365 Memories

On this day six years ago, at the corresponding moment of this post, my son was exactly one hour old. I had delivered him (after a two-day medical dance of IV pitocin , raised and lowered doses, fetal monitors, anticipation, frustration with the stalling process of induction . . . ), and I had held him close to my heart, touching skin-to-skin after nine months of wondering what that moment would be like. Then he was whisked off to the NICU . I was too exhausted to think straight; my blood pressure too high to be calm, and yet I had no energy left to be anything but. I wondered when I would see my son next—the fact that I'd had a son took time to sink in, as we had elected to wait until birth to discover the baby's gender—and I wondered whether it was somehow my fault that he was in an incubator and not sharing my postpartum room. It turned out to be something fairly common (who knew?) with a horrible sounding name: he had a pneumothorax , a tiny air leak from the lung tissue in...

I remember never understanding why people complained about allergies. I assumed it was some kind of psychosomatic thing, something possibly without merit. I didn't know anyone who had allergy problems, and I myself had never had even the slightest symptom. I also thought this somehow meant I was of heartier stock—maybe it was my Greek immigrant family history that had something to do with it. I couldn't imagine anyone on my mom's side of the family ever complaining of allergies; it seemed such an American condition. My father had allergies, asthma, hay fever, too, I think, when he was growing up. I remember him telling me that he was allergic to goldenrod and many other things. But long before I was born, he outgrew all of it, and I never saw him with itchy eyes, runny nose, and so forth, despite outings in nature. There were seasonal allergies, which I'd heard about for a long time, and then suddenly people had peanut allergies and wheat allergies . . . I rolled my eye...

When I was living in Paris in the spring of 1991, I went out at night as much as possible. Mostly this was to escape my dysfunctional and completely inhospitable host family. If people visited, then I crashed in their hotels. If there were no family or friends from home in town, then I often had an evening of dinner and music and sometimes dancing with my French professor, a woman with the initials E. F. (see another post about her here ). She lived in the Latin Quarter; I was on the other side of the city. Not much of a trip on the Paris Métro , but quite a long walk. I think the last train of the night—the famous " dernier métro "—was at around 1:30 in the morning, and service didn't start up again until sometime in the 5:00 a.m. hour. Of course, being used to the 24-hour convenience (if dubious late-night safety) of the subway system in New York City, the fact of the trains shutting down often escaped my mind. So I'd miss the last train, and although it was late, ...

I have to say: my son has a wonderful P.E. teacher, and he (my son) is only in kindergarten. Unless there's a big hole in my memory, I did not have a coach or a P.E. class until I was in middle school. Kindergarten was kind of like a one-room schoolhouse, without much of a curriculum other than learning how to "get along." The two elementary schools I attended—one a private school in Chicago, the other a public school in L.A.—did not have physical education classes, or really any organized sports activities at all. We had recess, though in Chicago I remember watching the older kids practice field hockey. The school in Chicago was K-12, so there were junior varsity and varsity teams, but as I was only there from first through fourth grades, I knew nothing about these. The kids our age just ran around outside playing tag. In the fifth and sixth grades (still considered elementary school in L.A.), same thing. There was recess. There was lunch. There were games of four-square...

The first time I heard someone singing opera in live performance was not in a theater as you might expect. In the 1980s I was living with my parents in Los Angeles, but they did not take me to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for opera. No, the first time I heard the passion of, specifically, Italian opera was while eating a plate of pasta at a restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica called Verdi: ristorante di musica. Verdi opened twenty-six years ago, in 1983, and it quickly became one of my family's favorite places. We were regulars and got to know the manager, a man probably close to seven feet tall, who was a singer himself, I believe, or had been—I remember thinking it interesting that his first and last names were really both first names: Chuck Frank. (How do I remember that?) The food was fabulous. I ordered classic Italian standbys such as angel hair pasta pomodoro (the pasta was fresh and deliciously eggy, the tomatoes pleasantly acidic and sweet), sometimes veal s...

It was not an everyday treat, rather an indulgence. In Chicago in the 1970s, when I was in the earliest years of elementary school, my parents would sometimes get the car (which was used on weekends and for road trips) and drive northwest to the city's   Ravenswood neighborhood, stopping at 2458 West Montrose Avenue. This is the address for Lutz Continental Café and Pastry Shop, which I'm happy to learn is still there (though no longer operated by its founders, Mr. and Mrs. Fred C. Lutz ). The authentic Bavarian pastry shop, also called a " konditorei ," was opened as a corner store in 1948 in its present location. In the mid-1970s, when we frequented Lutz , the shop had just expanded to include the café and an enclosed, seasonal garden space. If we ate meals there, however, I don't remember them at all. About Lutz I remember only one thing: marzipan. This was the place where, to my knowledge, I first tried the traditional confection of almond paste and suga...

