 |
| Dad and Nemo |
For those of you who lucky enough to have known my dad this will be a nice poignant trip down memory lane. Please feel free to comment about your memories as well, I'd love to hear them. For me it's been 17 long years since I last saw my little "poppy". My last vision of him was March 9, 1994 as he was being wheeled into the OR at Yale in the hopes of fixing the many problems with his heart and me telling him that I would "catch him on the flip". I am not sure why I said that to him maybe I was trying to cope with an uneasy situation but there it was the last thing I ever said to him- I hope that the "I love you" was understood. But- there was no flip. I think that out of all of us he may have been the most surprised that he didn't wake up. He always pulled through when the odds were against him- so why not now?
Vasilios Demitrios Kirkiles, aka Bill, was born in Meligala Greece on New Years Eve 1927. He was the second of six children who faced enormous hardships in Greece during the war. To say that my short time with my dad was nothing short of a miracle could be an understatement, for a while I thought he was a cat with 9 lives since he evaded death so many times during his short 66 years. Although I could never really get the facts just right the gist is as follows (thanks Dave for remembering details that I had forgotten)- His first brush with death was as a teenager in an execution line where the Greek communists massacred the men and teen-aged boys in his village. My dad was very lucky and the commander recognized him from when he sold pencils as a small boy in the village. The man released him from the line were they were wired together and said "Vasilli, I will let you go but you are on your own". He ran and jumped over a wall to hide. He remained on the run for a few months after that. I went to the site of this massacre as a child and saw the well that they filled with the bodies of the executed. There were row upon row of white crosses many bearing the name Kirkiles. Even as a child I understood the implications. My father returned to the village to care for both of my grandparents who were victims of war as well as both spent a great deal of time being hospitalized. My grandfather had been in the Greek police and had stepped on a mine/ grenade or something and eventually lost his leg to gangrene. My father was there to hold the leg during the amputation and was responsible for burying the it afterwards. A traumatic thing for a young man to have to do. My little grandmother (Yaya) one day was watching children playing in the street. She heard machine gun fire and raced out to save the children. She was hit with multiple bullets but managed to survive (as did the children). My dad was the one to help care for his younger brother and sisters. These events in his young life affected him deeply and my mother told me he suffered from night terrors for many years. My dad eventually emigrated to the USA landing in New York city to manage a little restaurant called Soup Burg on the upper East side. What else would you expect from a little Greek immigrant?
My parents could not have been any more opposite. My dad was 5' 3" tall on a good day. My mom 5' 6" and blond (well you saw that already). I have no idea how they really got together since my dad's English was poor and mom didn't know any Greek. It must have been fate.... or my mom's lack of cooking skills since she ate dinner at that Soup Burg where dad worked every night. He gave her half a roasted chicken no matter what she ordered. He was a one man show there- host, waiter and cook! I have a little tiny Greek- English dictionary that the two used to communicate. It is packed away or I would have taken a picture. Young Bill was so smitten with my mom that he eventually lost his job for dating a customer. When he finally proposed to my mom she said "Are you serious?" He asked why and her response was "well, you are short.... and foreign!" Apparently she was able to over come these obstacles and they were married in 1958.
My life was ripped from the script of the movie "My big fat Greek wedding". That stuff was not made up- well, maybe the Windex but I think that was a reference to Greeks being superstitious. My brother and I went to Greek school on Tuesdays and dragged to Church on Sundays kicking and screaming. I tortured the poor man by wearing my clogs (not the new Dansko rubber soled clogs but the old wooden soled ones) to church which drove him crazy as I klonked up the aisle to get bread at the end of the service (it however did not sway him enough to let me stay home). Every year in the early spring Dad would ask if we wanted a pet lamb. My response was that I was not an idiot and I knew Easter was coming. We never did get the lamb, nor did we ever have the lamb on the spit in our yard. We went to relatives houses for that. Becoming a vegetarian was the only way to get out of eating parts of animals that you would never have dreamt were edible if you had you known what they were.
I call my dad the "ultimate provider" because he was the most selfless hard working man, whose sole source of pride and happiness, was to provide for his family. It was always about us and never about him. He gave us what ever we wanted as kids so we would have a childhood like he never had. We may have pushed him a bit but he never disappointed us. We took skiing, sailing and horse back riding lessons amongst our many activities. I remember riding my friend's horse over to our house and standing in the yard until he came out to see what the commotion was about. My demands for a horse of my own resulted in first a 3/4 Arab mare named Gigi who I think my dad had more fun riding than I did. He would doll the bridle up with tassels and go out on the trails. The funniest part is that the tassels always spooked the horse and my dad would ultimately fall off. Every time! Through more begging we "upgraded" our ride to Archimedes- a well trained quarter horse/ thoroughbred gelding (with less attitude!) that took me to many a horse show and blue ribbon. My other ultimate fit of brattiness was to do a semester at Sea aboard the Regina Maris, an aging Barkentine tall ship, in 1984. At first he really didn't want to part with the money to send me (or understand why I wanted to go out to sea to study whales) but in the end he did and I literally had the time of my life and got 15 college credits to boot. I just found there was a facebook page for Regina https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=53237394912&v=wall- apparently many people also had the time of their lives at sea too!
