life. But he painted like Michelangelo and they forgave his outbursts until his family arrived in New York on the ship The New Greece on its last voyage crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

The Greek for that was what he was known immersed himself in his children and his wife and for several years things went smoothly until one day his wife was called on the telephone and told that her husband was in the hospital and injured. She saw him lying broken on a gurney. Five years, at least, she had waited, patiently, to see him again and now after all those years of heartache and the terrors of the open sea, he was there broken. The only thing unshattered was the look in his eyes, a blinding, careless anger that had led to one misadventure after another. This was the legacy that he bequeathed to his children. His wife began to grow herself in quiet, furtive ways until his death, eight years later from complications of cancer. She was a woman in whom all the dominant genes of centuries of island breeding had surfaced. She was my mother. When their lives had settled to her husband being a permanent, home bound creature, she discovered that what she wanted to do more than anything was to learn to bake bread and her island specialties like voutiraenna. At home, on the island, no one baked at home. There were several bakeries scattered like carefully engineered planning and preparing fresh bread each and every day regardless of plenty or war.

She mastered the art of making bread, rich, crusty, browned loaves fragrant and bursting aromatically when cut and the white perfectly raised loaf was smothered with her own preserves. But what she wanted most and never found was the joining, the belonging to her new acquaintances. Never friends, simply disjointed vagrants they seemed to her, soulless, heartless, mere brutes masquerading as Greeks while belching American lies and innuendos. She cared for her home, washed and baked, always baked, as she had been taught by a widow from her own island who seemed to have an inordinate fondness for her husband. Their visits together ended with his injury but he would often take long walks and she never knew where he went shuffling off to alone. She had huge expressive eyes and fully rounded lips, a patrician air and a glance that could freeze your blood. And she used her youngest daughter that would be me, until she became American and her second youngest after the birth of another. My mother, I am going to call her my mother although it seems that she saw me as her mother, since I carried her mother’s name. She never taught me those things, about names that is, why Greek children are named after their grandparents. Now, I know, that is I think I know. There’s so much to being Greek, it isn’t merely in the food and we don’t look any different from white Anglo Saxon Protestants, few of us look Italian although some do and not many of us look exotic like Indian or something like that. I want to find my mother, readers. Right now she’s dead. But I’m searching for her in my travels, in my memories, in my stories. She’s somewhere there and I want to know her, really.

Her favorite visiting friends, after my father died were storytellers and this is one of their stories, they told it to me in 1973 but I don’t think time matters with Greeks. This is how I remember them as they told their saga and what I remember of their story.

THE STORY OF MARY

The old man sat sprawled in his chair. His wife sat directly across from him. After their coffee and sweets, they were content to just sit and sleep. But, tonight, they were visitors and they tried hard to stay awake and maintain a conversation. My eyes could not help but rest on his right arm. For there on the visible part of his wrist shone two watches. Two large gold watches on the same wrist.

“Ha,” he said, “I’m wearing them to see if they both keep the same time, heh, heh.”

“Oh, I was just admiring your suit jacket,” I answered.

“This! When I was young, I was a snappy dresser. You know I come from a wealthy family.”

To prove his point, he pulled out a yellowed envelope. From this he took out and passed around four photographs.

“My goodness, Uncle, who were these people?” I asked.

“I’m the young man with the mustache. The one next to me is my brother. Well?” He stopped as if expecting my next question.

“But, the black girl? Who?”

“My sister,” he replied.

“Oh, sure,” I laughed. “She looks just like you. Come what’s the story?”

The rest of the family joined in my pleas and feeling quite sure that he would have an enrapt audience, he began. “You see, my father was a sea captain. Oh, sometime around 1880, he was docked at the port of Alexandria. He was newly married and I

suppose anxious to get home. While loading his ship, a turbaned man approached him carrying a brown sac.”

‘Sir, would you be interested in this?’ he asked my father.

“When my father looked in the sac, he saw a baby girl about one or two years old. Well, my father thought she would make a nice gift for his bride!”

“But.” I asked, “wasn’t he curious where that man got her from?”

After favoring me with a condescending smile, he continued his story. I was determined not to interrupt him again.

“Well, my father takes her back to Symi. As you know, the Turks were overseers of those Mediterranean islands back then. So, he had to sneak the baby in without their catching him.”

“What am I supposed to do with this?” my mother screamed, said the man with the two watches on his wrist who wasn’t really my uncle, but just another Greek from the same island as my mother.