No, it is not what you think, get your mind out of the gutter. The etiquette in question is oenological , not sexual, although another writer might well draw parallels between the adult pleasures of wine, sensuality, and physical arousal. For a wine professional, of course, it is really no question at all. Faced with a long lineup of vintages for tasting, the thing to do is to sip, swish, and spit. Etiquette likely isn't even a concern; it's just standard practice, reflexive. For a twentysomething woman raised with good manners, who has never been on a wine tasting before, however, spitting is just not an easy thing to do. These days, of course, I know better. I am the wife of a sommelier , and after ten years of dating and marriage, I have been to enough tastings to know that any highfalutin idea of manners may be safely (and should prudently be) forgotten. But back in 1998, I knew no such thing. In October of that year, I traveled to southwest France to meet my husband (then...

I don't consider myself a phobic person. I have never been afraid of heights (though I have blogged about a recent fear of flying, here ); in fact, I have been skydiving and loved the experience. I am not fearful of things like speaking in public or needles or spiders. I am not afraid to take creative risks or to make mistakes. I am not, strictly speaking, afraid of the dark. However, on this last item, I have to confess: it depends on what is meant by "dark." For most of my life, I thought I knew what darkness was—I don't mean metaphoric darkness; I'm talking about the lack of light at midnight. But I was raised primarily in large cities—New York, Chicago, L.A.—and in a city like this, the darkness is never complete. There is always a light-leak from someplace. You get ready for bed, turn off the lights, and at most it takes your eyes a few seconds to adjust before you see outlines of objects emerging from shadow. If you have a window in your bedroom, then you sl...

I drove into Stonington , Maine, for the first time under cover of night. Still on the interstate when darkness fell, I had no way of knowing what would meet my eyes in the morning. Night up in Maine makes a city dweller rethink darkness completely. When was the last time I had driven on streets without streetlamps? Only the car's headlights to guide me down the twisting coastal road of 15 South, heading to Blue Hill, then farther down and over the bridge to Deer Isle; down the eastern length of the island to Stonington at its tip. In darkness, the senses of sound and smell are heightened: rolling down the window, the aroma of pine came in on a current of cold air that carried with it also a chorus of insect song. Due to my late arrival in Stonington , keys had been left for me in an envelope in a box at the office of the inn where I was staying. Tired, I dispensed with the necessary bedtime tasks, turned off the overhead light, and saw a single rippling gleam on the water. I slep...

When my family lived in Southport , Connecticut, we would go on occasion to an Indian restaurant in Fairfield . I can still see in my mind's eye the dark green awning with white lettering that spelled . . . something. Or maybe I'm confusing the awning with a different Indian place; that's possible. Anyway, I can't remember the name of the restaurant, though probably my parents do. I'll have to ask them. I'm pretty sure that this was the only Indian cuisine available in Fairfield at that particular time (late 1980s), and it was lucky for us that the food was good. Quite good. The people who owned the restaurant were nice, too; the kind of people you wish to succeed. I have the feeling that the restaurant closed eventually, though—after my parents had already moved away and Fairfield in general turned into a consignment store haven. At the restaurant, we always ordered the same dishes, the ubiquitous items that have assimilated best into the American "ethni...

I was in my late teens, I remember. And I believe this was during my freshman year of college, as I moved off campus into my own apartment, where I lived alone for the rest of my undergraduate years. It could have been earlier, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is that this was a moment when I was taking a step toward independent, solitary living, and my father wanted to make sure that I was prepared. In terms of practical responsibility and emotional maturity, yes—but on this day also in terms of a toolbox. We went, the two of us, to a little mom-and-pop kind of hardware store in Fairfield , Connecticut, and talked about the basics. I didn't need much, Dad said, but I needed to be able to fix some things, to be self-reliant and not have to call a superintendent or handyman (emphasis on man ) for matters that required only the right tool and a little bit of elbow grease. The first thing we did was pick out a box. It was small, rectangular, and fairly flat, made of meta...

The final panel in a Greek Easter triptych: Friday, Saturday, and now the wee hours of the morning, officially Easter Sunday. "Christos anesti !" " Alithos anesti !" He is risen indeed. Leaving church past midnight, through the smoke of celebratory explosives, my mom and I found ourselves following George Kanellopoulos , my grandmother's cousin on the paternal side, a man who was probably a good twenty years younger than Yiayia , but who now looked the spitting image of my memories of her in her old age. He was, for an evening, a surrogate Greek papou . We went with him to his house over the protestations and histrionics of another cousin of my mother's (on her father's side); she wanted to know why we weren't going to her house, although we only had learned of her existence moments before. She carried on about how she'd found us and now we were being taken away, and po po po  . . . the Greek tragedy continued behind her own closed doors, whi...

Darkness, thick and warm on all sides, enveloping us. Standing in a crush of bodies, shoulder to shoulder at the back of Saint Athanasios —the very same church where, a century ago, my grandmother attended Easter services. 2007 now, the pilgrimage made, a dream realized: to attend the resurrection service in the town of Filiatra ; to go to church with relatives, whom we had found only that afternoon (a story worthy of its own posting) thanks to the owner of one of the town's many kiosks. Expectation in the air, candles—this time white; those of children adorned with ribbons and trinkets—held unlit in eager hands. The lights in the sanctuary were extinguished just before midnight. Only the luminous canopy of this church's epitaphios , the bier of Christ, now reaches out its gleaming fingers to the congregation. The priest disappears behind the iconostasis . When he bursts back through, it is with joy and no longer grief: he is holding aloft a candle lit from the holy flame of Je...

