She was born a long time ago, into a different world and a different set of circumstances. There were no iPhones, no iPads, or computers since there was no Internet. No Oprah, because there was no TV. And in her small town no radio because there was minimal electric.

She never had anything but a grade school education because of the unrest and because she was a woman. She lived in a time and a place not unlike many in the world today where there has been a great upheaval of people. She and 100,000 others left their home of many hundreds of years and fled to a new place with the clothes on their backs and a few possessions. They were the lucky ones.

With no prospects in central Greece in 1924 she agreed to an arranged marriage to a young man she had never met. To her fathers credit he told her she did not have to marry him if she didn’t like him. Her father would accompany her to France where she would meet and marry this man shortly after her 17th birthday. Crossing the Atlantic she was pregnant with the first of three children she would have before the age of 21. Her first born was Athena.

Her name was Anastasia Semonedies Vamvakides (Bamvakido pre-Ellis Island).

She was headed to a new life in a place she had never seen except perhaps in the picture postcard of New York’s Harbor with the Statue of Liberty. She knew no one there, didn’t speak the language and barely knew the man who was her husband. She left behind her family, her father and mother, her home and country, her language- and anyone who might have an inkling who this young girl might be.

My grandparents would live in a succession of a small one room flats. First, in Manhattan where my mother was born at Manhattan Hospital, then in Brooklyn were Abraham was born at Coney Island Hospital, and finally in Astoria Queens in Teddy Eptaminetis’ mother’s house, still there.

My mother would attend PS 122, a few blocks away and still standing. Newly renovated and repointed it looks very much the way it did when my mother walked through the doors 87 years earlier unable to speak a word of English. Astoria was and still is a Greek neighborhood in New York City which was and still is a city of ethnic & religious neighborhoods from Irish to Italian, to Germans and Poles, Jamaicans, Jews and Hindus. And on it continues today.

My grandmother would eventually teach herself to speak English. Her goal was to read the New York Times in English. My grandfather seemed to have settle on the World Street Journal, so he could check his stocks, which he did religiously, until his death.

When my parents were endlessly discussing their own funeral arrangements, invariably my mother would say “just scatter my ashes on the 59th St. Bridge, I am after all a city kid”. I think it was only years later that I finally realized in some fundamental way this was and always would be the truth. Her formative years were spent in the city. She did sit on the fence watching the Triborough Bridge being built. She would be nearly 11 before they moved to Long Island. Perhaps that is why none of her children or grandchildren possess nearly her degree of gregariousness. In retrospect, it seems fairly obvious.

My grandfather would eventually land a good job at Frank Fride’s Riverside- a restaurant and casino that had a celebrity clientele who would rent summer places on the posh north shore, the Hamptons of its day. Things improved. There was meat on the table. My grandmother got a job at a hospital and my grandfather would open a restaurant of his own. And one day it would get a makeover, as Vam’s club.

Life wasn’t always rosie though and although some of us have heard many of these stories a few times, I wonder if we might appreciate them more if we could think of them in the context of the time or from someone else’s very small shoes. When my mother ran out of the house, after her father had hit & knocked down her mother and rushed to a drugstore to use their pay phone out front, because they didn’t have a telephone, so she could call the police, which she did, she did it without assurances from a nonexistent Dr. Phil or a public service announcement telling her what to do in this instance. She was fearless even when she was afraid.

My grandmother and her daughter were more than mother and daughter. They were partners. Sometimes in crime, when they would systematically pilfer enough money from the register at the restaurant where they both worked for free to come up with tuition for music school for her brother. Her father had made it clear he wasn’t paying for his son’s education, at least not as far as he knew. Or maybe she would take his Buick Roadmaster and drive Abraham to get some sheet music he needed for recital, even though it was forbidden… and with good reason, since she didn’t yet have her license.

She would get her license, a chauffeurs license no less, so she could pick up passengers at the Port Jefferson Long Island Railroad Station across from the restaurant. This was not a typical job for a young woman. But Athena, although a product of her times and place in society, was not exactly typical. She did love baseball but would play with the guys. She was the only girl and her high school drafting class. I had and used some of her drafting triangles when I was at Pratt.

