Quota

On Aging

feeds@yuku.com (Timarete) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:45:56 GMT

On Aging

A good friend of mine once went to visit her parents who in retirement were living in their olive farm with chickens and a goat and all the rural delights. She found them high up on the branches of the fig tree, gathering the ripe figs. When she expostulated with them, how it was possible that at their age they should not know what a risk a fall from a tree was, they replied " but we do not feel that we are 78 years old, we feel as...

The Swalllow

feeds@yuku.com (Timarete) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:45:59 GMT

The Swallow

When God created the swallow, a migrating bird that winters in Africa, He started to show him how to build his nest. He showed how to make small mud balls with his tongue and how to gradually build up the nest; but He was interrupted just before reaching the point where He started to show the swallow how the nest should get covered and have a roof. The swallow, half paying attention flexing its wings and ready to fly off swiftly after juicy flies and mosquitoes said...

Marble cheese

feeds@yuku.com (Timarete) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 05:20:04 GMT

A man goes to the next village to get himself a wife. He meets many young girls but one of them, who smiles very sweetly and only says "aye" and "no" appeals to him, and the marriage is arranged.

He takes the sweet girl to his home and they have a lovely honeymoon, the wife is a good cook too, the only thing is, she keeps saying only "aye", "no", and smiling sweetly.
After a while this gets on his nerves, and he...

Indoctrination

feeds@yuku.com (Timarete) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:02:47 GMT

My mother witnessed while in college back in the 1930's a scene that she transmitted to me so vividly that it is as if I had been present.

A young fellow student and she were at the Dean's office for some discussion. There was a metal bust of an ancient tragedian on a stand next to where the other girl was standing that somehow lost its balance and fell on the girl's head.

The girl stood there, blood streaming down her face reciting in a strong voice:

...

One of my great grandfathers

feeds@yuku.com (Timarete) — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 12:37:28 GMT

as we all have four of the kind, organized armed escorts for mule caravans traveling from Caesaria, deep in Anatolia, to Constantinople ( Istanbul for you). This must have been around or even before the 1850s. He made a lot of money in this job, which he increased by playing the Bourse in Istanbul, stock market you would call it now. He decided he should build a manor back in his ancestral village, commensurate to his status.

He bought an orchard, he built a high stone wall all...

Perfection

feeds@yuku.com (Timarete) — Sun, 27 May 2007 21:25:53 GMT

Grade school in the post WWII and post civil war Greece was in the same stressed for resouces condition as the rest of the country. Classes were doubled up, and the children ended up hearing next years lessons while occupied with reading and writing, and the year after had as background the class they had outgrown. There were about sixty children in a class for thirty, squized three at a time into desks built for two, which helped a bit in the winter, as there was no heating.

A...

Nafplion

feeds@yuku.com (Timarete) — Sun, 27 May 2007 21:24:12 GMT

This is a story pertinent to this blindness of our own misdeeds, and how the enemy is not viewed as a person, but as the "other.

Nafplion in the Peloponese has a venetian fort, Palamidi. In 1822 it changed hands for the last time, taken from the Turks, in the revolution of Greece from the ottoman yoke .

I was at an international physics school there when the mayor...

A Hodja story

feeds@yuku.com (Timarete) — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 00:45:29 GMT

Hodja is a judge/imam/fool in the local tradition of Anatolia in Asia Minor. Though Greek, I have grown up with these stories. I was reminded of the following one hearing that there is thought of taxation of virtual assets on the internet, of domain names and such.

The woodcutters

Two woodcutters undertook a job to bring a load of firewood to a villager. One of them works hard in...

when we were very young

feeds@yuku.com (Timarete) — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 09:01:22 GMT
After WWII Greece was involved in a five year civil war that stressed the already ravaged country to its limits.Refugees arrived from the north, chased by relentless rebels, their houses burned, their animals slaughtered; they piled themselves in the shanty towns that the previous wave of refugees, those from the 1922 war with Turkey, had built as first shelters. These were tiny corrugated iron rooms, with a lean/to kitchen and a god-help-you toilet, shoulder to shoulder in long streets full...

Blockade

feeds@yuku.com (Timarete) — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 06:16:26 GMT
During the german occupation of Greece, 1940 to 1944, there was fierce resistance by the hotblooded youth and the not so young.The underground supplied arms and ammunition to the willing, even down to the tender age of sixteen. Every now and then a german soldier would be killed, and the retribution of the occupation army was to block off some main streets and pick up all the males up to the number of one hundred to be sent to concentration camps or to be immediatly executed. That was the...

