my nephew Leftheri

my nephew Leftheris (Terry for short) is sure to give my wife, his father, and I, a quick but sustained glance, before stepping onto the baseball diamond. Our waves and upraised thumbs give him permission to go out there and get a hit. He adjusts his oversized helmet on his curly haired head and adjusts his stance once dad reminds him pull in his elbow. Even from this distance, with the day draining into night, you can see how he holds that nervous tension in his chest and torso, how his throat refuses to let any air in or out. There's something in his light grimace that betrays the trepidation he senses with all these eyes focused on him. Please let me hit it, I hear him think. Please let me get a hit.

My wife also promised him ten bucks if he was able to collect a base hit.

We're not his aunt or uncle, you see. To Terry, we're always referred to as his friends, which is a status that many aunts and uncles would kill for, let me remind you.

The last time I saw Terry play professional sports was 3 years ago, when he and other five year olds chased after a soccer ball and cheered and celebrated when one of them actually kicked the ball towards the opponent's goal. I remember how big their heads bobbled on their tiny shoulders.

And what a rush when his elbows straightened and his bat spat that ball between the outstretched gloves of the short stop and third basemen and he dashed towards first base, his cleets casting pebbles behind him,and they fell to the ground in a triumphant cascade. And the satisfied smile on his face, and the deep exhale he snorted out his nose, and how his eyes sought and found our adoration was simply amazing.

I wonder if he'll remember this day, when he got, not just one base hit but three of them, and when he made twenty bucks, and when he got the Player of the Game award, and a ticket for a free popsicle at the next game. When he's consumed with grades and girls and getting a car...will he remember how proud his friends were of him?

the guy with the gaps in his teeth

As the guy with the gaps in his teeth  tipped the gun sideways at me, I was shocked by the fact I could see his face. He wasn't wearing a mask like his partner. His eyes glowed against his black skin, and his teeth were long and white and thick. I raised my hands because that's what you did, you raised your hands and let your eyes glaze over like a lamb's, because when someone with white feverish eyes is pointing a gun at you, you have to make like you are overwhelmed by your helplessness, made stupid by your helplessness. 

Fourteen seconds before that, I was doing a skim on the register and was counting the excess bills we had. There were three one hundred dollar bills, four fifty dollar bills, and thirty-odd twenties. I had just finished counting them when they came in, the maskless guy staring straight at me, grimacing, and I thought, Oh fuck. He took three strides into the store and his buddy, fully masked and hooded, was locking the door behind him and pulling down the blinds in the large front window. Two strides after that, he was swearing at me and showing me the small barrel of his gun.

Five minutes before they came in, I turned to one of my co-workers and wondered aloud how it was too bad we couldn't close the store a little early. There was one customer inside already, a Chinese gentleman who spoke little to no English. I think he was paying a bill or something. My coworker smiled and agreed, playing along with my fantasy, which wasn't a fantasy at all. I really did want to close the store early. I felt that the night was over as far as customers were concerned, and who gave a shit if someone knocked on the door to return their cable box.

Four hours before I was filling up garbage bags with boxes of cell phones, parked my car in the lot west of the Rogers store. I was ten minutes early. I got out of my Suzuki, locked it with a single button, and instinctively felt my pockets. I forgot my wallet. The thought crossed my mind like a suppressed cough: That's okay; if we get robbed at least they can't take my wallet. Then I forgot about it. Walked past the locked glass side door from which the two guys would later drag out at least five full garbage bags of product and hundreds in cash, after one of them jabbed my spine with the gun, screaming at me about where the cameras were.

For ten minutes we waited, and there was silence, save for our breathing and the delicate whimpering from the customer. When I looked up at him, his eyes were squeezed tight and he was holding the back of his head. He was shivering. And all the while, a sense of fucking calm inside of me, like I was born for this, like I had rehearsed this scenario a hundred times before.

Twenty minutes after they left, and the paramedics and cops came, I looked out the front window to see a cameraman looking right at me.

The invasiveness I felt watching the barrel of his camera stare at me was identical to when I gazed into the deep barrel of the gun held by the guy with the gaps in his teeth.

a dream

I saw my grandmother Chrisoula in my dream last night. I'm not sure why. She was leaving for somewhere and I was writing on her hand because she asked me to. Like I was signing a farewell card or something. 