 |
| Regina Maris |
My dad's providing nature manifest itself in many forms. First and foremost it was about food- cooking it, growing it and eating it- lots and lots of good wholesome food. The more he could do himself the better. Living in a development in Guilford didn't stop my dad from small scale farming. He got chickens and ducks even though that was against the rules. When the roosters started crowing he would eat them. When my dad got sick after his first heart attack (he was 44, I was in 3rd grade)- I was shipped off to relatives. When I came home I looked for my pet ducks. They were missing. My mom told me that my uncle Chris looked after them. Yeah, he sure did look after them- he ate them! Hunting was also a passion for my dad. He was an expert marksman. However his methods were fairly unorthodox. His favorite place to hunt was from the upstairs bathroom window. We lived on a salt marsh that was stocked every year with pheasants. Often the birds would wander into the yard. I would plead with him not to shoot them running to hide in my room. I'd hear the bathroom window go up- and pop pop! And there would be pheasant for dinner. He was also quite fond of ridding the yard of wood chucks and raccoons to protect his crops. One day when I was at home and he was again sick (he spent most of my life sick and trying not to die) he was sitting in a chair near the sliding glass doors. There was a string in his hand. I followed the string out to see a box on one end with a stick holding up the other end. There was a pile of birdseed and morning doves lurking nearby. The guy was trying to catch his dinner! Can't remember if he was successful but perhaps he was. In his later years he took to deer hunting. His last hunting trip he took he shot a deer. Before the animal could be fully processed, or what ever it's called, my dad had a heart attack and was hospitalized. As they were taking him into surgery he was telling me how to make the venison sausages and to make sure that his friend Angelo made the sausages before it was too late. It seemed to be the only thing on his mind at that moment.
He was an avid fisherman and his gardens were vast and very old school. He would have challenges with the next door neighbor about how much produce his garden would yield per season. The neighbor was an anal retentive gardener with everything in neat well spaced rows. My dad's was just the opposite but his yields were better. There was often a 55 gallon trash barrel filled with his latest haul. It could have been fish (blue fish, black fish or porgies) or veggies. How many afternoons did we spend picking the ends off of those damn string beans in the heat? He canned tomatoes and filled the freezer with fish and veggies. I think that we ate stuff out of the freezer for a few years after he was gone. My favorite was how he spelled things. A roast was "rost", which reminds me that I always had to spell the word twenty for him. Never quite got the hang of it. I remember my mom chasing after him in the house screaming "for God's sake Bill you've been in this country for 25 years and you can't put together a simple sentence!" Those were the days....
 |
| Porgies anyone? |
 |
| His famous Greek string beans and just a few tomatoes |
Although he looked adorable in his straw hat and flip flops he could also dress to the 9's. I called him my little peacock. He wore the nicest suits often with an ascot. He also smelled sweetly of jasmine cologne. He would strut around the house in his elevator shoes (you know the invisible lift). He needed all the help he could get standing next to my much taller mom. Want to see kids cringe? Have your parents dance together and your mom refuse to wear flats. It was a horrible sight that I am still not completely over.
When Dave first met my dad it was really funny. Neither of them could understand one another. Dave couldn't get past the thick Greek accent and I would see him staring and trying to read his lips. My dad had never met anyone like Dave before (but really who has even to this day). All he could say about him was that he had "beautiful hair". I think that my Dad would have learned to love Dave. Not quite sure what he would have thought about our 18th century wedding though. But that's a different story for June.
His ultimate gift as a provider was to send me a sign when my mom was dying. I know it sounds corny and far fetched but I just cannot explain it. When mom was in her last day, I was at the nursing home sitting near her. Being my father's daughter and unable to stop working I was e-mailing a surgeon at Yale about a protocol. I sent the response to his query off and resumed tending to my mom. She died shortly thereafter. In the morning I got an e-mail from this Dr. who asked for me to resend my response- as it was all in Greek symbols. I have checked and rechecked what I had sent him- it was English and very clear. His e-mail sure enough was in Greek symbols. Believe it or not, thems the facts.
Well Papa, I think that you would be proud of where little bro and I are in our lives and how much of your sense of family and hard work we have incorporated into ourselves . If he knew Dave and I had a kitchen shop he would be thrilled. I only wish that dad could have met his most wonderfully fun and adorable grandsons- Sam, Evan and William. I am sure he looks down upon them often and smiles.
 |
| Note the tomato in his hand! The oar was part of our clothes line. |