Mortars and mortality

feeds@yuku.com (Timarete) — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 09:56:27 GMT
My mother, a long time ago, gave me a japanese lacquer box to keep my treasures in, and it has been sitting, with its prim and proper Japanese ladies on my dressing table all these years. In it there is a fragment from a mortar, about half an inch thick and two inches long. I dug it out from the wooden front door of my childhood's house, before its demolition as a sacrifice to progress and practicalities.

It was a dark afternoon, sometime in December 1944, when Greece was balancing...

Still on the palette

feeds@yuku.com (Gyrafalcon) — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 21:21:11 GMT
A painter came to stay in our house.
Her cheeks suffused with a tint
of titantium and napthol, her fingers long
with the pressure of stroking
carmine and mars
with the tail of a comet
stuffed into her ferrule.

Emancipation

feeds@yuku.com (Timarete) — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 13:09:43 GMT

Attending college an ocean away from my country and family made me independent since the age of eighteen. I returned to Greece three years later, and continued studying my chosen discipline, physics, with the objective of getting a doctorate in the subject.

My marriage at twenty-four was a surprise for my parents. I told them: I would like you to meet "him", as in "he called", as we are getting married in two weeks. I knew that my mother was not pleased...

Pear trees

feeds@yuku.com (Timarete) — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 08:12:46 GMT
My father left Kappadocia in the exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece in 1922. He was only eleven years old at the time and his recollections from the village became bedtime stories for us children at a tender age. Thus some stories I have absorbed as if I were present when they happened, feeling the angst and the pain, and sometimes the pleasure. This is a pleasant recollection of the fruit garden they had with apple and pear trees and one big walnut tree to which about 16...

hard of hearing

feeds@yuku.com (Timarete) — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 11:20:59 GMT
Our church, though in Greece, was a protestant church, and there were the usual hymns sung. For many many years a great aunt of mine was playing the organ, until she could no longer push the pedals. My mother graduated to the position, and spent a long time during the week rehearsing the hymns she had to play on Sunday. Inevitably she was criticized by the aunt, who had been her first teacher " It was OK, but stop putting so much emphasis on the bass". It came to the point that my...

Clean Monday in Greece

feeds@yuku.com (Timarete) — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 04:31:51 GMT
Today is Kathari Deftera ( clean monday) in Greece. It is the first day of the easter lent which lasts for 40 days. It is celebrated by eating a lot of lent allowed products, like tarama salad and octopus and calamari and shell fish and beans and salads etc, and a special bread called lagana, which is a large flat bread without rising ingredients. Lots of wine is also consumed.

It is called "clean Monday" because when people were very strict about lent, all utensils should...

Honey bees

feeds@yuku.com (Timarete) — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 05:41:31 GMT
My father, when he retired, decided to raise his own honey to complement his own wine, in the country cottage he built with the help of his brother. He bought three beehives from an aunt who had grown too old to care for them; she had kept them on the roof of her house in Athens. He bought the necessary gear and started reading up on bees.

One summer while on vacation my husband decided to paint the roof of the cottage, which was made of corrugated asbestos; those were innocent...

tunnels

feeds@yuku.com (Timarete) — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 02:58:20 GMT
I have never been to Kapadocia, the ancestral village of my parents deep in Asia Minor. For my father it was the lost fatherland ( patris, hence patriotic) for us children a matter of mythical tales.

Kapadocia is famous for its underground villages www.jehpin.com/travel/tur...adocia.php .
On a rocky plateau, it had two reasons for going underground, cold, and...

Speaking of funerals

feeds@yuku.com (Timarete) — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 15:32:29 GMT
I have written a poem some time ago with the distillation of what follows, but somehow I feel the need to expand the story.

*****************************

My mother's family was very extensive. Her grandmother had had 18 children of which twelve grew to adulthood and had families. The village of their origin was deep in Asia Minor, in Kapadocia.There seemed to be an unlimited number of second cousins, half of whom were settled in the US, where they ended up after the exchange...

Harbinger

feeds@yuku.com (StormKeeper) — Sun, 22 Jan 2006 15:09:35 GMT
old story, from 1993. . .

Harbinger

I. Messages

It was the first Sunday in September, 1991. Not by coincidence, it was the second day of the 1991 Buckner Family Reunion. It was right after the family worship service, and I arrived at home first via my uncle Rudolph. My mother, sister, niece, and grandmother were still at the church, so I was the sole...