My printing was neat, in Greek capital letters. I can still feel the warmth of her palm and how soft and weathered her skin was as I wrote in blue ink. The ball point pen pulled at her skin as  I wrote.

I wrote three aphorisms on her left hand. I don't remember what the first two were, but the word ΟΔΗΓΕΙ - guide - was written. Something guiding something else.  

I even made some spelling mistakes because I tend to when I write Greek in capital letters. My grandmother patiently, lovingly, pointed them out to me.

At first I was embarrassed that I made the mistakes, but I wasn't customarily angry with myself or anything. I hate making spelling mistakes, especially when I'm writing with pen...and making them on my grandmother's hand before she leaves...well, you can see how pissed I would get. Something in the way she corrected me made me forget about it; I actually forgave myself the mistake. I think she laughed when she saw them, and it was okay.

The last aphorism was: Η ΑΓΑΠΗ ΕΙΝΑΙ ΑΠΛΗ. Love is simple.

When I woke I still held the warmth of her hand in mine.

on the occasion of my grandmother joining us for supper

My grandmother Chrisoula just left about eighty minutes ago; my parents offered to drive her to my aunt's house in Ajax instead of me having to drive her there. She was supposed to come for dessert but as fate would have it, we had a simple supper together: my wife, my grandmother, my parents and my in-laws. Steamed dandelion, three barbecued chicken breasts, four mild sausages, and eight pieces of beef liver (for the old folk, ultimately - I tried a bite and loathed it being between my teeth; my wife doesn't touch the stuff). I cut her food into bite sizes, wishing I could remember her doing this for me when I was small. A last supper of sorts: she's leaving for home this Friday night, and I wanted to have her over here at our place. The next time we'll see her is when we visit Greece.

My grandmother, eighty-three, at the head of the table with a glass of water; my wife and I at the opposite end, sharing a can of Coke and a perfect view of my beautiful, old yiayia.

Na ta ekatostiseis, says my mother-in-law, May you make it to one hundred. And my yiayia's face looks stunned, like a child's face when they've been informed there will be no cookies until they've eaten another bowl of pea soup. I ate this much, and now you want me to eat more? 

And she's so loving, my grandmother. She grabs my mother-in-law's hands and says, Na hareis ta heria sou, kissing her hands, thanking her for a wonderful meal. Loosely: May you take pride in your hands. Because hers are now so tired. She doesn't cook anymore. The little pleasures she took in preparing a meal for her family are now memories. She spends much of her time in bed watching shows she can barely hear, because she can't walk very far anymore either.

Between the competing words of my dad and father-in-law, I stare at my grandmother, whose wrinkles are like hundreds of eyes sealed shut against the world. Like sealed lips along her face. Those lines along her face are most beautiful when she laughs at the absurd and speaks sarcastically.

Her blue-rimmed dark eyes welling up with tears as I put her coat on, and as she says goodbye to my father-in-law, thanking him for his hospitality between futile sobs, insisting that he come and visit her next time, in Greece, because she will not be coming back to Canada to see her children and her grandchildren. This visit back was the last one. And he says to me how she reminds him of his mother, God bless her, and his voice can't help but crack a little. My mother-in-law forces another coat over her shoulders, to shield her from the cold, crying a bit herself at my yiayia's melancholy.

Walking my poor old grandmother, husbandless for more than half her life, with three of her daughters an ocean and three seas away from her; walking her to my parent's car, holding her arm, reminding her where the short steps are. My wife behind us reminding her to be careful. 

Love one another, she says to us. Like a woman who has seen too much, has agonized too much, has lived too many years missing her husband and children and grandchildren. Like a woman who is older than she wants to be. Like a woman who means it when she says it.

I helped her fasten her seat belt and kissed her on her head, and her hair was smooth where my lips were, and smelled clean. 

my grandmother Elpiniki

My father's formative years were fatherless. My grandmother raised him under a careful eye and under the gaze of my grandfather's picture, perhaps his army photo, wrinkled and colourless.

My grandmother's first concern is the well-being of others; truly, she pushes herself to limits beyond her years and physical ability, to make sure that whoever stays in her home, humble and old as it is, feels welcome and warm. Greeks have a word, philoxenia, which could translate to hospitality...but hospitality doesn't encompass the duty a Greek has to ensure a stranger in his home is taken care of, is provided for, and is bestowed safe harbour. I read somewhere that the custom dates back to the time of Homer, which is quite a beautiful thought.