April 2007. Great and Holy Friday, as it is today in 2009. I am sitting with my mother in the "women's section" of the Orthodox church of Agios Nikolaos (St. Nicholas) in the sea town of Methoni in the province of Messinia , located in the hand-shaped Peloponnese of Greece. A row of women, perched like crows in their wooden seats, keep watchful eyes on everyone in the church. I am glad to be sitting behind and not before them; not all of them seem benign. We have each purchased a long, skinny, buff-colored candle, lit it just inside the church doors and pushed it down into a round tray of wheat berries to stand, burning in memory with dozens of others. It is 7:30 PM, and we will not leave the church until 11:00—even then, there will be one last ritual to observe. Contrary to expectations, the time passes quickly, awash in sacred sights, sounds, smells. In the center of the church, the epitaphios , symbolic bier of Christ; it is covered by a canopy of red and white carna...

At night, tired from a long work day, strange things surface. What would make me remember a story I hadn't thought about in decades—a story that isn't even mine, although it belongs to my childhood? When I was young, I loved to tell jokes. Knock-knock jokes in particular, as my son tells now, and when I was older, jokes from the "Truly Tasteless Jokes" series of books (I think there were many volumes; I had at least one of them, with a black cover). Then for some reason I stopped being able to remember jokes at all. I've rarely told any in my adult life, though I like to think I've managed to keep a sense of humor anyway. The jokes were often quite long, with complicated stories leading up to a punch line. This is probably why, in time, I became unable to tell them. I'd remember the punch line but not the setup. I do know that some of my old jokes were rather inappropriate, especially for a child telling them. One involved a rip-off artist in a house of il...

Every year, we've got to pay The Man. The Tax Man, I mean. The government. April 15, time to pay for all that stuff they do that we don't even know about until it's too late. Not that there aren't good uses for tax dollars. But this is not a political blog. It's a memory. I am in Chicago at the age of twenty-five. I had just left a job with a PR agency to test my hand at something more editorial, and while waiting to land a salaried job I started doing a little freelance work. I had not done it before, so this was a first lesson in entrepreneurship. It was scary, but exhilarating. I did a couple of projects that were passed along to me by a writing teacher who developed a lot of texts for a healthcare -related organization. He landed the jobs, then subcontracted to have me help with certain chapters, usually to do with management tools or patient education in hospital settings. The work was interesting enough, and the pay was okay, though nothing to live on. I kept ...

It's raining again. I love the sounds of the city in the rain: the slip slap of wipers, the swoosh of tires on wet pavement, the tapping of drops blown by the wind against my high-rise windows. I relish the sounds—plus the sight of taillights and neon dragging their long, rippling reflections through the blacktop of the avenues—but I confess I've become a curmudgeon about getting wet. I love the rain most when I'm warm and dry inside. When did that happen? I hadn't realized. I'm sure it was my son in his big rubber boots and his slick jacket; my son who, despite loving the thing, never wants to take his umbrella out when it's raining—I'm sure it was his enthusiasm for puddles and his wanting to stick his tongue out to catch the drops that made me see how old I've become, if not in years necessarily then sometimes in attitude. Who is this person, cursing the feel of cold water seeping through an ill-sealed sole? Who is this person carrying an umbrella? I ...

Senses swimming in a deep, blue hue. An unexpected bath of color, and the feeling of being washed clean. In the intimate, empty auditorium of the Musée Chagall, in Nice, France, I sat in shafts of light made dazzling by the stained-glass windows of the artist's spiritual genius. Outside, at the base of the hill on which the museum perched, the January air did little to keep beach goers off the Promenade, but my mom and I preferred being inside, in this museum. I am surprised we did not go back daily while in Nice. It was 1990. I was living my twenty-first year, and in that moment, in front of that three-panel installation of Chagall's windows, I could allow myself to feel that I was just then, only then, beginning to live. In fact, the windows are called La création du monde , or "The Creation of the World," dating from 1971–1972. I was two to three years old when they were made, so we were very nearly born at the same time, the windows and I. The auditorium was u...

It's Easter—at least in the non-Orthodox world—and, setting aside the commercial lure of bunnies and bonnets, creme eggs and Peeps, I consider it a day for two visual symbols: it's a day for crosses and lilies. I saw both in church this morning. A processional cross and candle announced the beginning of the service; potted white Easter lilies stood front and center, amid an explosion of springtime color in bloom (an embarrassment of floral riches at the foot of the pulpit). I have to say, I don't pay much attention to lilies at any other time. There is something about the most popular varieties of the flower that I find a bit showy, though the beauty is undeniable. In terms of lilies, I prefer to think of lilies of the valley. And I think of them because they were named once, long ago, by my mother as a favorite flower. I was older than five, younger than ten. We were living in Chicago, bordering Lincoln Park. Daily at this time, my mom and I would walk along North Lakeview...