free speech on myspace and in friendships

Over the past few days, I’ve been having an email fight with one of my really unconventional friends on myspace. He keeps changing his name to offensive things to be cheeky. But It irritates me because he changes his name to things like “fuck me in the neck” all the time, or things with a kind of demonic theme, and while I know he’s just doing it to get a reaction, I felt like we were close enough friends for me to say something. When I commented to him about his page, he flipped out. I was just kidding, but kind of serious and ever since he’s been sending me these really long diatribes about his freedom of speech, and how my students are college students and don’t need to be protected. Well, hello, I know that. But isn’t it my freedom of speech to be able to say whether or not I like a particular name or image?

I had a student find my profile and I didn’t realize I had set it to private. The student asked to add me as his buddy, and I did without thinking. Since then, my friend, who is really the boyfriend of my very best friend has been posting bulletins from “fuck me in the neck” We call him a contrarian and we made up a little song for him while we were all hanging out with the guitar to the theme song, “It’s the Dawing of the Age of Aquarius,” except instead of the word, “Aquarius,” we sing “Contrarian.” So you can imagine the song: This is the dawning of the age of contrarian, contrA-rian, conTRARian.” (you have to imagine the musical flourish on the last one.) So anyway….I’m not really that offended by his little game. I get what he’s trying to say.

But, why would somebody post something on a public forum and then get mad if people didn’t like it? Anyway, that was my argument. His argument was: (I’m really summarizing here, because he had a lot to say–about three full emails worth) First, he said, how would I like it if he asked me to change my profile because he didn’t want to offend his pagan friends that he was friends with a Christian. Well, first of all, he knows me, so he knows my religion. But I never post it anywhere on my page. And secondly, I don’t think commenting on not liking his name is wrong. What are people’s problems, anyway? Fuuuuck. Then he changed his name, as if to spite me, to “Jesus Christ’s Throbbing Cock inserted into A”

People always like to throw in that whole “Christian” thing around in the Bay Area. It’s like if you’re a Christian you have somehow feel guilty or uncool. Not to mention feel bad that somebody else is offended my your being a Christian and that your presense is somehow oppressing him. Yet, the people in this country who consider themselves “regular ole Christians” think that Greeks still worship the twelve Gods, and have no idea that many Palestinians practice the oldest form of Christianity in the world, and instead see them as all fundamentalist Muslim suicide bombers or something. (But I’m not writing to fight that battle of misperception. I’ll never win there. And even among the Greek Orthodox Christians, you find political crazies and corruption and the lion’s share of people I disagree with.)

And I firmly believe in not getting involved in what other people believe. That’s really up to them. Whatever floats people’s boats. However, not to contradict myself, but Satanism doesn’t bode well with me, or any religion for that matter that isn’t focussed on “loving and protecting the good in all things.” I have to say that mocking my religion kind of pisses me off. It seems like an easy cop-out for people to hate and make fun of Christianity these days. To me, this is a cheap shot. And if you were really my personal friend, had been to my wedding, seen it in the Greek church, why would you needle me by changing your name to spite me, free speech aside?

Free speech, is important. I believe in Free speech. Let me give you an example.

One of my other very best girl friends is involved with the rich and powerful. She is starting to kind of maybe have a thing for a young Republican with political aspirations, connections, and possibly the means to land him in a powerseat someday. The other day she asked me, a known liberal, if I would still advise her politically if she were to get involved with this guy in a major way. What I think she really meant was, “would I forgive her if she became a republican?” Two years ago, might I add, this lovely friend of mine was at New College writing odes to the vagina and engaging in agit prop works of performance art. And I have to admit, I love her uniqueness for being the only person I know who is having this kind of dichotomous dillemma. Might I add, two years ago, she got me a subscription to The Nation for Christmas.

