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 NewGreece 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.