‘Never mind,’ my father told her, “when she gets older, she can helpyou keep house so you can take it easy.”

“But, it wasn’t such an easy thing, keeping a black child a secret on an island that paid ransom to the Turks. One day, a neighbor came panting up to the house and barged into the kitchen where my mother, my father, and an uncle were sitting. The baby was playing on the table. ‘What’s wrong?’ my father asked him?”

‘Turks, they’ve heard about the baby, they say since it’s not baptized a Christian, it belongs to them!’

“Instantly, my uncle reached down and grabbed the baby, “the old Greek with the two watches beamed, “you hold them,” he said, and I’ll take care of this.”

He took the baby up into the mountains to the monastery of St. Michael not Panormitis. There was a monk living there at the time and he baptized her Orthodox. Well, now that she was an Orthodox, the Turks couldn’t take her off the island. Fact is, after my mother started having us, we grew up thinking that she was our sister. I was the third , but I think Mary, that was her name, did I tell you? Liked me the best.”

Without further explanation, he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

“Well, what happened to her?” I asked.

“Nothing, until my sister Georgia got married. He replied. My father was afraid that she might ask to get married to. The people would kill me, he would say, if I let the island get full of little black kids.”

“Did she ever marry?” I interrupted.

“Sure, but not until years later when she left the island and went back to Egypt.”

“You know,” my mother chimed in, My mother, the woman I saw as my mother, the one I am now looking for, who never felt like my mother. She said, “I think I remember seeing her once. She came to some neighbor’s house, wearing a huge hat, gloves, dressed like an aristocrat.”

“Oh, that was probably after she had gotten married. She went back to the island once or twice after she left.” He said.

“How did she leave?” I asked.

“I told you, when my sister got married! She started thinking about herself. She knew that there was one or two men who wanted her. So, she went to my father and asked when it would be her turn. My father was perplexed, but he told her straight out that any man who said he wanted to marry her was probably only after his money. He promised her a house, money in the bank, but no marriage!”

“She probably thought of herself as one of you,” I said feeling sad for the sttange woman bought as a slave, reared as a Symian, and black.

“Of course! Wouldn’t you know the very next day, she disappeared. She took only five gold pieces and some clothes.”

“How did you eventually find her?” I asked to keep the story going.

“Ah, there’s the whole story, she went to Alexandria and got a job with an extremely wealthy British engineer since she spoke Greek. And, she got in touch with my uncle who had moved there. When I met her again, you wouldn’t believe how happy she was to see me. I had gone to Alexandria with almost no money in my pockets. Naturally, I went straight to my uncle’s house. He put me up on a couch in his sitting room. I soon saw Mary. She took me out one afternoon to meet her employer. I was a bit embarrassed knowing they would be curious as to how I had a black sister. But, you know, they didn’t ask. They had such trust in her. She had control of all the household monies! She took me once to see a show. They had different kinds of shows, all live. There was this enormous stage with a girl dressed as a snake curled around this tree! Beautiful! She paid over twenty dollars for our tickets. But, she had to leave early and go back to work. You know when I got back to my uncle’s; I found a new bed waiting for me. When they brought over this bed, my uncle almost stopped the delivery. They told him it was paid for.

Yeah, she liked me best.”

“But. Didn’t she feel bitter towards you?” I asked. I felt bitter sometimes resentful and always eager for a morsel of affection from my mother.

“Let me tell you,” he said, we were walking down this street in Alexandria, me and my now affluent sister, when this black man started to point and to stare at us!”

“What’s that good for nothing blackie staring at us for?” she asked.

“Ha, she was packed down with ten pounds of powder. What a woman! She always thought of herself as a Greek.”

“Who did she marry, “I asked dejectedly and kind of weary of Mary.

“Oh, to a Cypriot Greek who was widowed with two children. He was good to her and rich!”

The funny old man with the two watches and his by now exhausted old wife smiled at me as if that’s life and there’s no way to make things different. I used to take my clothes to his dry cleaner and he was always quizzical when he looked at me. I had the same name as his wife. Of course, I was named after my maternal grandmother, I didn’t care who his was named after. I was not a happy child, I existed.

The old couple went home. I picked up the table that’s how we say it, Greeks that is, we don’t clear the table, and we gather it up. .I went to sleep and I crossed my pillow. We make the sign of the cross on our pillow to keep away vampires, I guess, readers. And I wrote a prayer.