I told her, listen, we’ve been friends for a long time and I repect your right to change your political party affilation, but let me tell you honey, *I’m a damned progressive tree-hugging bleeding-heart liberal and will proudly be that until the day I die.* I found myself repeating my the words of my contrarian friend: If you want me to change who I am to suit your new friends, I just can’t. If maybe I had just become friends with her and already knew her political party affiliation was farther right than mine, I would just accept it and probably not say anything or really care. You can’t disciminate against possible good friends just because you disagree politically. That’s fascist, to me. I mean, if they’re not huritng anyone directly and neither are you, than why? You can disagree on them with certain issues. I have another conservative friend who whenever he comes over fights with me point by point on every issue until we get tired. But we’ve known each other for 8 years and enjoy this kind of thing. It’s part of our friendship. Nobody ever takes it personally. Eventually if we get too frustrated we, or a loved one changes the subject. Sometimes we may even eerily agree on certain obscure points.

So, I realized something important after all this. Like my friend, “fuck me in the neck,” I too, a contrarian.

And also, I can’t ever add any more current students to my myspace and as a precautionary messure, I deleted the student, who added me. Though he is nice and seems normal, I figured why take a chance. There are other people in the class who I would definitely never want to add me. Unlike certain crazy-haired young bright grad. school professors who get to wear jeans and guayaveras to class and people think it’s cute because they are a young studly man, I am a woman, and I get judged if I don’t dress professionally and people notice if my ass is fat. That’s the way the fucking world works. When I’ve published a few, maybe I’ll start coming to work wearing my jeans, but for now I need to look a certain way in order to pass for being at least thirty.

Also, I’ve come to the conclusion, I have to work for my living like everyone else, and I’m not going to tempt fate when I have students telling me they’ve googled me and know I’ve won an award and am going to the Society of on X day at Y restaurant to receive it. The world is just too fucking small. And, free speech aside, I need to work right now. Why chance it?

Don’t attack Iran.org

This is rather an emotional little icon.

Nevertheless: threat of nuclear war, never a good thing. To be avoided at all costs.

*might I add, many Iranians think their pres. is nuts, too.

Santorini Dreams–mantra for burgeoning writers

A table for two in Santorini. It’s empty, waiting for you to fill it with the honeymoon breakfast of your dreams. The grounds at the bottom of the coffee cup whisper of a few great journeys you will take. There are three different kinds of journeys you will take–of the mind, the body and the spirit. Break bread before you go. It’s a long and arduous path and you will feel at many times that you are alone with nobody there to guide you. In some ways, this is true. In other universes, stiched into the seams of this one, there are others who make similar journeys.

Before you, gentle artist, lies a portal. A creative path to your dreams. On the other side of it lies good health, long life, and *deep breath* infinitely creative spirit. Open the door to your dreams, find them spiraling to infinity. Don’t be afraid to be unrealistic. Your dreams will be unrealistic, kid dreams, drunken dreams. People with realistic goals and action items will look at you like you are from the moon. You will be seen as a child in closed-minded circles, where values are about protecting petty amounts of material things, image, and other bullshit.
You will draw your own map with green and blue crayola crayon on the back of a newspaper, you will scrawl them in inky black fountain pen on the back of a bar napkin. Open the door without a handle.

Once you figure this out, you will set sail down a huge sea that really resembles the Aegean. But when all other forces are trying to pull you into reality, don’t be afraid to say pooh to reality and to keep dreaming. Dream and dream and dream, even if it’s three thirty three in the morning. Dreaming in the face of reality is really revolutionary thought. What do you care if people snicker? Let them. What is the point of life besides to live it? Why not allow these dreams to occur? The hairs on your head are counted anyway. Would you rather die a cubicle queen, or a realized dreamer? If you can’t find where you want to go, throw your map in the garbage and make up a new one. Leave a lantern on at home in case you have to stop back to pile up on snacks, comfort food like cookies and tea and salami and feta cheese and dried bread with olive oil.

Surround yourself with a few really good supporters. Don’t expect to find a lot. There are a few dreamers among us, as it is. Not everyone will be able to support your dream like you want them to. Sometimes it’s because they have their own dreams to protect and they feel like if they really help you, that the small spark of their tallent that they’ve been trying so hard to protect all this time, will be gone. This is of course, silly. Because as a wise woman once said, if you spend your whole life trying to keep your small flame of fame from going out, then your personality will always be that–small. Sometimes people won’t support you because they are not fully aware of their own dreams. Don’t take it personally. Just move on. Look inside you to the loved ones that affirm you. These loved ones are the corner stones of your hearth. They sit watch like wooden posts in your safe harbor. If you don’t have loved ones, call for them by singing songs into bottles and cork those bottles and put them in the sea.

