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AN AMAZING MAN
My dear father was an inventor of handy tools, a botanist, a linguist, speaking four languages, and he had never been to school for one day of his life. The virtuous man created a house, church and institutional buildings painting company, later. He had many workers until his sons were old enough to help him in the family business.
I would go to his jobs sites (when they were close by) and bring him freshly made hot lunch. I remember noticing how hard he would work. He had help but he worked harder than all of them. When I was 10 years old my father was 52 years old and yet he climbed tall ladders and even walked on those ladders like an acrobat in a circus.
He loved what he was creating, beautifying places. I remember seeing him up high on very tall ladders and scaffolds painting inside of a church. I had to hold my head so tilted back my neck would hurt. When I was a little older and I was permitted to ride the bus by myself I went downtown to the Thessaloniki’s yearly world’s fair and I also carried him fresh hot lunch there. My father had contracts with the international exhibitions and it seemed those buildings were painted often. With his four languages he communicated with those people very well. I always wanted to be close to him to learn from him. I even volunteered to wash his paint brushes just to be close to him.
Achillea my father also had filotimo. He was not all Greek but somehow he had this wonderful virtue called filotimo.
Supposedly all Greeks have filotimo but I tell you, starting with my own large family, they do not! I noticed it when I was about ten years old. That is where I inherited my filotimo from. It is like forgiveness you either have it or you don’t. I believe it is inherited. You cannot learn this and you certainly cannot buy it.
Every time his company painted a rich home that had old books thrown out, he would bring them all home, for us to read. Some books were even in foreign languages. I remember now there were also black and white volumes of photo albums. Most of these albums were Austrian and German.
I suppose he was wishing the albums would be from his early years when he had so much back in Graz. He considered it a great sin, throwing books out. His hobbies also included listening to the new German made GRUNDING radio with the big green fluorescent eye. He had purchased this radio at the World’s Fair in Thessaloniki and it was his pride and joy. This radio was so powerful, my father would listen to foreign radio stations especially European and the Middle Eastern ones. We were accustomed to listening to Middle Eastern music.
He played dancing music, the classics on the radio and I would dance with him while standing with my stocking feet on his feet. That is how, I learned to dance. I tried to be light as a butterfly not to hurt my father’s aching hard working feet.
My father played the piano in Austria, when he was little. He played the guitar while I was growing up. We did not own a piano. My sister Roula played the accordion, and we all sang to their melodies.
I remember one time he brought home another great find. It was a shiny, ceramic, eggplant colored coal stove that could also burn wood. It was a very handsome addition to our living room, and a conversation piece.
On the top you could also cook on the two burners and under the fire there was a hot metal drawer where you could bake potatoes in the hot ashes. It was the most beautiful wood stove I had ever seen. In the winter we baked our delicious potatoes under the wood stove and roasted our chestnuts on top of that coal and wood stove’s two burners.
On Fridays, payday, my father would bring us freshly caught Aegean Sea fish. Most days my mother cooked vegetables, lentils, dried beans of all kinds, split peas, soups, and stews. That is what the true Mediterranean diet is about; lots of whole grains, fruits, vegetables, eggs, lentils and dried beans. Red meat or foul we ate only on Sundays. Twice per week we feasted on fresh seafood.
Friday night was special, and the family looked forward to it. My father would grill the fish on an electric appliance on the kitchen counter and then bake those tasty potatoes in the ashes.
My mother would fix a fresh from the garden salad, with olives and anchovies, feta cheese she had made from the goat’s milk. The olive oil was from friends’ olive groves and the lemon juice was freshly harvested from my father’s citrus trees.
I read the other day it would take four oranges to give you the nutritional value of just one orange from the 60’s. Imagine that authentic taste of the russet type baked in ashes potatoes. The grilled fish was smothered in our homegrown lemon juice.
This used to be our Friday night dinner. Saturday night we had no meat or dairy products. We fasted for the communion on Sunday.
After church we would have our Sunday feast baked at the local fourno, commercial oven. We had a Petrogas stove in our home but not an oven. Most houses had no ovens at that time, so every neighborhood had a local bakery and a fourno, the public oven.
I also remember one summer after the schools closed, my father took me to another state, in Greece. The state was Edessa. This was the land of the water falls. They produced fruits especially peaches, very large and very juicy. This type of an unforgettable peach was called yiarmathes. Eating one, it would take two hands to hold the peach and the juices would run down our chins. As kids my mother would place bibs around our necks.
There, in Edessa my father had a contract with the Greek government, painting military buildings. We stayed in a motel and my father would take me to friends’ neighboring house during the day, while he worked.
The lady of the house would wash, and comb sometimes just brush my long brown hair, and then braid it. I played with her children.
In the evenings I would dress up and go with my dad to some beautiful restaurants. One restaurant which also had live entertainment had a little bridge over the running waters. I was about twelve years old. My hair was very long, and I wore it in long braids, with satin bows at the ends.
My father always claimed I looked just like my mother when he met her at fifteen years old. And to this day I claim to be my mother’s daughter, in every way. But since I was such an inquisitive child, I also learned so much from my father. I also have a beauty mark on my right arch under my foot, just like he did and I also have his toes and fingers. All my other looks are from my mother. But I did end up having both of their spirits.
When I was forty years old and had been living in America since I was 13, it seems the computer in my head miraculously got turned on. I started remembering details of the answers they gave to my countless questions. I started remembering the stories my mother told me and the advice my father had giving me. I call this, my enlightening period of my life. It was like I got hit on the head.
My father would also do neighborhood jobs, so he had many close by clients. Many people knew of him and respected him. In the spring I was the flower delivery girl just as soon as I was big enough to carry the bouquets.
My father raised fantastic Easter lilies. To thank his clients for the business he would send them freshly cut flowers. The lilies smelled like Heaven.
His hobbies were fixing things, creating better plants and flowers, and he also had created a fruit tree that had many types of fruits on it.
Even the apricot tree had pits sweet like almonds. Usually apricot pits are bitter and non-edible. This fruit was an exceptional large juicy apricot, we called it: kaisi.
When my father was about 50 years old, we received an unexpected letter from Austria. The Red Cross finally found out my father was still alive. After
