Neighbors quickly recognized the quirkiness of my father’s behaviors and as village gossip spread like locust in August about the peculiar habits of my father, a clever prank was hatched by our amicable neighbor, Christos. He was a rather provocative catalyst, a speculator in a way, always looking for a semi-shady financial deal to make him rich. His personality was effervescent and disarming, just the right mix that attracted my dad to him. Christos and my father immediately became comrades in arms, and provided additional fodder for the villagers as the two companions seemed to terrorize half of Ikaria with their exuberant wisecracks and antics.
The closed ranks of the brick army were being diminished swiftly by the bricklayers, as the
bedroom progressed. Eventually a pile numbering about two hundred remained intact for the final push and completion of the bedroom. By now, my father’s sleeping pattern had once again changed. Helping out the workers during the day by hauling bricks, mixing cement and running errands exhausted him physically and by 10:00 p.m. he was in his bed sound asleep.
Throughout this tumultuous building process our inquisitive neighbor Christos made daily reconnaissance to observe and record the progress of the bricklayers, all the while quaffing a glass or two of ouzo with my dad and joking about his natural affinity with the bricks. The aggregate of these scouting visits was the formation of a deviously ingenious joke, at the expense of my father. It was a short time later during a hot and windy night that Christos stealthily made his way to the last remaining battalion of bricks, still precariously occupying a corner of our yard. Within two hours he had singlehandedly transported my dad’s precious stash to his side yard, a mere twenty meters from our house, and covered it with a large green tarp. Christos’ fiendish klepto plan was basically to enjoy my father’s baffled and confused look in finding his famously proprietary bricks had somehow mysteriously vanished in thin air. He moved his rickety table and chair to the edge of his porch so as to embrace the best view of my father’s emergence from the house and the bewilderment to follow. The morning sun had already cleared the horizon as my father stepped out of the house to inspect the previous day’s work, when he stopped in his tracks. Perplexed by the sight of the missing bricks, he promptly assumed the actions of a possessed man. Words flew out of his mouth like machine gun fire.
“My bricks, my bricks, someone stole my bricks, they’re gone the bricks, the bricks!” He ran from the yard to the church below desperately seeking some kind of divine intervention on his behalf, while filling the sky with stinging blasphemies. His agonizing pursuit continued onto the main street, still in a frenzy yelling “my bricks, my bricks, my bricks,” dashing wildly throughout the neighborhood and once again waking up the confused and groggy villagers.
All the while our rascally neighbor was watching him from his porch chuckling at the amusing antics of my father’s painful search for his bricks. Finally, when Christos could no longer contain himself with all this merriment, he called to my father to check out the suspiciously tarp covered pile. My father swiftly raced the twenty meters to Christos’ side yard, pulled back the green tarp to expose his precious collection of sienna colored bricks. A combination of relief, anger and amusement enveloped my father, luckily the amused part won out, as he shook his head slowly and a smile crossed his face, he realized the joke was on him. As morning coffee was shared by the two companiable neighbors the account of the missing bricks escapade was repeated numerous times, and laughter filled the quiet morning air.
Eventually the additional bedroom was completed, but that did not end the saga of my father and the neighborhood jokester. The summer passed quickly for me and I had to return to the States, but my father remained an additional three weeks to tie up loose ends with the workers and the bureaucratic Greek building codes. It was on the last day of my dad’s extended stay on Ikaria that Christos came by to say good-bye and to wish my hurried father a safe journey back to Chicago. He presented my dad a package the size of a carton of cigarettes, nicely wrapped with a colorful ribbon and bow.
The package was meant for a mutual friend, Anna, who was going to meet my father at O’Hare airport. The contents of the package Christos declared were prescription drugs for this friend, drugs that were much cheaper in Greece, thanks to socialized medicine, than in the States. Not to be derelict towards a friend in need, my father unabashedly agreered to transport this needed medication. Since my father had already packed his antiquated suitcase to the gills, he was forced to re-pack leaving several small gifts behind, to accommodate this hefty medical parcel.
The return trip for my father was a slow and gruesome one, most appropriate for travelers to and from Greece at that time. The ferry from Ikaria to Piraeus was six hours late, his stay in Athens had to be extended by two days, and his Sabena flight back to Chicago arrived hours behind schedule. Throughout all these delays and constrains he carefully and meticulously guarded his luggage with the medicine safely secured, tucked in the inside compartment of his suitcase.
Finally, arriving at O’Hare and uncommonly breezing through customs, he was met by the anxious Anna. Immediately my father opened his venerable suitcase and judiciously pulled out her brightly wrapped gift.
Perplexed by this magnanimous gesture on the part of my father, she asked “What is it?”
“It’s the medicine you asked Christos to send you from Greece” he replied.
“I never asked him to send me any meds’ she countered, somewhat confused ‘but let’s see what it is.” Deftly she removed the bright ribbon and tore into the wrapping paper. Their world, in the middle of O’Hare airport, seemed to stand still as they tried to focus their eyes on the heavy object gently resting in Anna’s trembling hand. What my father had so painstakingly and vigilantly escorted for days, across two continents and over five thousand miles, was one of his brick soldiers, regulation size sienna colored brick, compliments of good neighbor Christos.
The trip was put in proper perspective a few years later after my father passed away, the excursion we took together was the last one he took to his beloved Ikaria. It was only then that I was able to appreciate those periods of daily mayhem that included arguments and squabbles with the locals, as with the cantankerous old priest, overdue or inebriated workers, and annoying but amusing neighbors. In the end we both survived, returned home with various bumps and bruises and plenty of emotional scars that are the transitional outcomes of such father and son expeditions. Chronicling this story I’m left with the visionary words of the poet Anne Sexton, ‘It doesn’t matter who my father was, it matters who I remember he was.”
No comments:
Post a Comment