Even with loved ones and supporters, you can’t do it alone. Pray to whatever name of the god you believe in. Let the holy spirit protect you and save you. We’re never strong enough on our own. Along the way to your dreams, don’t forget that there is an infinite love in the universe. Don’t forget the memory of your ancestors. Don’t forget to love along the way. Be not selfish or rude. Be gentle. Take deep breaths. Dicipline. Purify.

Some day, you will come up with a product. This product will be one of the many things you will create. You will have realized dreams. Then, realize that life is more than just this goal. The journey and the people you met along the way and the inspiration for this project and the process behind creating these were really what it was all for.

Then when the sun sets, exhale and thank. Drift into the other world with calm. Or you could see it, like another long and crazy dream with no end and many, many beginnings.

peace be unto the dreamer

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*photos (c) Alexandra and Theodore Andersen (Oia, Santorini, June 2006).

Thesis-in-progress blues (and manic oranges)

I’m sorry but I am going to have to do some bitching here.

Like some of my other blogging buddies, I too have been feeling guilty about writing in my blog. I kept thinking maybe blogging is taking away my writer juice or something. I sent my thesis director a story I wrote and butchered trying to slim down the word count. She sent me an email saying that she’s really concerned about the quality of the work I sent her and the level of distance I have towards the characters. My husband says I probably should have sent her nothing instead of something I thought might be a failed experiment. Maybe he is right. Maybe sending in crap will hurt me in her eyes. I just wanted to make some kind of connection. Once in workshop, I sent in something I wrote when I was 19. Everyone LOVED it, thought it was the culmination of my work at Mills. Loved the self-confidence in the voice. Well…the truth is, I wrote it before I even knew what an MFA was, and honestly, it’s still the best thing I’ve ever written and I wrote most of it stoned.

I’ve been spending so much time fighting with insurance companies to get medical coverage, that it’s been taking away all of my writing time. One positive thing is that the powers that be at my school are currently re-thinking their policy. Apparently, I am a compelling case. Maybe they fear a lawsuit. Or maybe they are just decent human beings. At this point in the game, the jury is still out on that one. I will post more about this as soon as it gets resolved. Either way, I will be posting but I want to be on the downlow about it for a while, because I am not sure what is going to happen and I will have to rethink my next plan of action depending on what goes down. Will they give me insurance when I am not elligible for ANYTHING else or will they STIFF me? Come on Mayor Gavin Newsom with your Universal Health Care plan for San Franciscans. Hurry up already! There are uninsured 26-year-olds who don’t qualify for medi-cal because they don’t have kids, are over 21, under 65 and who aren’t pregnant, in a nursing home, homeless, a hatian emigree, an assylum seeker.

OK. Now I am going to do some more bitching. Bear with me, folks.
ARGGHHHHH! I am so sick of being on the fridge of an mfa program. I feel like I spent the past two years being beat down by my peers, being workshopped, writing by commitee and then having false discussions in workshop with self-involved people concluding that we are all not writing by committee. I have been given lazy comments by self-absorbed workshop leaders who are so wrapped up in their own work that they forget to nurture others. Though, I learned a lot from my peers and from deconstructing things I’ve written, I also feel like I LOST my voice and my confidence. I need to get it back. I need to snatch it back from the bottom of my throat. Really, I had it all along. Where are you fire spirit self? Come out.

Right now, I’m meeting these really incredible people which are helping me research my “novel.” Sometimes whenever I say the words mynovel in my head, I imagine some MFA candidate saying it in a smarmy almost nasal kind of selfish way. I hope I don’t sound like this. While I learned a lot in this program, I also feel like it’s time to cut my strings. I feel oppressed by having to write for anybody in the program….Even if it is my thesis advisor and readers. I just want to write for myself for a while. Maybe that’s why this blog is so good. It takes the ownership back of my own writing and really lets me say what I want to say. However, I have to add that one of my students found me on myspace, so I am debating whether or not to clean up this blog a bit and it was linked to this blog. But nahh, let the world see me, naked with a lampshade on my head. I don’t care. Here I am, World. A crappy writer, an ugly betty of the mfa program, a fuck-up extraordinaire. Well, maybe we’re getting a little over mellow-dramatic here. but you know what I mean. Here I am, regardless.

