Lost Days

I remember the year the white horse broke the electrician's jaw, and Christo the yard man sat under the pine trees with a full meal laid out on a folding table by my mother, and shouted for more lemon on his steak. This was also a year of umbrella-men, knife-sharpeners and chair-weavers who hollered down streets in morning hours with their yodel-hiccups falling on quiet shutters; or late afternoons when women in rubber sandals hosed the dusty sidewalks clean, and Popi's husband's underwear hung obscenely white on the clothes-line. I had a bike called Blue Thunder with nut-pads and knobbies ridden bald in two weeks flat, and no balcony bound shrieker could scare us with threats of the famous police, because we knew exactly where to find them--- backsides welded to metal chairs at the "cafe-neon" on Gravias. And anyway---can a Bluebird catch Blue Thunder? In those days my grandmother would make her summer journey to suburbia once known as countryside, settling into our living room like the occupation; arranging her battalion of Madonnas, her holy flame--- a great silver egg-cup on fire set beside sour Byzantine friends. In mid-afternoon she'd kneel and wail to the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and my grandfather in the clouds, waiting. Then, emerging from the tragic adytum, she'd fix her netted wig and go for coffee with the neighborhood gals. Ah Lord, how I waved that red flag while she begged me to pray, and patiently, so patiently, choked me with incense. My poor grandmother, buying fake photos of the second coming from city peddlers, and seeing herself in her finest fur passing through the open gates of heaven.

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