She could be as stubborn as her father and when they locked horns she eventually quit for a while and got a job at a lingerie shop in New York City on 53rd St & Madison Av. Commuting on the train from Port Jefferson every day, her father would drive past her in his car as she walked to the station. This is as good a visual of their relationship as you can get.

My mother was a girl in case some of you have somehow forgotten that, or forgotten her many hair incarnations over the years, from mile-high black to behive or the more casual 50’s boufont with frosted tips or the platinum blonde of the 70’s or the redhead with corkscrew curls in the 80’s …and the occasional silver wig thrown in. She loved going to Suburban with her girlfriends, a local dress shop out East. She was a good friend to have in those days because you never knew what she might do but you were pretty sure you could count on her. We never really knew about suburban life back then. We never knew whose husband was running around, who tried to commit suicide, who was having a nervous break down, or who was dying of cancer. It was only after the fact that we got a better glimpse into what was actually going on at the moment.

My mother had a good non-Greek friend named Gloria, originally from the city. When Gloria was on a TV talkshow for a week, I got to stay home from school everyday to tape it. And when I say tape I don’t mean videotape or cassette. I mean real-to-reel sound recording. My mother was in and out of that house a lot when Gloria got sick with cancer with four small children of her own. When the priest finally came to the hospital to administer last rights he asked my mother to leave the room. Gloria told him my mother would stay or he could go. And that was from a nice Catholic girl. There is, was, something real and immediate about my mother that some people just saw. Something besides the crazy housewife.

In 1972 when my father was finally diagnosed with myocarditis, from which he nearly died before entering St. Charles Hospital where he stayed for a solid two months, before having a relapse and returning there for another month…. my mother went there every day. And I don’t mean for a visit. She got up and went there as if she were going to work. She went every day, day in and day out, because it was her job. I heard someone say how can John stand being around her 24 seven. But what they didn’t seem to understand is that he couldn’t stand not being around her. That very simply put she was his rock. She was what made it possible for him to go out in the world and be John, be the John we knew. She was also that missing element, to a large part, from his own early family life. She brought a volatility but also an emotional warmth and loyalty that had not been there. That is what he saw in Athena and that is what he never stopped seeing in her.

And just quick note, every meal in that hospital came with a very nice brightly colored set of rock hard, melamine utensils; all of which my mother saved and brought home and ran through the dishwasher. We used them for picnics and barbecues for years and years afterwards.

To say that the last few years before my father died weren’t difficult, that she didn’t lose her way, wouldn’t be true. She was worn out and had lost her sense of herself. The very person who could’ve calmed her down and comforted her through this was the very person who was disappearing in front of her. For all her anger, and she was angry, she would still find her footing once again. I spent a lot of time in that house and not just the last few years of his illness. I saw the long curve, the arc of their life together… the good and the bad, the sweet and the melancholy, the every day dull moments and playful ones (and there were playful ones). The quiet hushed talks before breakfast continued long after we were all grown and gone. I can still hear my father‘s voice (when it was strong) from another room with a very particular intonation he would use when he knew my mother was getting worked up and upset about something. A-T-H-E-N-A he would say. Without him there to say Athena, she would struggle to find her way. But into the next phase of her life she would go without him there by her side. And make her way into this next phase she would, alone.

In 1989 when my father was
having surgery at Sloan Kettering in New York City my mother stayed in a hotel across the street and I would go up there in the evenings after work in midtown. Sometimes we would just heat up something in the microwave that she had gotten at the nearby deli, where she got to know all the guys by name and their life story. Even the hotdog vendor on the street had a single folding chair he would let her use when she got lunch from his push cart. Yiayia was back in the hood.

My mother has never been accused of being analytical, never. And she didn’t have a philosophical bent, except perhaps in a pragmatic we can do this kinda moment. However, this night she was is a thoughtful mood, wondering if donating to charities really counted as trying to do good in the world.

And then she wondered out loud, quickly taking it back and saying she loved us all, loved my father, BUT. And there it was, the but. “Sometimes I wonder what I might have done or who I might have become”. Imagine that? Still being able to think of yourself, not as your children thoughtlessly do, as just someone’s mother. Or simply as somebody’s wife, or someone’s yiayia, or even daughter. We are so sure of what we think we know about other people, especially the people around us. We take a lot for granted when we see only what we want to see. And it is pretty much a guarantee that when we do that, that is all we will ever see.

