Frank Georgalis – Writer

My Father’s Life Story:PART III (Unedited)

The Crime and The Punishment

By Frank Elias Georgalis

Among the numerous adjectives that I used, up till now, to describe my father, I left out two; gullible and naive. He was alert, smart and intellectually sharp but naïve and gullible, for he had never learned how to lie and cheat. I remember, my father asking the question, “Who is honorable? I believe that a man is not honorable just because he is not a taker, to be an honorable a man has got to be a giver,” he would say. “Every man must acknowledge that some of his possessions are contributions from others. If one cannot return some of his possessions to others in case of need, he is selfish and no selfish man is honorable. Like the poem says:

How far is home from where I live

How much is mine from what I give.

Therefore, to be honorable one must also be a sharer. Jesus only had five loaves of bread, but five thousand people were fed, because they shared with the others what they had. It is scientifically proven that people who help other people live longer”                                                                                                                                              When I became ten or twelve years old, always impressed by his reserved attitude and unique character I acquired some yearning to get to know him better. He was firm and serious with everything he did and interesting in everything he looked at.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          I used to sit on a rock across from him, watching his eyes- humbly, watching his eyes, and then his hands as he was fiddling with a whip; the same whip he used to whisk the horse and the same he used to lash the servants and the same one he used to thrash me. All that time, I thought that my father was the most fair-minded man that I ever knew particularly with the servants. If there were the occasion where he had to whip any servant for something wrongly done, he had to find a reason in the same day to whip the other servants so the one who was whipped wouldn’t think that he was unfairly treated. His method of punishing the one who did wrong and the rest later, also served as an uncalculated tool to have the servants supervise one another, knowing they would all be punished for the wrong one did.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      I didn’t watch him in idleness; I eyed him while he was stroking his whip with his fingers and looking around for his next prey. I had dread desire to know what he was going to do next and whether it would be my turn to suffer or somebody else’s. I don’t mean to say that I was often beaten or the servants, but even once every six months was an unpleasant event to remember. I wasn’t the only one who was watching him. The servants were discreetly and fearfully observing him while they were busy with their chores. I knew they were thinking of the same thing as I, who will be the next one? nor knowing if anybody did anything wrong . When he would become conscious of being watched he would either act or react. In acting, he would pretend he didn’t know he was being watched, he would look sideways, without lifting his head an inch, to locate each and everyone of us. He liked being watched. He liked being feared by the servants, he liked seeing them working in silence and with care. Many times though, he would stand up, look around the working servants, smile discreetly and would walk away, making an interestingly witty comment and we would all laugh with relief as we gathered up our hearts that had fallen into our boots.  In reacting, he would speed up the stroking of his whip like a bull that kicks the dust before his attack, he then would stand up, look around with a wild eye and spread fear and terror, and whip the legs and the backs of anybody near him, including me. The latter would take place rarely, but swiftly, and for only serious wrongdoings or terrible mistakes the servants would have made, such as losing four or more goats to the wolves. There was a common and a recommended practice for the masters to exercise severe disciplinary punishment on the servants and slaves to keep them in line. There were many masters who were so cruel to their servants, it was a well-known fact, that they had broken solid staffs on the servants’ backs and heads and some of the servants were murdered and the little law that hardly existed in those days and places, was on the side of the masters to keep the economy strong, after all they had the means of defending themselves and the money to bribe. My father, in comparison to other masters, was kind and soft hearted and I knew that some had taken advantage of him. His method of punishing all, he called it justice for all. I am certain he had some delight in that form of executing justice for all, thinking that he was doing the right thing. He was very unpredictable man in his moods. I had never heard my father telling anyone, “I told you so” or “you brought it upon yourself”. I know he showed the same pity for the ones stricken with tragedy, whether it was a self inflicted tragedy or administered by others. I had never heard him saying, “You brought it upon yourself,” which is a common response from     e ones who feel righteous and superior.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Many of times being around him while he was in a good mood, I could have come back from the cheese monger’s shop with my donkeys loaded with all the goodies. If I could get my hands on, 500 kilos of salami 17 kilos of caviar and sixteen heads of halva and charge it on his name, he would laugh and call me thick headed, but at times, in his bad mood, he would whip me for buying something as little as six sardines without his permission.                                                                                                                                                                                                                   As I have said, my father was a unique man. He also had a unique way of hiring help for the livestock. As drifters came around learning that we were always looking for goathands and cowhands, and they were looking for work, my father would survey them with a keen eye, but regardless of their appearance, age or origin, he would say to them, “Listen to me, boy, you look strong and healthy and honest.”                                                     They would nod vigorously.                                                                                                                           “Are you hungry?” he would ask.                                                                                                                                                                                   Most would nod again as vigorously as before.                                                                                                                                           “There is boiling milk and corn bread, serve yourself, eat and then we’ll talk.”                                                                                                                                                     Once they finished filling their empty bellies, if they had met his requirements as he observed them eating there was one of two things he would say to them, “While you are working here, you must be honest, fast and don’t lie or steal and have a thick skin and thick head to withstand some whipping.”                                                                                                                                         If they didn’t meet his requirements he would show them the way to the next herd of goats, which was normally 5 kilometers away. It took me long time to find out what criteria he used to hire, finally I learned that, if they had sat down to eat he wouldn’t hire them but he would only hire them if they ate standing up and treated the brastogalia (porridge) as dearly as if it were pork chops. Sitting down to eat, according to him, was a loss of time and when, “You are goat shepherd,” he used to say, “You must be on your feet because goats are fast moving animals.”                                                                                                                                          I found out later on in life that Henry Ford exercised a very unique method in hiring his top executives, too. Before he made his final decision, he would take them out to dinner. After dinner he would tell them of the decision he had reached, but he never revealed the basis under which he decided. Some time later on in his life, he was asked what he was looking in them at dinner and he replied that if they salted their food before they had taste it, he wouldn’t hire them His reply was accompanied with his famous saying ‘Don’t fix it if it’s not broken’.  I smiled when I learned that. It reminded me of my father who was as unique as some of the biggest men around. Maybe my father wasn’t as great or famous as Henry Ford in the world, but my father was just as big and famous in his little world of Astakos and Dragamesto.                                                                                                                                    He was a very hard man to know. I didn’t know whether he was running away from the Satan or pursuing Heaven. It had never occurred to him to sit and smell the roses and count his blessings, instead of sipping coffee on the run. I could have stood looking in his face for an hour and most assuredly should have gotten some idea about him, but I had gotten the same message as if I were looking at a clock that had stopped ticking a long time ago.                                                                                                                                                                After the triumphant days of the Arabian horse and the steel wagon, which slipped away swiftly, he had to find something exciting to do. He wasn’t a traveler, or a party man, or a drinking man or a womanizer, although he had the intelligence and economical means and could have been any and all of the above, but instead he built a pigsty, better than our family house and even better than the most of the houses in Dragamesto. Once showing signs of expecting, the stout sows were given their own private room. Our family house in town had only four rooms and less comfortable for us, than the pigsty was for the pigs. But one thing I must say about our house, although there was no electricity in town, it had a natural air-conditioned in the summer and natural heat in the winter.