Phew* I needed to get that out. Thanks two-am void for listening. As always, you’re the best.

books I’ve been meaning to read

I need to read all these books I’ve accumulated and some I haven’t accumulated and in honor of all the book blog posts I’ve read, I wanted to compile a list of all the books I want to read in one place so that I will start.

Books I’ve acquired in Greece:
*Salonica: City of Ghosts by Mark Mazower
*Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece by Patrick Fermor
*Road to Rembetika by Gail Holst-Warner
*The Maze by Panos Karnezis

Other books I’ve acquired that I’ve been meaning to read:
*Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
*The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera
*eros: The bittersweet by Anne Carson
*The Known World by Edward P. Jones
*The Woman Who Gave Birth to Her Mother by Kim Chernin
*After the War was Over by Mark Mazower
*Christ Recrucified by Nikos Katzanzakis
*Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
*You Can’t Be Neutral on A Moving Train by Howard Zinn
*God’s Snake by Irini Spanidou
*Extreemly Loud and Incredibly Close by Johnathan Foer
*Bangkok 8 by John Burdett
*The Collected stories of Eudora Welty
*Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross

Books I want to get
*Armed Madhouse by Greg Palast
*IOU
*Amy Goodman’s new book
*My Name is Red by Orhan Palmuk

good greek food

I love the way my hands smell after I dice garlic. Even after I wash them, the smell remains. I am also partial to the feeling of olive oil on my hands, and the feeling of basting raw meat. I don’t know why this is. I like the sensuality of crushing halved lemon pulp with one of those spiral juice squeezer tools. (I don’t know what they are called.)

This summer, when my husband and I were in Crete, we got lost in the mountains with the rental car. It was a crazy experience. I kept hearing from locals that people in Crete grow weed on the very high altitudes of the mountains. But that they also stockpile weapons up there and chase the police out with guns ablaze should anyone try to poke around their fields.

We spiraled up onto what we throught was part of the road on the cheezy tourist map our hotel provided us with. But we ended up off the map on this dirt road. Finally two guys on hoseback came up to us and blocked our path. Then this other car of men came by and said, “Hey are you tourists? You should turn back. We’ll help you.” I tried to explain to them in my non-Cretan Greek that we would like to explore farther into the mountain. (Cretans speak a very distinct dialect that I have trouble understanding.) They told us that the road dead-ended. Though we could see it winding up around the mountain. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. All we knew was that those guys were going to politely block our way and not let us up to where they were going to go. So we turned around and headed down the mountain. Along the way we met many little animals. One of the our favorites was the kri kri, the Creten goat. It’s different from other Greek goats because it’s cuter and has circular horns. I was able to take pictures of several of these little creatures on our way down the mountain.

By the time we chugged back to the paved road, we came across this little restaurant on a cliff. It was called the Eagle’s Perch. I remember that Leila told me on Friday that she went to a village restaurant in Lebanon and when the people saw her coming, they butchered these chickens and as she walked up the path to the restaurant, the chickens were running around with their heads cut off, literaly. Well, this wasn’t quite as dramatic. The wind was wistling outside and bending the tall grasses, and swirling down a huge gorge, and coming up again. Inside the restaurant was a fireplace and several wooden tables. We sat down and it was one of those places that didn’t have a menu. What they did have, was roast kri kri with potatoes. And we ate some of our friendly greeters. It must have been killed the day before, but still it might have been related to one of the ones we saw along the way.

Afterwards, they brought us, as a thank you, this wonderful bottle of raki with two glasses and watermelon, telling us to drink as much as we desired.

We couldn’t resist taking a picture of the raki and watermellon. I offer it here for your viewing pleasure.

Cheers, dear reader. To Life, to Love, To good friends. To all the little pebbles that make up our dreams.

