Frank Georgalis – Writer

My Father’s Life Story: Part I

GOOD MORNING MY WORLD

MY FATHER’S TRUE CHILDHOOD STORY

Part I

As it was told and some parts written by him

By Frank Elias Georgalis

It is not the critic who counts nor the man who points out how, the glory belongs to the man who is in the arena, battling the constant challenges of the world along with natures cruel elements, and still stands like an old oak tree in the valley, scorched by the sun, whipped by the rain and torn by the wind. I have spend, on this earth some eighty years of time, during that time I have had my share of happiness, troubles and tribulations and I have learned the answer to a number of questions in order to survive.. There is one question that remains unanswered. Philosophers, doctors of medicine, doctors of chemistry, doctors of science and economics, writers and a number of other cream of the crop brains have toiled and struggled to find the answer to that question, but it remains unanswered on the table and has never seen the light of day. The Question is: Why are we here. One thing is certain that we come in this world with our fists tight and leave with our hands open and the world we leave behind goes on in the same unraveling manner with many changes that we are not aware. My earliest recollection of my life began, when I was three years old in the year of 1905. I was born in a privileged family with three siblings ahead of me. One may think that the three ahead of me could and should have paved the road for me, in terms of finding a mother and a father already trained to be parents, but I was wrong. I found out later in life, that no matter how many children are born to one couple, that man and that woman will never learn to be seasoned parents and the reason is we are all born with our own difficult selves with our destinations in mind, and being unable to express ourselves, our parents, not knowing who we really are, attempt to redesign our destinies and that confuses the hell out us from the very beginning. I feel that I was born destined to be somebody great. I feel that I was endowed with all the necessary tools to reach the top, but because my parent’s short of faith and knowledge or experience failed to recognize the symptoms of greatness, so they started chipping away my wings and feathers, starting with the first 17 (“Don’ts), until my mind looked like a plucked duck with fluffs instead of feathers and obviously I couldn’t fly, so I remained there like most peasants with both feet on the ground in the town where I was born. Still in my infancy, this I cannot recall, but probably there were times that I couldn’t understand why God gave me hands and arms, because my parents forbade me to use them by saying don’t touch this and don’t take that. On the other hand, if I where allowed to use my hands as I saw it fit, I would probably have broken everything in sight and I would have set the house on fire six times a day. So I came to the regrettable conclusion to think that there was no meeting of the minds between my parents and me. The perfect example is the fact, not being allowed to use my hands and arms; I grew up to be very awkward in handling things. I came to the point whereby I cannot unlock a door even if it has a foot wide key whole. It was dreadful torture an unbearable humiliation which grew into a uninterrupted feeling and palpable sensation, that in the eyes of the grown ups, I was nothing but a perfect nuisance, thus I reached a point in my life up, where I began to behave as an unimposing human, but I was simply drawn and kept myself into an undesignated corner, which I made it my world while I was growing up and I was given the title as being shy. I learned later on in life that the syndrome of shyness is common among little people but is not shyness, it is resentment, because we feel more intelligent, more developed, more noble and because grown ups could not see it, we regress to our little corner and stay there until we develop the proper tools of fighting back. During that time I simply darted along like a groundling in the most becoming manner, making way for everybody, even donkeys. There were many times in my early life when I’d touch something, somebody would slap my little hands to the point where I began to think and to plan how to get rid of limps so as not get into trouble. Thus I will go on now from the point in my life whereby most of my birth given feathers had been plucked and I looked like, I said before, a plucked duck with few of my original feathers and most of the feathers of their own choice which didn’t compliment mine. Being sidetracked from my birth given path of life, I never reached the summit station in the world or, as a trumpet player would put it, never hit that high note, but a fair minded reader will realize that I was not completely faultless or mostly responsible for what I am. I am not going to sit here and tell you that I was a complete loss, but my longer than expected visit to earth was not a triumph nor a disappointment, but I must tell you, as the old saying goes, I could have been a contender. I was born and brought up in the small agricultural village of Dragamesto, Greece, which was built, (many generations before my arrival), in the belly of the mountain Veloutsa. The whole place was, or should have been in my eyes, a delightful a place to live, and yet it didn’t stick out in my mind because there was no other place on earth I had seen. The other vision that comes back into my mind is the presence of my mother with her pretty long black hair, (when ever she removed her black scarf), and her youthful shape and of course the face of my sister Sophia whose cheeks were so red that I was surprised the sparrows didn’t pick on them thinking they were apples. I heard my mother saying to the town ladies when they had gotten together, in the public town fountain, and spoke about their grievances with their husbands, ‘I am sure my afendis (master in Turkish) and I never have a word of difference, except when he insists on me changing dresses from black to something light even red. But I tell him that I will then be the only woman in town to be dressed in black. In those days was not unusual for the wives to address their husbands Afendis. Many things stand out in my mind from that young age; one, equally significant with the rest was the memory of my father whose name was Iraklis (Hercules). My father like his father was a tall man, slender with a thick neck and strong arms. Even though he had no schooling, he maintained himself in a very respectable place in life and was always at hand when needed by the townspeople. He