When my father was in hospice, my mother kept asking me “is he waiting for something? Is he waiting for George? Is he waiting for Stacy? What is he waiting for?“ Eventually, I had to tell her, he is waiting for you to let him it know it is ok to “let go”. She immediately understood this and asked me to leave the room. My father died a day later.

There was this young boy, who accompanies his mother, father and baby sister to the city to see a specialist. The clang of the steam radiator and the strange shadows the fire escape throws on the wall of their hotel room will stay with him for the rest of his life. His sister will not. She will die before she is three. When his mother has another girl years later she will hand off the child to her son who will have a large part in raising her. My 9th grade English teacher used to say you “rear” children, you raise potatoes or chickens. He would raise chickens, more than 500 hundred. His mother was so relieved when he was offered deferment from military service if he would just increase his poultry production for the war effort. But he felt, in his own words “strange” staying behind when so many others had left, including his older brother Achilles, already serving in England. So he joined the navy. And that’s how my father, a small town boy raised on a small family farm, that got them through the depression quite well, on a still rural Long Island, wound up in the middle of the Pacific in WWII.

I never heard my father or his brothers ever refer to his father as anything but the “old” man, with a slight mixture of awe and wariness. He was a force of nature of sorts. My paternal grandfather was a workaholic who rarely slept more than 4 hours a day and managed to have a finger in everything. An accountant with a N.Y.C office on 34th street & on LI, phone trunk lines that rang in both locations, a real estate agent, a landlord, and a part time farmer. Also, clearly an early case of a family member with ADD and hoarding tendencies. He amassed quite a bit of real estate, and donated a lot of money to the Greek Church. So what if he had his wife’s sister declared incompetent and seized her property. So what if he held the mortgage on the homes of many of his “tenants”, who always seemed to owe him an extra months rent, if they ever wanted to see the deed to their property again. So what if he used he son’s real estate license, as well as his businesses to squeeze an additional commission out of a sale, illegally …and I could go on in this vein not even mentioning his personal life. But it’s not the point. Six months before my father died I asked him if he thought he took after his father. He looked very surprised at my question and asked me “where did that come from?” And then he rolled his eyes and said “I hope not”. That is the point. My father used his father as a model for the man he did not want to become and would not become. A kind of moral compass to point him in another direction. And choice by choice he made, he became that better man, a better version of what had come before. And not simply in his business dealings with people but in his personal life. We all make decisions great and small everyday and the cumulative affect has a lot to do with the person we become. Perhaps all children arrogantly think they will never be like their parents. The playwright Lilian Hellman said wanting a better way of life was “proof” enough of deserving it. But having it took sheer will, but not having it was sheer hell. She didn’t mean a better life as in bigger plasma screen tv’s or more Facebook posts or more expensive recreational toys. She meant a better way to live in the world as a person.

My father’s word actually meant in something in business. Perhaps he wasn’t enough of a risk-taker, a boy scout, or my personal favorite, ” too honest”. As if being honest were a character flaw. And now a days, in world where lying has been elevated to be a sign of good business acumen, he would be even more out of place with his modesty.

The day before he went into hospice, after being in an unresponsive and catatonic state for 24 hours and then slipping into a deep sleep for a day, my father woke up. In a voice that had been so weak and diminished lately, he said very clearly “l’m worried about your Mother”. This was five days before he died. I told him he was a mensch ….”do you know what that is? A real man, not a poser, not something for show”. He said thank you, like I had just was passed him the saltshaker. Always polite, the master of understatement, that was John.

My mother was a mixture of qualities from both her parents. She had the tenacity and volatility of her father. She lacked some of her mothers more subtle negotiating skills, but she had her mothers loyalty and warmth, especially if you were a friend or the underdog. My parents were a good match in many ways. She drew him out and spurred him on. He calmed her down and leveled her off, trying to remind her of her better self and she encouraging him to express himself….Yin and yang, city girl and country boy (and she always considered him a country boy), extrovert and introvert, selfless and self-possessed. It was a dance they managed for 62 years, even when they could no longer dance, and barely walk.

If you we’re there and saw him in the hospital bed in the family room, almost immobile but trying to raise his arm to put it around her neck to give her a hug and comfort her, it was both heartbreaking and heroic. This is how I remember the two of them, connected, in a place beyond words.