Stin i yia mas. To our health.

red letter day

Well, not quite. I had a break-through day today with my class. It made me happy. Things are on the up and up. Getting more of my list done little by little. My cat, Lilly is cute. House is finally cozy. My bedroom now has this old persian carpet my mother’s best friend gave us from her home as a wedding gift in front of the bed and next to the bed this beautful wool hairy rug from Northern Greece. My aunt Marina cut it off a peice of hers. She had said she was going to do this when we were there, but my cousin got kind of mad at the idea, so I didn’t ask for it after the initial suggestion. When my dad went to visit them after us, she cut off a strip of hers. It’s hand-woven on a loom. I saw a replica of this in a furniture catalog. They were trying to get several hundred dollars for a small peice. There’s a taverna in the mountains that has stone walls and in the winter when it snows on Mt. Olympus, the owner gets lots of business from the near-by town, most of whom are people trying to go for a weekend gettaway in the village. He has really good sausage up there. Great desserts. And it’s warm in there. He’s got these wooly things up on the wall, except they’re not white like mine. They’re dyed different colors. They look like animal skins but they’re not. I finally have my very own. It just makes the room feel more comfortable.

Got to watch the tale end of my new favorite t.v.show:Ugly Betty. Such a cute show. I like to fantasize that I’m the main character when I was interning at City Lights Publishers, but instead of nasty super-models, I had to deal with the wannabe bohemian fashion police and this one girl who always treated me like I was a moron every time I asked her a question. City Lights, unfortunately, has lost a lot of its former glory. The younger 20 to 30 something crowd working behind the scenes now mostly have something to prove. I really hated interning there and it was the place I had most idealized as a teen and early 20-something. I realized that the gods had clay feet, and that was a shitty internship, and most of the people probably wouldn’t remember my name a month later, let alone now that it’s been over a year. I used to get the feeling while interning there, that people didn’t want you to talk to them if you weren’t a part of their clique.

You would be there as an intern and they would all be engaged in conversation but if you added your two cents, they would do two things: a) either pretend like you hadn’t just spoken or b) act annoyed that you didn’t see the invisible isolation booth wall sheilding you the crappy once-a-week intern from the more stylish full-time employees. I think they hated me as much as I hated them. I was not good at being a publishing intern at all. They took the main task away from me of reading manuscripts because I had too much of a heart for people’s writing. I couldn’t throw it away after reading only a page. Once I had a french manicure and it was peeling off my fingers and the girl who was training me totally noticed disdainfully as she dictated me while I performed some banal data entry. I always felt like I had really bad b.o. when I was there and that everyone was prentending not to notice or putting up with me for some reason. I remember the editor laughed and said in a mocking tone when I asked her what her guidelines where, “MY guidelines? Hah, what. am. I. looking for.” And then she didn’t tell me what she was looking for. It couldn’t help that my mom’s crazy friend who was going through a divorce got wind of the fact I was interning there and sent me all of her poems and kept calling the editor and pretending like I was selecting her poems for publication. I was promptly taken off manuscript screening to “give some of the other interns a chance,” but I knew it was because they thought I sucked.

And you know what, I’m glad I quit. This is the first time I’ve been able to really let that out. I felt like I should have been incredibly lucky to be let inside the inner-sanctum behind the velvet ropes on the third floor. But I also felt like when I got there there was not much to see, that I would never get a job there unless somebody dies or retires, and even then there are all so many other button nose, indie-rock punky librarian alterna-girls who had a lot more grace, ready to take my place. Also that the type of fiction I write isn’t wry enough for them to ever consider anyway. My poetry isn’t what they are looking for either. And you know what? That’s okay. It was a good experience figuring out what I was bad at.

The novel that dare not speak its name

I don’t know what it is. But I haven’t been able to work on my thesis to save my life. I’m supposed to be writing my novel. Yet I feel after taking a summer off completely alienated from my MFA program. I want to go there and talk to my advisor. But she is on sabbatical. I have a stand-in advisor who I know is cool and a great writer. But every day something prevents me. I feel like I would have to talk about the book she loaned me that I only got through half of, so I say to myself…maybe once I finish reading this, I’ll go back and try to meet with her. Then I think about all the better things I could be doing than finishing the book she loaned me and I don’t go back.

