Travels with Dad Part II

Most Greeks when faced with a major construction project, will use whatever money they have available, proceed to purchase what materials they can afford, and start the lengthy building process. When the money runs out construction comes to a complete halt. Workers are dismissed and what piles of materials, stone, sand, bricks, etc. remain are just left there waiting for the next injection of money. This prolonged period of time could last weeks, months or even years before construction can once again resume.

This start and stop construction cycle with its’ various mounds of materials scattered all over the Greek countryside was a particular annoyance to my father’s convoluted sense of organization and order. When we finally arrived on Ikaria, after our arduous beginnings, some of the building materials we ordered, primarily the bricks, were already delivered. These pavers were brought by a dilapidated dump truck that casually and not too carefully unloaded them in our front yard establishing an enormous sienna colored pile of bricks, instantly creating condos for countless families of scorpions and lizards. Immediately my father seeing this vast and seemingly endless pile of bricks began a verbal assault on the Greek truck drivers for their inconsiderate and lackadaisical care given to his precious and cherished building materials.

My dad and I tired from our long and exhausting trip, turned in early that first night hoping to get some much needed sleep. Sometime during the night or early morning hours, a strange and mysterious sound coming from the darken yard kept reverberating in my ears. A sound vaguely similar to a young child knocking together his play toys in a consistent and rhymic pattern. Knowing that no child would be up at this ungodly time of night, I crawled out of bed and made my way to the window. There, as dawn was breaking over the eastern tip of Ikaria, was my father in his scruffy work clothes carefully arranging the scattered bricks in neat and orderly rows, like soldiers in formation waiting for their marching orders.

“What are you doing?” I yelled in a dry and parched voice. “You know it’s barely five o clock in the morning, people are trying to sleep!” My bellowing had no noticeable effect on my zombie like dad. He just kept on methodically arranging his brick army in readiness for their battle with the bricklayers later on that day. In desperation I quickly slipped on my sandals ran out of the house towards my father, just in time to see him place the last brick, like a royal coronation, on top of the last row. Grabbing him by the arm as one grabs a mischievous child, I shouted at him. “You can’t be doing this in the middle of the night, everyone and everything neighbors, dogs, mules, goats are trying to sleep and you should too.”  Grumpy and exhausted, but tepid from his nocturnal employment, I led him back to the house,  as he explained to me that bricks have to be properly and systematically arranged in order for the bricklayers to work under optimal conditions. Finally, as the first rooster was heard across the hollow and the eastern sky turned crimson red my father went to sleep.

With typical haphazard of starts and stops the building of the additional bedroom began in earnest. Among the many and inconvenient distractions to the process was surprisingly, the elderly village priest, who presided over not one but three churches in our small village. One of the churches, affectionally known as number two, was situated right below and adjacent to our property. Given the location and the general direction of the summer winds, the church yard, as well as the church itself, was often encrusted in layers of blowing sand, dust, and cement powder from our ever expanding construction site. The rakish priest, a late septuagenarian, was a contemporary of my father, both

having grown up on the island and having a long history of personal skirmishes and disputes. None the less, every day he climbed the fourteen stairs from the church yard up to our house, enjoyed the customary glass of ouzo, and shared with my father the latest village gossip. This daily routine lasted about an hour, an hour that my father felt was useless and wasted on the priest, because it took precious time away from his work and the overseeing of the workers. He made his views known in a hushed voice everyday when the priest was descending the fourteen stairs to the church yard below.

As construction continued and the meltimi winds picked up, the priest in his daily visits would complain to my father of the debris and mess created around the church. In response my father in his most diplomatic voice, would deflect the priest’s complaints, and state that he had no personal command over Mother Nature and  her relentless winds. Ultimately, these too frequent bouts of grievances came to a head one bright gusty morning. 

 The priest was once again sweeping the construction sand and dust out of the church entrance, when in a fit of total exasperation stopped sweeping and called up to my father, “Come see what mayhem your workers and the wind have created inside this house of God.”  On this day my father must have had on his cranky pants and was in no mood to take verbal abuse from this man of God. As the barrage of words escalated between the two septuagenarians, the workers hearing the torrent of threats and retribution sensed that something inconceivable might happen.  

Then, in what appeared to be a split second the wind stopped, the cicadas became silent, the workers dropped their tools, and in unison watched this geriatric smack down unfold. My father in the heat of the moment, promptly picked up a near by shovel, and lacing the morning air with a slew of obscenities raced down the stairs. He ceased only momentarily to graphically describe how he was going to grab and pull the scraggily beard of the priest,  twist  and squeeze  it like a pretzel  around his scrawny neck, so he no longer would have to listen to the daily bitching of the holy man. The priest, alarmed at the sudden appearance of his half-crazed neighbor, stood defiantly in the church entrance, head held high, clutching and holding out the gold Orthodox cross hanging from his neck.  My father, still seeing red, instinctively swung his improvised weapon wildly in a dervisly manner high above his head.                                                                                                

 Suddenly, with a thundering clamor, he brought it belligerently down at the feet of the startled priest, still embracing his protective cross, and scattering the accumulated piles of sand and debris. The two combatants now sweating and exhausted by their morning joust, stood silently, glaring eye to eye and heaving  laboriously, as two depleted heavyweights.   

Swiftly, I flew down the stairs and placed myself between the two warriors trying to interject an air of tranquility, but I was irrelevant for the remainder of the event. As the level of adrenaline slowly decreased in the two bellicose neighbors, a shred of calm appeared in their behaviors. They had taken their positions to the limit, and finally acknowledged the futility of their actions. Only with the last batch of cement mixed and the last brick laid in place, would this daily skirmish cease. This realization was understood by both of them, and with a grandiose gesture my father assured the priest, that when construction was finally completed, he himself would come down and personally clean the church and the church yard. This confrontation was the talk of the village for months, and each time the story was told it embellished and elevated the personas of the two combatants, casting them as the clash of the two septuagenarian titans.