I pray to Him who shares His peace with strangers to look into my frenzied soul

And not to judge

To look into the mind of one of his little angels and to touch

They gave me bread to ear but I could not break it

A dulled knife presented itself

They gave me wine to drink and I accepted

And it was good and I drank some more

Then, the heavy king intruded

I was made to see

My mind refused to witness

I pray to He Who reaps the fields I can not fathom

Will give me the means to gather my mind and to sow reality

People, pain searing slowly, stealing Degrading visions A whirl of water that sucks my sight.

The languid glare of nothing

That vaguely tries to rob what little growth I’ve managed.

I pray to Him who will forgive my prose and bless my poetry like David

A warrior for His glory for my own life has little substance, Lord.

Okay, I give up; I’ll tell you what I’m looking for. For my mother, you see she died and from what I’ve seen by people who are richer than me, they come back. The dead that is. Now don’t play stupid! I know. I’m looking in her past habitation, in her last habitation, in people’s faces in other cultures, even; I’m looking for my mother. I know what I’m looking for! She was born with a shrewd eye and a quick wit. If there was a fault to be found with anyone or anything you could count on her to find it. As a matter of fact, come to think of it, she could have been Socrates’ wife! Where did she come from! Where’d she go? I want her. I know she’s out there, where? Did you hear, I went to Greece to find her, of course? All Greeks, all of them tell stories. They don’t talk, they tell stories. Not about themselves, either. Stories about everybody, everything! Now and then a story about themselves, theirs, drops in and if you’re lucky, something about you if you’re from Symi that is. My mother was all of them and none of them. Drop her name and they say your father’s name and ask you if you’re his daughter. You say, yes, of course. And you’re one of them and none of them. Who are these people? Why do they know everything about you! For heaven’s sake and why won’t they tell you? I’m looking for my mother, I’ll see her in one of their eyes and I’ll know she’s back. Did I tell you that I married? In between being my mother’s favorite object of abuse because I was easy, of course, I managed to get married. Marriage isn’t at all what they crack it up to be. I married and fixed up houses and eventually I ran away, back home, of course. They bring my daughter to see me confined. She brings my books and papers and wine.

Not really wine, of course. I’m all metaphor it seems. The wine of tomorrow and the promise of youth, Shall I listen forever to drills of the past. Remolding familiars into familiars and cast. Wherefore does the dawn awaken the day? If only to find the embellishments of out dated grey. Shall I fight forever awkward covers of shams? Coverage of disillusioned terrors descending. Therefore to continue from hidden backward control, promoting the future on platters of rehashed ash. Shall I promise to marry in the dim distant time? Another solemn virtue of extinguished pride. Much better to sulk behind veils of pretense, dignity of the disenchanted in cycles of deluge. Shall I make merry and smash the glass? Splinters mixed ashes invoking the night. Embers of awakening Spring frolicking. My Joy disenchanted, enchanted, flow fountain of youth and embattled chrysalis. I will go forward in the dark and spear the shadow of games pretense of the real, we go forward in the dark and cast the Spear at shields. My daughter brought my notebooks and pens and she lies. She can’t tell the truth, its like telling someone that everybody knows threatened your life to back off or you’ll kill her first and then to find yourself jailed for threatening the killer whom you stopped from killing you? It’s a poem, isn’t it? I like poetry!

It was my friends

A moment of exhaustion

Delayed by frantic tides

Of tremendous proportions

I don’t speak French, My belle la dams merci

I t was a blinking of a moment’s diffusion, my guide is fooling me French, Bon jour

Se l mes same

My day in court came and went and I gesticulated because they did and required redress. The court, I assumed, and the saying about assumptions, holds true, would hear my perfidy and recant how drill like it was that day in court, the bombastic lies, distorted waffling and disjointed pasts. Lies promenading in covered masks and all gesticulating and burying their ax at the foot of an angel who will never again care. I’m finished and my dead mother isn’t in the hospital. She was in none of their faces. What a loss.