I know this is stupid, but I think that my old mentors wouldn’t want to talk to me for some reason. That they will be too busy. That they would look at me in this deadpan way, blink and say, “Well, I never have problems with not being able to write. I write all day long. I’m perfect. I cut friends and everything out of my life and just write.” I know this is not true, that everyone goes through these periods, but this is what my insecurity tells me.

I feel like it is easy to “write” when you have a contract with a major publishing house, movie options, international recognition for being a writer. But when you are fighting your insurance company to get insurance, have a broken toe, and have to watch for cancer, when you have to work to make a living, when you have to teach students Freshman English who come to you underprepared from public high schools, when you are freelancing in every possible way, it becomes difficult to continue to believe in yourself. In other words: I am having difficulty believing in myself, right now.

I have this friend who is not really a friend who when I asked her whether or not she thinks I should just turn in some garbage for my thesis or take another semester and really work on it. She said that if my MFA program was not “feeding” me anymore to stop. Well. It’s not “feeding” me, whatever that means. And is that necessarily a bad thing? And does it have to be “feeding” me? Maybe I should stop listening to people who are not really my friend, and stop asking them, stop wondering if they are my friend, and just realize the plain truth, that we are in competative oposition with each other and I should just *let it go*. Deep breath.

Or maybe I’m ready to get back in the water, so to speak and make contact after being mentally on vacation for so long.

I ask myself, why did I go to an MFA program in the first place? To finish a big chunk of work. Along the way I got seduced by teaching, reporting, journalism, poetry, rennaissance literature, radio, you name it. I love the things I’ve learned. I’ve learned things that I’ve always wanted to know but not known where to get the information. I’ve learned things that I wouldn’t have learned all at once. I know this book is inside me. But it’s wound inside my being like the circles inside an onion. I’ve become a professional, in a way.

If I graduate this semester, I will have a teaching job at my college. If I wait, I will still probably have a job if I can find a mentor. Either way is ok.
Maybe I should hang on and see what happens. It’s only October. I have plenty of time to work on things.

Just plugging away step by step, inch by inch, one foot at a time.

poem made from from other people’s cut up dreams

Here is a poem I created from Diane Diprima’s workshop. The idea is to go around the room and everybody tells a dream and then use aspects of other people’s dream cut up into your poem. I came up with a strangely succinct poem, considering.

At the rehearsal dinner
the day before my wedding
at cold springs tavern,
the man cutting prime rib said,
“Where’s the bride?”
I was pushed to the front by a stream of hands.
A short, Latino guy in a Hawaiian shirt
Cut the prime rib and smiled at me.
“The best peice,” he said, “is for the bride.”
I watched him as he cut off a slice.

My life–a slice of meat.
My life–the next chapter
lay on my plate.
What if I couldn’t eat it all?
~

A beach: cold grey rainy day.
Up in the Sierra Mountains
the macarell swim upstream
exfoliating themselves on the rocks.

Sometimes an old woman sits at the top
She is turning the hand crank of time
and lives are beginning and lives are ending
The other day I went to a funeral
of a great man
A chumash medicine woman wove her arms in a circle,
poised mallet over drum and welcomed him
to the spirit world.
She waved them in a circle and wailed goodbye
in her language.

His daughter sang ‘Amazing Grace’
her voice warbling to the corners of the cold room.
She was the irredescent blues,
her silver-shoed feet were the cross on the altar
When she sang, the stars shone.
When she sang, everybody wept.
Even the stairs knelt for her.
The door to the outside world swung open when she began,
banged shut when she ended.

I wonder, suddenly, if he found himself
standing under a blue sky in Montana
under a jazz shack
as her voice called to all corners of the ceilings, and floors.
I wonder if this father imagined himself
eating really good wedding cake
all white and sugary
at her wedding.
Or did he hang like diffused molecules in
the room with the strange, unpalatable feeling
of joy
that he’d seen it–her future.
he’d at least seen it in the forward flashing rush of her existence.
And even though he could not go there, he sighed, was happy.

I wonder when death comes,
does it come on a grey, misty day
while we’re staring at the waves.
Does it charge in all of a sudden,
like a mac truck?
Does it stand next to us in dream
and wave its hands in a large circle
and suddenly time and space don’t exist.