And my grandmother is quite a beautiful woman, in many ways like clean, subtle lines from Homer. Her eyes are an uncommon blue-hazel, and reveal her feelings fully. And I love how small her teeth are when she smiles.

I sent her pictures, this is going on two years ago, of my wife and I, from our wedding photos. Months later I spoke with her on the phone and asked her if she had received them well. She said she had..."but I speak to them and they don't reply". I think about that day, those words, and how can I not feel rage at the distance that force people apart, sometimes for decades.

My dad left his mother and father, left his country and village, at the age of sixteen. To make a better life, as the story goes. Her only son left her much like her husband had left her fifteen years before, for a better life. And what of her life? Alone, husbandless at one moment; alone and sonless, the next. Each time, a bus would have held a damn seat for the men in her life, would have a dusty pane of glass from which she could look up at them as they were taken away.

There was a song she used to get my father to request from the only radio station in Greece, back in the day. "An Empty Plate On the Table" was the name of the song, and should you hear it and understand the words, you're overcome with the feeling that so many mothers in Greece, so many mothers around the world, feel when someone is missing from the dinner table. She would get my father to request the song, and they would sit around the radio and listen to the song, and truly listen to every sound, without the benefit of reply. An empty plate on the table/ A chair always bare/ They await when you'll return/ From abroad our dutiful child.

When my father left, she most likely would have had her daughters request the song for her again, while she sat with her husband, who had by then returned from abroad, listening. How was she to know that it would be decades before he would return?

We went to Greece as a family for the first time in 1999. My father hadn't gone back to his home, hadn't slept on his bed nor kicked the dust from the streets of his village, for what amounted to almost 28 years. My grandmother and grandfather visited Canada twice within that time. I wonder what it was like for her to see her son walk out of his room after so many years, not a child of sixteeen but a grown man with wisps of grey in his hair. I wonder how sweet it was for her to ask him what he wanted for breakfast, and how her hands must have trembled slightly as she prepared his food. I think about how that old song must have been the furthest thing from her mind as she set the plates on the kitchen table.

I last visited Greece in 2001. I was napping in my father's old room the day I was departing. Thinking back, I could have gone without the nap, I could have spent those hours talking to my grandmother. Such a little thing, but in my mind now, so immensely selfish to have sought sleep instead of sitting beside my grandmother. She woke me up and I could tell from the tremor in her voice that she had been crying. 

It's weird: While I know that my uncle came to drive me to the airport in his small sedan, for whatever reason, my memory has me waving at her from an old bus, smiling down at her through a dusty window. Looking down at my grandmother who, with familiar (all too familiar)  tears, chases after me with knees that can no longer bare to run anymore.

papou stogiannis

My paternal grandfather is the epitome of distinguished, refined, and sincere. He speaks in a quiet, calming voice that demands attention by the authority in his shoulders, and the way he breathes deeply from his chest. He is at once very fragile and very solid - you sense that if he saw you crying, he would encircle your sobbing like a halo and would cry with you. I'm certain however, that he would breath with you in such a way that you'd have no choice but to forsake your tears for the certainty that exists in the angles of his arms and in the pattern of his respiration.

And I miss his stories. He saw many things in his life and many of these were not so pleasant. I'm reminded of him now because last night we watched our wedding video and there's a part where our family gives us warm wishes and advice. and every time I see him on the video, I can't help but miss him, and my eyes can't help but well up. Because he wishes a long life, with much success, and while his words are simple, the way that he says them make me feel so proud to have him as my grandfather. And because he is a man of so few words, when he does speak, people notice; when he speaks, it is something of value. 

Which reminds me of a story he once told me, of when he was in Canada in the fifties, I believe. He worked in various restaurants along Spadina Avenue, before there was a Chinatown of any kind. They called him Johnny, which is actually my middle name (Stogiannis is my given name, after him - "stow-YEAH-niece"). Everyone loved me, he says. He did a good job, never complained. He worked with a smile on his face, and picked things up: how to speak English, how to serve ham and eggs, how to wash hundreds of dishes with his bare hands. 