Our house was built on top of a rocky hill. About  ten yards from the front of the house there was a cliff. Standing if front of our house, one could see clear across the valley, for more than ten kilometers, and could see the rocky hills that rested like sleeping giants, the one behind the other. The nearest to the eye was green and fresh, the next in line looked green and gray while the next turned gray until the very last one disappeared into the misty horizon. Standing in front of our house, one could see the peasants working in the fields below us, could hear the birds’ singing their favorite songs, hear the roosters crowing and feel the gentle breeze that came up the valley leaving the Astakos blue bay behind. Everything lived and thrived under one huge light-blue umbrella.                                                                                                                                  At the bottom of that thirty- foot-straight-down cliff was the town’s water supply, a natural mountain spring, with two huge outlets made of carved stone and resembling a handful, into which the water ran endlessly, and then spilling into ten-foot-long and three-foot-deep stoned carved trough, then falling on the earth, creating a brook that noisily rushed down the mountain until it reached the flat lands where was used by the animals for drinking and the rest for irrigation. Evidently in the back of the spring was an underground pool; on that , unknown to anyone, our house was built way before the conversion of the spring, by the townspeople, to the main water supply for the town. The house had dirt floor. Below the floor was the natural pond, where the water had poured in from other underground springs, lingered in the pond then it went out through the stone-carved outlets. The water in the pond was always in the constant temperature of seventy Fahrenheit degrees. In the winter when the temperature out side dropped below freezing the house was absorbing the 70-degree heat through the floor and it made the house warm, in the summer when the temperature reached 90 the house was cooled down by the seventy degree water under the dirt floor. Nobody knew about it for a long time until there was a small earthquake that cracked the floor; then we heard the water running under the floor. We did nothing about it. I remember, when my mother was angry with my father she would declare to us, “Your father has pigsties, where pigs live better than humans and we live on top of a river and one day they will find our bodies floating in the Astakos bay like drowned cats.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            The roof was guaranteed for ten generations to come. During the heavy rains sometimes a part of the mountain would break away and roll down towards the town. Before I was born, one big boulder rock rolled down, hit another huge rock in the back of our house and it split it and a very nice slab landed on the roof of our house, covering the whole house. It was impossible to remove the rock, so my grandfather had some people seal it in place and we had the roof of solid stone slab.                                                                                                                                                      At the beginning of my story I stated that some things stayed in my mind other than my thoughts of my father, it was my addiction to smoking, since I was three years old. Ahead of me there were the three sibling Giannos, Sophia and Thanasis, but I was my parents’ favorite child for they thought that there wouldn’t be any more children. I said that my father was a playful man. When I was three years old, I loved sitting next to my father, watching him rolling a cigarette for himself. He would look at me and seeing my fascination with his cigarette rolling, he would roll one for me. I can recall that my father, my mother and the siblings were amused looking at me smoking like a grown man and blowing smoke out of my nose. Eventually I became addicted and I began to cry for a cigarette. My mother found herself in a predicament; in lack of pacifiers which was a non-existing item, to stop me from crying, she allowed me to suckle on her breast, something very common in those days. Having my mouth on my mother’s breast while holding and smoking a cigarette, I now know, that I became addicted to both, but at least I was quite for the time being. She tried very hard to stop me but everything she did to stop me was fruitless. This continued until I was four years old, at which time my mother gave birth to a girl, Zoitsa. I, not wanting to compete with my sister, stopped the breast feeding, but the cigarette habit stayed with me until I was eighty years old.