I was at one time a graduate with a master’s degree from an accredited university as they say in America. Long before that, I was a graduate from what Americans’ think is a totally only American experience, from high school. American assumptions are about as amusing as claiming to be the first in space. Graduation night I was dressed in a pale yellow suit, silk. I went downstairs, and there was my mother, now that I remember, who had a churlish smile on her face, anybody could tell her anything and , of course, I was the human dump, she never told me what (they) would say she would only turn on me, the hag! She turned on me with a churlish smile on her face as if she wasn’t pleased. She said, “Ethel’s going to go to the hall.” I protested. “It’s my graduation!” “Ayg,” she said. I don’t remember how I got to the hall, probably with some visiting Greek. I danced. Mr. O, the senior English teacher, who had stolen the election from me as class book editor, cut in line and he actually danced with me. Imagine that! Every Greek there knew what he had done.

I wasn’t all that done even if the world seemed turned against me. I recall, if you are from this earth, you would be one of them. You are not of this world and they rant and rail and conceive all manner of lies against you. Somewhere in between my being a not understood and emotionally abused girl and eventually a loving and occasionally loved mother, myself, I taught. I am going to lecture to you, readers. About evolution and God, mysteries that have always been my release from the mundane existence of existence. Evolution strictly speaking, seems to be as much a topic for doubt and confusion as does creation. My background on both is limited; however, I have been subjected to both theories. The amusing part of this subject is that no matter how many brilliant ideas are made and no matter what the credentials of the ones making them, full acceptance of one or the other seems impossible. Personally, I for one find little difficulty in accepting either one, and I thought no one else had any trouble. I was wrong. Some seem to have the impression that if they accept Creation they have to buy Adam and Eve and the sneaky snake. Some feel this is childish beyond belief and turn to evolution as an answer. Evolution, as determined by Darwin, denies finality or vitalism; he uses the mechanism of natural selection. Natural selection seems simple, but it doesn’t seem adequate. It seems true that until organisms or mutant traits that are harmful will be eliminated but it does not displace the final cause. Unless I am misunderstanding vitalism, why can’t there be a force that starts natural selection and continues where it leaves off. Darwin, of course, was not aware of genetics at the time and does not fully realize the cause of variability. Also, in modern times the weakest have a chance of survival, due to modern science. Natural selection seems now to be a question of sexual attraction rather than survival of the fittest. Darwin in one of his later editions of the Origin of Species placed emphasis on sexual attraction that males were given or evolved greater capabilities in order to attract females and both sexes did not have the same capabilities for the sexual cause. However, today, sexual attraction isn’t really so important; there are simple too many people around. Another of Darwin’s ideas are on “population-thinking”, here it is said that he had his most serious trouble with the philosophers because he ignored Plato’s eidos (idea). Whereas to those who accept the idea as being real and variability as illusion, Darwin holds variability as real and ideas as illusion or abstract. In one source it is stated forcefully that the concept of a “variable population” and natural selection does not refer to a mere hodge-podge of chance events but implies an order that eliminated harmful organisms or that organisms while not affected by environment during their evolution can change if a severe change occurs in their environment, also that through disuse organs could cease to function not because of the environment but because of its disuse. Organisms are so beautifully adapted to their surroundings because natural selection eliminated and still does the unfit characteristics. Darwin was a modern thinker as shown by one of his statement, “Even slow-breeding man had doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate, in a few thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for progeny.”

Evolution in my viewpoint has in no way altered the argument for or against God. If it had it would be logical to assume that we would have had less confusion nowadays in our beliefs. However, evolution after all is not a new idea; it has survived along with religion; perhaps, it should be used a s a supporting post by religions. After all evolution only tries to explain how life is as it is, religion explains or tries to how life began. The