I think of my own father.
Detached retina loosening him one day
sending him to the mirror to examine his
own mortality, going to the doctor,
coming out the next day with a death sentence.
Somehow cheating his way out of it this time.
Throwing the fortune telling in the water
Standing on the blue altar,
denying the logic of its existence.

Finding my roots in San Francisco

I went to Church today and because of this peice I just finished on the old Greek town in San Francisco, everyone wanted to talk to me. For people who do not know, there used to be an old “Little Greece” on 3rd Street and Harrison (South of Market) in San Francsico. It’s over 100 years old. It had it’s heydey in the 1920s. Then, it moved North of Market to Eddy Street. My grandparents used to hang out there. They had bars and bouzoukia like the Golden Peacock, and Cafe Minerva. They also had over 13 cafe Aman. According to one source I spoke to, all the big name Rembetika musicians came to San Francisco to record their music in the 1920’s because the recording equipment was better over here than it was in Greece at the time.

My grandmother moved to San Francisco in 1945. My grandparents opened up a grocery store in Pacific Heights called the Royal Mart. It sold fancy produce to the Pac. Heights residents of the time. On a tip from some of the afluent clients, my grandparents were able to put my mom in the very afluent Convent of the Sacred Heart with head of states kids, and the powerful of San Francisco, and the US.

My mom used to ride to school on the back of a produce truck and was an outcast with the other working class, ethnic kids. Her other friends at the convent were, a little girl whose mother was a Burmese doctor and father was a Norwegian shipcaptain, and a little Korean girl with polio who was adopted through the march of dimes, and an Armenian girl, whose parents were both dentists. The armenian girl was a genius. A musical prodigy who spoke seven languages, she got mentally ill after her parents died and was never the same. The Korean girl with polio grew up to become an English professor. She ended up getting her Ph.D. in English lit from Harvard. My mother went to University of Chicago. Her friend who was the daughter of the sea-captain and the doctor never went to college. She married a Persian man and they have a son together born on my birthday ten years later than me. They opened up a travel business together in the East Bay.

After my grandparents shut down the Royal Mart, my grandfather got a job working as a produce buyer for Patrini’s on Fulton and Masonic. It’s now an Albertsons. Inside the old Patrini’s, there used to be an old OWL drug store with a tiny diner inside. My grandmother used to have a tab there. I remember going there with my grandmother when I was five. I remember she used to send me down to the corner to get chocholate malts and put it on her tab. I remember that the man who worked there was a nice Greek man and he used to make the best bacon and eggs. He would talk to me about how nice my grandfather had been.

My grandfather died when my mom was 14. I never knew him. Randomly while doing interviews I met an older man named Ted. He let me interview him for the project and we exchanged numbers. When I called him at his home, his wife answered and scrutinized the hell out of me. She wanted to know who I was, and who I was related to…typical Greek stuff. When I told them my grandmother’s name, they recognized it. They were the ones who owned the diner on Fulton and Masonic that we used to go to all the time. I saw the man at church this morning and he grabbed my hand and said, “I remember you when you were a little bitty thing coming into my shop with your yiayia.” Then he told me all these things he remembered about my grandfather, who was aparently a very sweet man. (He rembered my grandpa Jimmy so vividly then, even though he died of colon cancer in 1969, over 30 years ago) Then he got on the priest to come visit my grandmother and give her communion, which I thought was sweet. I think because she’s a shut-in, people she used to know probably just think she died or maybe feel awkward trying to call.

Even though my grandmother has dementia, she is still vain, and wouldn’t want people calling her and knowing if she wans’t in her right mind, or coming over if her hair wasn’t set properly the night before. Listening to this man today was wonderful. Also, my old friend Ioanna was at church. I met her when I was a freshman at UCSB and she was a first year grad. student in biology. Now she is doing her post-doc at UC Berkeley and we’ve come full-circle again.

I really felt connected to this old Greek community then. It felt good for my family to be remembered. I felt honored and a real part of the community up here. My husband made the best sausage and eggs the other morning. He also made his famous appleskivers (danish pastry–a cross between pancakes and donuts..really the best on earth). He and I are starting a new chapter in this San Francisco city, home of ancestors with the lemons from old lemon tree flavoiring our ice-water. The lemon tree is the one in the yard, planted by my grandfather.