was a soft-footer and a soft spoken man with a peculiar habit of looking the one he was addressing straight in the face with a keen eye and used the phrase “listen to me” more than any phrase my father had ever uttered. My father surrounded himself with an atmosphere of the most respectable and powerful men of the area and moved secured around it. He was playful; a man of few words, humorous, tenacious, forever optimist, with the devil may care attitude and cast a lot emphasis on keeping his promise. He was the only father in the town of Dragamesto who would play with his son, me. He taught me to fly a kite, in front of our house. He tried anyway, but I was very clumsy in my handling the kite like many other tasks that required handling skills. After I would fail to keep the kite flying, he would take the string to show me one more time how to pull it and I remember he would say softly, “Now, listen to me, Elias, try again. Try once more and don’t be thick.” I would obey him and try again. At his first suggestion; trying once more, I was successful but the latter, don’t be thick, I was unsuccessful; then, my father seeing me failing again, would say, not softly any more, “You are thicker than two short planks,” he would take me by the shoulders and make me sit on the rock at the top of the cliff, as if he were telling me that my next stop was going to be the bottom of the thirty foot cliff, and with that in mind and recalling upon other cruel treatments, I would begin to cry silently with tears as big as beans, would begin running down my face. My mother, as she sat nearby knitting, would look at me submissively and at times she would say, “Oh, Elias, Elias, my little guy,” without taking her attention from her knitting. Hearing this, my father would say, “Be firm, Ypapandi, be firm with him! Not, Elias, Elias, my little guy; that’s childish. He is not a child; he is six years old. He knows what to do but he don’t want to do it, that’s all.” Now I remember that my mother darted along like a groundling too, but she only made way for my father and no one else. “He knows what to do, but he don’t want to do it” my older sister, Sophia, would echo finding the best opportunity to get even with me for being babied by my mother. “You see, even Sophia sees that too. When I was his age,” my father would continue with an orator’s air, “I would cut down an old oak tree, single handed, down in the valley, chop it up, load five donkeys with the wood and bring it home, while my father was romancing the hookah (water smoking pipe) at the cafenion and enjoying the thick shade under the sycamore tree and cooled by the gentle sea breeze that came up the valley.” That statement would send a sense of a failure up and down my spine, believing that my father did all that, and I couldn’t even fly a simple kite. Before I had time to recover from that shock of that feeling of failure, I would hear my father say, “Listen to me, boy, now, come back here, boy, and try it again and if you don’t do it right this time, the bottom of the cliff is your final place of rest.” Then, on my way to start all over again, I would detect a faint smile on my father’s face, indicating that he wasn’t serious with the threat, but I would then think again that some day he wasn’t going to smile, but go through with his threat. My father was the most self-contained man I ever knew. Because of the way he carried himself, it would have been next to impossible to suspect him of being illiterate or a wrong doer. His main reason for living wasn’t his family but the respectability of the town’s well-to-do men; that he had. Therefore it made him more or less arrogant, capricious, tenacious, egotistical and a big show off. He used to say that; “A man only lives twice, once for life and once for his dreams.” We had a lakinia (herd) of over one hundred full size horses, but my father, following one of his dreams imported a horse from Arabia for his riding pleasure and a four wheel steel wagon from Germany– the first steel wagon that ever rolled in the towns of Astakos and Dragamesto. It was a spectacle event when he rode it into town sitting on his steel wagon, smiling and preening, as it was pulled by four horses, being so heavy, and seeing the frightened peasants flying out of his way, made him feel important. The steel wagon being long and heavy was impossible to be brought to our town of Dragamesto. The town was built, as I mentioned before, in the belly of the mountain Veloutsa, which made it almost impossible for pirates, Turks and steel wagons like my father’s to reach into town. . It had only one small rocky road snaking to the center of the 500 population town. Most of the inhabitants were the children and grand children of immigrants from Northern Greece. They had come there to escape the Turkish occupation after 1830, right after the Constantinople Treaty, when part of Greece was granted its independence. Dragamesto was within the independent Greece. Most of its inhabitants were working in their small pieces of land, down the valley and all of them had goats and ship and a few cows. Most of them were poor but they never submitted themselves to poverty. Most of them were not humble, criers or complainers, they were proud of their existence and survival methods and none looked for charity from another. Most of them believed in God but were not regular church-goers. Most of them had strong pride of their heritage and culture. Most of them, even though illiterate, philosophized and rationalized living in their life embraced in poverty. Most of them worked, but didn’t toil. The men would spend a lot of their time in the café romancing one glass of ouzo or a cup of Turkish coffee, seriously talking politics, while their women would take it upon themselves to do, and did the best they could with what the earth provided to them, the household chores. The women did not walk around with smiling faces, but they didn’t droop either. Life there was on the lowest terms that could sustain it, but was not accompanied with misery and always showed signs of youth like the trees and plants around them that revived in the rain and dance merrily with breeze. Expressive signs of what had made them and kept them poor, was the rocky and dry land, not neglected land nor obsessively cared for, in which they were chosen to be born in, as I and all my ancestors. Most of all, there were no visible difference between the haves and the have-nots. That was the village of Dragamesto, rising above the flat land, leaning on the east side of the mountain, awaken by the first rays of the growing sun and looking down at the green valley that lay at its feet