fact that one little speck of life in the beginning began life does not explain how it got there, or for that matter why anything had to be. I see no real purpose of a God hovering over mankind; I can’t imagine the purpose of a heaven or a hell. What purpose is evolution? Why should we have natural selection? Why is this so much a part of chance which lets survive unfit organisms? In astronomy they say that the universe does not really have any specific order, planets and objects are caught in their positions by a force; the universe could be surrounded by something else, etc. In biology they speak of eugenics, controlling the survival of inherited traits, or breaking down DNA and creating new chains and producing new organisms. In genetics, they speak of the chance factor as being all important. They refuse to deal with God; however, it seems to be an irrelevant subject. And, to be frank, this is also my position. I do not deny God; I respect religion, but, admittedly, the whole subject has no answers and only questions leading a seamless circle. In order for science to achieve anything, to explain anything, it must have freedom from any distracting preconclusive factors. It must accept only what it can prove and even that on a tentative basis. It cannot deny what it cannot prove or accept. However, if I had to choose a position of evolution strengthening or weakening the idea of God, I would say it speaks more of a negligent (Lord forgive me) God, who created, got bored and moved away. I gave these lecture readers and kept its draft years and years ago. I must have known something then now I sit in this room and watch the years and the days pass and remember and search for mother. Such large, beautiful windows, French windows, I guess, every once in awhile I clean them. They tilt in, very modern, I guess. I don’t lecture anymore; I sit and think such impossible thoughts. Do you think reader that you can think back to when you were born and laid in a wooden cradle, dark brown wood, etched, with a hole in the center of the front board? I see myself there, and I see the figure of a frightening force, coming at me with a sharp small shiny thing. She pierces the side of my belly. I scream and mother comes. She picks me up and she doesn’t see anything. I howl and she sends the frightening thing for the doctor. My nanny comes from next door; she has by now heard my cries. She picks me up off of mother’s arms and she sits with me in a chair and rocks with me. I am not stilled. I howl. In between my howling and their yelling, a tall, gaunt man carrying a long black case comes in. He examines me and finds the sore spot. There isn’t much he can give me he tells them because I’m a baby, of course, and he tells my mother that if I don’t stop howling they’ll have to take me to Rodos for surgery. The look on mother’s face is devastating, but, not as devastating as the pain in my belly. From then until the following morning, my nanny has been sitting holding me. What happens later, dear friends is Greek tragedy at its most superstitious best. A cross forms on the lower, right-side of my belly. I am now blessed and doomed according to island and what was probably most of Greek Christian mysteries of Simon. The doctor comes and looks at me. The cross has already split open by the time he comes. My nannies skirts are wet with the oozed out infection and I am calm, really! I am now to carry the cross. Don’t you think they are carrying Greek farce a little too far! I was saved by the cross. The cross then becomes mine in all its enigmatic glories. The church of the cross just happens to be our neighborhood church although we belong to the church of the Holy Trinity and my father belongs to the church of St. Athanasios. I grow, a little vision of seer and child of angel and bubbling authority. I will free myself of the cross I vow. I know it intrinsically, no

one had to tell me what happened, I know. I’m searching for mother, one of these days I will find her! When I was in the hospital, many, many years later, for some other malady, I wrote songs and all of them probably possessed of the cross. Would you like to be saved by the cross, readers and write songs? I wrote song 5 to those within hearing. That would be you reader since reading is hearing with the mind’s ear.

I will give praise to my God who awakens the beauty of the morning and
Withdraws the curtain of the night from my eyes. I will praise God who is
With me in my laying down and in my rising up. I will praise my God who
Has chosen his singer from the midst of many rivals. I will praise God when
All around me are full of treachery, open jaws contemplating my end. My God
Knows of my distress and will comfort me for he is my God and on Him do I
Rest. Hear their secret plottings, Lord, dash their plans against the highest
Mountains, make sure Lord to remember your chosen one who bears your
Cross in the midst of her sorrows.

There is something peculiar about being born Greek Orthodox, didn’t I tell you readers this is what I am? I was baptized as Greek Orthodox by my uncle a priest in the Greek Orthodox Church. He said for we spent many summers together since he was married to my father’s sister, my aunt, that he dubbed me a Duchess by inferring English inflection on my grandmother’s name, that was who I was named after. We plotted together, John and I. He was my favorite uncle and he died. Sometime while visiting him in Symi, I also traveled to Israel. We must have passed, it’s a fleeting memory of a walled nunnery, the nunnery of St. Mary Magdalene is in Jerusalem, isn’t it? It isn’t amusing but I think I will make my cross into a maypole and all Mary’s my brides. Such ribbons of Adam shouldn’t be lost as Pope Gregory who thoroughly tarnished the blessed Magdalene’s soul might well agree now. I’m tired. I turn and look out the window and the street is dark and cold or looks it for how would I know its cold, being in the room. Somewhere in betwixt my travels and my fellowship with my uncle John, the priest, I evolved in my own mind what I was determined was the real story of a woman I call marina. The story of Marina as written by me before I married, of course, follows and if you condescend to follow me in my personal reverie of my cross, don’t judge it harshly, what is written is written. For some reason I think I have comediennes as readers. Regardless, a reader is a reader and a rose is a rose, penned by someone who knew better than me, of course.