He learned also that people can be cruel. He told me once of a time when he was walking down the street and someone driving by decided to throw tomatoes at him. "Go home, D.P.," they screamed. What is a D.P. you ask? Ah, its a term our culturally sensitive times no longer uses. Greeks were called DPs back then. I'm not sure what we're called now. We were known as Displaced People. DP for short. So it goes.

He tells me the story without an ounce of complaint. Regret, perhaps; no complaining though. He speaks of it as if it happened to someone else. He has his dignity, and his dignity will not allow the intolerance and jealousy of others to affect him. 

He left Canada not because some Canadians didn't want him. He left Canada because of his bones. And he looks down at his wrists and hits them, like disobedient children. His bones refused the climate, and he was in constant pain as he worked 12 and 13 hours washing dishes and serving people, many of whom viewed him as one only fit to serve them their liver and onions. And nothing more.

And still he wanted to belong. He had what so many people in our times, both natives and immigrants, poor and rich alike, lack. He had class. He knew they didn't want him, and still he rose his shoulders and the corners of his mouth, and nodded at their requests, and nodded when he fulfilled them. He saw many things, put up with many things, and he had the class to deal with them all with equanimity and dignity. Not because he was Greek, or he was a man, or any other such reason. 

He put up with so much intolerance because to complain was to waste one's energy. To complain was to try to change people at a level in which they were not prepared to change. To return their words with words of his own wouldn't solve anything. Dialogue is not always the answer. 

He held his body upright and acted as one unperturbed by the narrowness of others. He acted. He nodded, and smiled, and accepted. He thought of his wife and his son, who he never got to raise because he was here, in Canada, trying to make a better life for them, sending money back to them, while they were in a tiny village in the north of Greece. Maybe he was a displaced person, maybe he didn't belong in Canada. Maybe he didn't belong in Greece, either. Maybe. But he never let others decide for him whether or not he belonged. His focus was all consuming. He wasn't interested in rights; he was consumed by responsibility. The responsibility he had to make a better life for his wife Elpiniki (which translates to "Hope Wins"), and his son George. The responsibility to do whatever it took to find his place in a foreign land that viewed him as a foreigner. The responsibility he had to live with dignity.

And as I write this, hunched in front of my laptop, the TV yakking away, I imagine him sitting in his living room with the white walls and the pictures of his children and grandchildren in their wedding portraits, in a small house with a black wrought-iron fence, in a dry village of 800 souls in an often-ignored province of Greece. Maybe he is watching the evening news while my grandmother washes the dishes. Maybe he is waiting for his eyelids to soften. Maybe he is thinking about the four houses he would have built here if it weren't for his brittle bones and the dull, constant pain in his joints. Or maybe he is sitting there, thinking about how I have his nose and cheeks, and how our downcast eyes defocus when we tell a story, and how I inherited his smile, and how I have his name.

My Wife, on our fourth year anniversary

My wife hates it when i look at her while she sleeps. I mean, she'll wake up (I won't say the force of my gaze stirs her from sleep), notice that I'm looking at her, and frown, withering down the slope of her pillow, her hair like a long shadow behind her. I like it though.

I'll stare at her, look at her, see her, and breathe. I don't have to say anything. The breathing and the focus are enough; the room's silence a backdrop; the distractions beyond our window an unreal protest against the wordlessness and soundlessness I seek.

And here I can simply be. The disappointment, the clumsiness, the ephemerality of words, are nowhere. As much as I love words, words truly are meaningless and forgetable, as the old Depeche Mode song goes ("Enjoy the Silence" if you're not sure which song, and if you haven't heard it, please do). But being needy, meaning-seeking souls, we grasp for them because without them we're faced with our own wretched aloneness.

And so words like Love keep us from the abyss, an abyss that stares into us as much as we stare into it. And as much as a distraction the word is, loaded with disappointment and clumsiness, still, it is all we have to express that something inside of us that seeks expression. Ephemeral, clumsy, disappointing...yet beautiful.

And staring at my wife as she sleeps, motionless, her serene beauty has no bottom, is unfathomable, as we all are unfathomable, without bottom. And perhaps therein is where Love - not the feeling or the word, but the being of Love - waits and makes its final promise. In the silence of one person, wholly apart from you and still wholly yours, still wholly yourself...the promise of a million bells, tolling.