There is a Greek expression that is too subtle for literal translation but perhaps it is enough to say:

Your future is behind you.

What this really means is hard to explain except perhaps as a visual…
If life is a road or better yet a river and we are all in our little boats rowing upstream with our backs to the front of the boat, then everything we are seeing is the past. Even as we move forward into the unseen, unknown future, we are surveying our ever growing, ever lengthening past.

Your future is behind you.

My grandmother saved my life when I choked at seven. Years earlier she saved the life of a curious child by doing what no adult could manage by treating me like a person. A small person but a person nonetheless who needed some answers, which she gave freely and with great honesty.

There was a time in my thirties when rarely a week would pass when I didn’t think of her. She informed me, consoled me, pushed to a better place where I found some of my better character traits. Even though I was barely eight when she died I like to think I don’t idealize her too much and that our connection, however brief, was real and mutual and continues. At least it continues today.

Your future is behind you.

My grandmother fled her home at 15. She would leave her father and mother for America at 17. She would see her own mother again, exactly ONCE more time in her lifetime. My grandmother died at 54 years of age. Her own mother would continue to live never knowing her daughter had passed away. We are so extravagantly spoiled. We take so much for granted. We are so sure of what we know and smug about what we think we know. None of us will ever KNOW what it is to make our own way into a new life, with no one to look out for us. No one to have our backs. We are all here because we are standing on the shoulders and backs of those who came before us. Whether we know them or not. Whether we see them or not, whether we remember their names and choose to acknowledge them or not. Or as Wallace Stevens put it….“We will speak their speech and never know”.

It’s time to wrap things up but life is sometimes messy and it isn’t always easy to tie up all those loose threads into a pretty bow. Still I would like to leave you with something. It’s an image. Unfortunately, it’s not one we will see in any of the photo albums we’ve been looking through. Still, it’s a great image so I’ll set it up for you….

My grandmothers’ good friend lived across the street from them in Deerpark. Her son had become a successful designer for the rich & infamous ie. think mafia bootleggers. If you have a spare $8,000. you can pick up some of his very collectible retro furniture on 1st Dibs. When James Mont (and his real name would be Pessengalu) got out of Sing Sing (and that’s another story) he would visit his mother on the weekends before he rebuilt his business in the city. He would take the train out to Deer Park. Newly paroled his drivers license had been revoked, so my mom taught him how to ride a bike. Growing up in Istanbul he had never needed to learn. His reputation as a bad boy underscores just how crazy he could be, but like any successful businessman, persuasive too.

Although my mothers family was living on less than half acre in town, my maternal grandfather still had chickens too, and of course, a pig….which had had piglets!

Jimmy convinced him that they should bring Guy Lombardo, the bandleader, one of them as joke. Jimmy knew him and knew that he was renting a house on the North Shore for the summer and thought it would be the funniest thing to knock on the front door and hand him a baby pig as a housewarming gift. So the two of them climbed into my grandfathers’ convertible. And my mother got into the back seat. Sun-shining, hair blowing in the wind, sunglasses on…and a baby pig in her lap. And off they all drove on a little adventure. I like to think of my mom as being on a kind of road trip now, one where she will be seeing some people she has been longing to see for a long time-and one in particular. I am going to miss her. The world will be a much more boring place without her and for some of us, not nearly as warm.
Thank you Athena….

Christos Proios, August 24th 2020

In her life Athena knew sadness and depression, was heartbroken with grief and loss, confused about what purpose her future could hold…but she never considered herself a victim. Despite a childhood that was far worse than we ever knew she did not act as if life short changed her. She innately believed she deserved respect. On this point she was always very clear and didn’t take to being treated poorly, by anyone. What choices she had to make, she made. Some she made brashly and others with reservations but she moved forward even when she wasn’t exactly sure what that next step should be. Whatever forces in the universe were responsible for the problems life threw her way….she got on with it and did her best. And along the way she managed to be a force in many other people’s lives. She managed to be more than generous with her time-and equally generous with her money. But more than anything, with her whole heart she managed to be a constant in ALL of our lives, for ALL of her years. Until the last. That signpost, that figure, is what’s gone from the landscape.

“Memory is the scribe of the soul”~
Aristotle