Category Archives: Life at Home

The Greek Gods

26 Thursday Feb 2009

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For as long as I remember, my Greek grandfather made his living cooking for others.  But on his days off he cooked for us.  This arrangement suited Mom just fine, unless the cooking involved one of Papa’s many attempts to make the Greek-style yogurt of his childhood.

 

Each try left the stove caked in burnt clabbered milk that he didn’t care to clean. So he didn’t.  And while Mom wasn’t the best housekeeper in the world, even she couldn’t stand Papa’s messes. So it was just a matter of time before Mom’s pent up anger would boil over like lava out of Mt. Olympus in a fiery slamming of doors and drawers as she grabbed her cleaning supplies.  When Mom was mad, she didn’t care who knew it, as long as the perpetrator was included.  But in this, Mom was denied even the smallest pleasure of justice being served, as Papa had perfected his art of selective hearing.

  

Papa drove others to anger with his driving.  Aunt Carol sums it up this way: 

“He invented road rage.”

Oblivious to the wrath he left in his wake, Papa cruised around town in his land yacht of an automobile – a white and aqua 1955 Chrysler Windsor. He rode window down, arm out, cigarette lit, eyes never wavering from the road.  I’m pretty sure he didn’t believe in using mirrors. To compensate for this, he only drove one speed—Slooow.  He once told me not to drive over 35.  And this was after the Oklahoma Highway Patrol had pulled him over on I-40 for doing just this — driving slower than the posted legal minimum speed of 40.

  

His driving on city streets was no safer.  Often, when he pulled into traffic, he was met with the sound of tires screeching, the smell of burnt rubber, and the screams of frightened grandchildren huddled in the backseat.  My cousin Deb recalls him doing this even to this day.  He would always turn around and wave it off as a “slight” driving hiccup in his heavily accented, slightly mangled English:

“Ahhhh…., don’t worry.  They all got brakes.”

His driving snafus weren’t all speed-related.  Mom loved to tell the story of Papa pulling out against traffic on a busy one-way street in downtown OKC.  When brought to his attention, Papa waved it off, saying:

“I’m only going one way….”

All these near collisions may explain the police siren he had installed on his car by a smpathetic mechanic.  Maybe he thought it would be easier to merge into traffic if his siren made it come to a standstill.    dsc01217a1  

 

I never understood why Papa was so driven to make his yogurt.  But this I know:  His yogurt-making pursuits never did stand still.  And if his childhood yogurt tasted anything like this wonderful yogurt I recently purchased at Crescent Market– marketed under the name The Greek Gods—well…. I can say I finally understand.  Papa wouldn’t let a few angry people deter him from his quest for this childhood delight. After all, what could mere mortals do to him? 

 

It’s not like they were the Greek gods.

 

 –Thanks Kyle for a grand job of editing. 

Voices Out Of Nowhere…

24 Tuesday Feb 2009

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It’s eerie how a desire I had just expressed, while talking with my dear friend Ann, was answered three days later.  On Wednesday I spoke of losing touch with my childhood friends…and on Saturday a voice from my childhood calls out of the blue.

 

Well…it wasn’t really out of the blue.  Deb’s call came out her father’s recent death and the love she has for her mother.  She was hoping to find a solution to enable my dad to converse with her mom.  It’s probably been close to two years since dad began losing his speech capabilities, so almost that long since this brother and sister have enjoyed a good two-way conversation.  When they ‘chat’ these days, he listens while she talks.  And even though dad doesn’t say much, I know by looking at his eyes how glad he is just to listen to Aunt Carol’s voice.  These siblings have stood by one another through the thick and thin of their lives and these one-sided conversations are nothing more than another verse of their same old tune.  

 

Trying to figure out how to reconnect our widowed parents offered Deb and me a chance to relive our own shared childhood stories.  But to discover we shared a story of more recent vintage was almost unbelievable.  And I do mean unbelievable.  The weekend before Deb’s dad passed, ‘something’ told her to call her parents.  By Monday night, her dad was dead and she was glad she’d listened and taken action on her premonition.  Similarly, the weekend before my mom suffered her stroke, I felt a persistent longing to give up my weekend plans to go see her instead.  But, rather than acting on my instincts, I followed through with my plans and made arrangements to see her the following weekend.  By then she was in ICU.  And even though she never regained consciousness, I talked to mom as if she could hear me for the seven weeks she laid there, hoping that the sound of my voice brought comfort even if she couldn’t understand my words.  It strikes me that my one-sided conversations with mom and my Aunt’s Carol’s one-side conversations with dad are not so different to the one doing the talking.      

 

Where do these hunches or inklings or premonitions come from?  Are they voices that call from deep within us or voices that call from a world we cannot see?    No matter which, they always seem to come out of the blue.  And they always appear to carry a message that responds so perfectly to our needs, even if our need is not yet known.  These voices out of nowhere are the true one-sided conversation.  And the next time one calls, may God help my unbelief so that I too may listen.   

“Who Was That Masked Man?”

23 Monday Feb 2009

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We woke up yesterday morning looking like a pile of puppies.  With two standard poodles cuddled up around us, it was evident we’d just slept through still another of our local weatherman’s famous “two dog night” forecasts.   But no matter the temperature, it felt good to have Max home.  We missed him something fierce while he was off getting well at the animal hospital.  But for Maddie, it was more like fierce unadulterated grief.  Without her faithful sidekick in high jinks, our home grew quiet as a tomb, as the sight of our sad dog gave me fresh insight into that oft used phrase….‘doggone’ lonesome.

 

So it wasn’t surprising to find Maddie holding vigil at our backdoor when we returned home with Max.  Can I tell you that it was an absolute honor to bear witness to their family reunion?  I just felt glad to be alive when I saw her leap for joy and as she performed her full bag of flying circus tricks to welcome home her prodigal ‘son’.  But how in the world had we come to this place?  Even now we’re not sure.  One moment Max was his bouncy self and in the next he had transformed into this big bear rug covering our floor.  Somehow, our three-time immunized puppy had contracted parvo, something the vet had never seen or heard of in his twenty years of practice.  But it was something else the vet said that really grabbed my attention.   

“But that’s why I’ve got a veterinary practice.

I’ll always be in practice.  I’ll never be perfect.”

Though we’ll never know the ‘how’s’ and the ‘whys’ of it, we are grateful to have two silver linings from our sad puppy dog tale.  The first is the assurance that Max will be as good as new.  And the second was this guy providing the assurance—because after months of searching, we had luckily stumbled upon this humble OSU-trained vet—who was perfect to us mostly because he knew he wasn’t.

 

So it’s another happy ending where the good puppy wins.  Maddie is happy.  She no longer has to play the part of the grieving ‘lone ranger’.  Max is not.  He’s sweating bullets as he’s figured out he’s in recovery–not from parvo—but from his strong addiction to eating rocks.  And for the medical record, he’s none too happy about the doc’s recommended treatment, as already he’s wearing a new black muzzle for his backyard escapades.  Following the trail blazed by his poodle sister, it looks like Max will become the newest masked rider of the west, as he begins to play the– “who was that masked man?”— hero of yesteryear.  Hi Ho Silver…Away!  Max is back in the saddle…. and with grateful hearts we watch for the unfolding adventures…. of Mesta Park’s newest Lone Ranger who rides again.