The steep shadows formed terrorizing figures on the majestically built house. Fir trees of unknown generation loomed around it and their breath mingled with the smell of gardenias and the richly scented roses. Situated in one corner of the outer garden was a small family monastery. Its whitewashed frame glistened as it reflected the bright moonlight. The monastery was built for the family’s patron saint, St . Paul. Within the tall large wooden doors were rows of hanging chandeliers of various sizes. In front of the most holy icon of St. Paul was a raised platform made of brass. On top of this platform was a small jar filled with water and oil and centered with a lit taper floating in a tin holder. The small insignificant light did not show the figure of the one who knelt in the center of the altar with head bent and softly, chanting prayers. On either side of her were icons depicting various saints and event in the life of Jesus Christ martyred in Jerusalem for his acts contrary to the laws of the Jewish state and enforced by their roman masters.

“St. Paul,” she prayed, “if it is right that it should be then it will intercede thou for me. This marriage cannot be. He is a known a sinner.” The soft light cast by the wicket fed by the oil was now heavily filling the monastery with the resinous smell of olive and was comforting.

The story of Marina does not end here readers maybe I’ll finish it for you all at some time.

May I interject a thought kind reader at the incredulity of atheists to Christian believers? Do you all know that in the United States of America a sitting president made it law that a woman who was bright and well educated was forbidden to write or to work in the areas for which she was highly trained because her sister-in-law who carried similar sounding names was ignorant but well skilled in the arts of giving males pleasure. Of course this brilliant woman was already targeted for being an excellent educator and a thoughtful and giving person and extremely sensitive to males seeking to give pleasure for ten thousand but were fortunately part of a nonexistent American game of turning a human being into a game rabbit. Seriously kind readers since we all live with such absurd threats attacking us and being supported by demonic posing as federal guns and calling themselves the ins game attacker? Really kind readers such preposterous behavior is real what is the fear of admitting will they lock us all up? Perhaps Jesus of Nazareth had similar lack of fear as your amusing writer. I bear my cross and listen quietly to a tape of a voice telling me she knows where I live and that she will kill me. If I tell the police then they drag me to hospital and then to jail because I recognize the voice and that endangers theirs. I know who is threatening to kill me and that endangers theirs the killer? Ssh! Don’t tell anybody but I know who their law is he studies international law and that makes him the law or the entrance to the cave of the depository of Jesus’ body. The entrance to the cave is the now meant to be the vagina and the Holy Grail; the cup is their whore’s vagina. Ssh! don’t tell them we know or they will call us what they are vile for knowing! Can we share a laugh friends, I call my readers friends for who else can come out from reading the voice of another but a friend. There once was a vile and dangerous witch. Really and truly friends! She left a land steeped in Maya as they call witchcraft in Greece. She was not really from Greece from what I know, and she married a very wealthy and obnoxiously self-important man whose family had spent years molding into a caricature of what they never had, a father. Being fearful of her impending marriage she faked a trip back to her secret country from there she wrote her about to be husband that she had a former alliance with a man who now lived in New York City and her family considered it a point of honor for her to visit him and to inform him of her about to be marriage. Talk about the entrance to a cave and the audacity but it worked. Her about to be husband was proud of his about to be wife having such proper connections! I am sure Emily of etiquette fame did not write for witches but who knows? She had made arrangements in her country to visit a Japanese doctor who was making a lucrative business of sewing back vaginas. She returned back from New York a new woman! Such flair, such audacity, such remarkable change in personality and she married. Women don’t you think the vagina is overly exaggerated!

Excuse me while I run and dab myself with Holy Water before I return to my room and to my cross. It seems rather dreary my mind having to come grips with a really aberrant American secret religious cult culture. People are afraid to say such things, things might

happen to them I need to distract myself and I think I will tell you kind readers the story of Christine. You don’t mind reading it, do you? It’s really rather entertaining and I’ve titled it The Open Room.

“Ah, there’s another one!”

“Another what?”

“Another spider!”

“You’ve got spiders on your mind, Christine!”

“Oh, yeah, well it just crawled under the chair cover.”

Christine’s mother got up from her easy chair and went over to where Christine had been sitting. She pulled the covers up, but there was nothing there.

“It must have hid in some corner.” Christine said, insisting that it wasn’t just her imagination.

Christine was now sitting on the couch with her arm resting over the edge. “yikes!” she screamed again, “something just touched my arm!”

“Listen, kid,” her younger sister was obviously irritated by her screams; “I want to see this movie, not hear your screams about spiders.”

“Oh, shut up Mary.” Christine was in no mood to be told to stop screaming by her younger sister. But she did concede to herself that the second spider could have been one of the tassel fringes on the couch cover.

“I think I’ll go to sleep. This show’s dull and anyway.”

When Christine got out of the room, her mother said to her sister, “She’s had spiders on her mind every day since school’s been out. She said that she had a few of them visit her quite often during the last couple of weeks. It must have been the heat that brought them out, he he.”

Christine had gone to her room and shut the door behind her. She began to leisurely pull her clothes off. When she came to her little brief top, she had to remove her glasses in order to pull it off. It made her very uncomfortable to remove her glasses unless, of course, she was in bed. In a very short time she was in a short bed shirt and she jumped quickly under her bed covers. Before she could take her glasses off and place them on the night stand, she remembered the light. “Oh, hell!” she growled as she got out of bed and flipped the switch. With her glasses off and the light turned off, she could see nothing. She made a quick leap for her bed. Although it was a hot night, she pulled her covers up around her neck and felt safe enough to close her eyes.

“Don’t look now, but you got yourself a spider crawling up your wall, Miss Howard.” Christine Howard looked up and there were two spiders marching up her wall.

“What do you expect down here in this dungeon?” Christine answered April, one of her brighter students.

“Why’d they got you teaching down here?” April was a very persistent young girl.

“What can we expect with a Board of Education like ours? I wasn’t always down here. I had a room up on the second floor for two years. It was so clean and airy. This place is positively foul!” Miss Howard had a way of being open with her students. It didn’t even dawn on her not to degrade the board of education in their presence. Besides during the last two weeks of school she had very few show up for class and her guard was completely down especially in the face of those damnable spiders!

“You better move your foot cause there’s a big black bug comin straight for it” Diane another one of her students said which made Christine jump up and look, sure enough there it was. She picked up her waste basket and placed it gingerly over the bug accompanied by the jeering laughter from the five students in her room.

“I should have known you were afraid of bugs before,” John spoke up and he had a mischievous look in his eyes.

“Where were you planning on getting them from your home?” Christine had learned not to let anything get by when you’re working with tenth graders.

“No, yours!” John had also learned not to let a teacher get away with a crack like that.

Suddenly Dennis, one of her drop-outs pulled the door open and practically bounced in. “Hey, Miz Howard, could I use your waste basket?”

“Why?”

“Hey, I got to clean up my locker.”

“Sorry, but I’ve got a bug buried under it.”

“Is that all?” Without a second thought, he picked up the basket and put his foot securely over the bug. It made such a crunch that Christine nearly passed out.

“Look at her face. Ah, he, he,” John nearly fell out of his desk with laughter.

Dennis not being satisfied with merely stomping on the bug decided to dissect it also with his foot.

“Would you cut that out Christine?” Mary was pulling at her to stop.

“What are you doing?” Christine realized that she had been sleeping.

“I’ve got to listen to you scream about spiders and now you’re screaming in your sleep. What’s wrong with you?’

“I guess I just can’t forget about school.” Christine answered. She couldn’t help feeling good that it was just a dream and the awful experience was over.

But now she couldn’t get back to sleep. Maybe she thought I can just lay here and think about Alex. She didn’t something many lonely women do, she worked up a dramatic love scene and played it out in her mind and in her case always with a tragic closing. Sleep enfolded her in the middle of her act but as things would have it the exhaustion of the day precluded deep sleep and she awoke once again screaming.

“What the heck is the matter with you?” Her mother did not appreciate having her sleep interrupted.

“Oh, nothing, my eye is bothering me again. The right one is burning.” Christine dared not say that it was a big, black shadow looming over her bed that had caused her to scream. Her fears having totally matched her body’s exhaustion, she fell into a deep and quiet sleep.

Such a problem Christine had with her students and pathetic basement classroom. Are there many women, any women, who would trade their lot in life for Christine’s? Probably not amongst those who can read. I am laughing. Did I say I was looking for my mother in all my adventures? I was and though she is now dead and buried, such a lovely funeral, I am still not done looking for my mother. Wherever could she have gone to? I once met a woman who suffered a most unusual life due to her decision to divorce.

She called herself her lawyer’s prisoner and her story as she told it was exactly that.

Let us call her Joanne. Joanne tells her story brilliantly because she is after all a brilliant

woman. She begins. And like all brilliant women, she ends.