Memoirs

The color of friendship is chestnut, and it sounds like crumbling leaves, under the fast wheels or roller skates. I feel the feeling of friendship best during the month of September. I remember her moving to our neighborhood, maybe because our soccer games became suddenly more intense due to her athleticism alone.  We play together  with the boys, and nobody tells us no.  We make a club, where we meet and share stories and sweets. We alternate between these activities and hide and seek.   At other times we gather chestnuts on Sundays for our schools from the yard of the academy of sciences, which happens to be close to the neighborhood where we live. We cary the heavy bags on Monday to school and wonder what is the purpose.  One time she is being a little to brave and climbs the trees in the yard of the academy of economic studies - to gather more chestnuts for school and she falls, she breaks and arm. This marks the end of a season.  Then high-school ...

  White is the color of the skate rink. My father and I take the tram and we go there once or twice a week for figure skating lessons. I feel cold and clumsy and I skate carefully in the beginning as my dad is watching - from the sides. He does not know how to skate but he will try anything. And he wants me to try. I discover the joy of moving fast, almost effortlessly. I am still clumsy probably but I have figured out most of the tricky balance moves I was supposed to learn, and I like skating backwards. Mostly I like moving perpendicular to the long dimension from wall to wall , to use all the space that our team is allowed to use. We are many teams, and the whole rink space only opens wide to all of us at the end of the lessons. We swarm in a big circle, around the rink. The hockey kids skate faster and one of them always comes close, too close at some point, touching my skates as he passes ahead. I am afraid of falling and think that if I fall I should keep my hands under me, o...

  Silver is the color of resistance, at least for me. I was baptized in a silver and copper cauldron in the house where i was born. A 150 year old house standing strong, the house where my grandmother and her sister grew up for the most part. The house their grandfather had bought from his father, who could not figure out how to divide a 3 room house to his 9 children. The house that their grandfather had expanded to 6 rooms, and where 6 families used to live during a certain period of communist times. They were all sharing one bathroom, which apparently what the communist regimen demanded from the rich bourgeois family that owned 6 rooms - to share their riches that is. The house that we were now sharing, two families with kids, plus my grandmother and her sister. We were all there and not in church, maybe because Bucharest was too cold in winter, or more likely because at least one of the family members could not be seen in church, or would loose a job that involved a position wi...

  I did not think that Joy was going to come to me dressed in brown but she did. She was shaped like a lake, undulating light with her smiles. She was dressed in brown, with streaks of green, and yellow. And she wore the forest for her skirt. She was warm. And we communicated through swimming for one mile a day pretty much every day for this summer. Turtles and fish entered the conversation at times. No words were ever required. 

  Red and white are the colors we wear on the 1 st of March. White is the snow that melts, red is the fresh youthful blood of spring. I have a meeting with my boss at noon, and an appointment at the doctor at 10 today. This was i thought the ranked order of importance. But the doctors decide i am not to go home. My baby is due to be born. Why now, is it not soon? Maybe they say, but the baby is in distress, and you are having contractions. We are going to to a C section because she is still breech. I am calling the husband, and he is planning to come at the end of the work day. Because he is close, and he knows that the birthing process takes long, and because he had waited for many ours outside the delivery door when our firs child was born. I am trying to explain that this will be different . He is stressed. The nurses are trying to wheel me out to the surgery room. I tell them to wait. I exchange my turn in line for surgery with another woman, and they warn me - you are next. I ...

I had promised to try not to give birth of a Friday afternoon, when the traffic is at its worst in Patras. But when the water breaks, you have no choice but to head to the hospital, leaving the lab at 3 pm. I dropped by home to get the few things that I had already packed for this big event, even if I did not expect to give birth early. I asked my friend to please dry the clothes in the washing machine, and i met her at my home too. The we all three drove to the hospital, the future parents and my friend. My protector - who is the wife of my PhD supervisor is out of the country, visiting her children in England.  She had given me in charge of an older and respected doctor, who did not show up. The young italian doctor is short haired, bright eyed and alert. I trust she knows what she is doing better than me. Which is very easy. The doctor moves around me, doing what she is supposed to be doing I guess, and being mostly  quiet. The nurse is a lot more verbal and is coaching me,...

  Blue was the color of the telephone booth in the plateia of the small village in Lefkada. Ovidiu, Chris and I had rented a room above the cafeneio of the village and were enjoying the morning looking down from our balcony at the center of the village. The cafeneio was the place were people would gather to drink and talk about the news, to get away from the wives. The place were you could drop off or pick up the occasional letters. Letters that would come to the village, with a name on them.  And on such occasions the owner would send word for the addressee to come get them. The old woman who was coming towards the cafeneio was short, pressed by the years closer to the ground.  But was walking firmly toward the phone booth. She used her card, waited a while for the connection to happen, and started talking loudly to her daughter. Maybe because she could not hear well, or because she had to be heard al to way in Australia we learned from our balcony as the old w...

I cannot decide on the color of stink, it must be a dark brown, with shades of black and repulsion. But if you cannot smell it, can you still assign it a color?  The story of grandma's lake starts with a Duke student who was losing smell, as a result of a degenerative condition that was affecting his olfactory nerves. He was from Missouri and drove up there, and asked his grandmother for money to help with his treatment. The old lady refused, and in his madness he decided to kill her. He then put her in the back or trunk of his car and drove during the hot month of August, from Missouri, all the way to Carolina, and Chapel Hill when he dumped her in the lake. He then took the car to be cleaned, and the poor men could smell the stink he could not, and turned him in.  The plans to have a restaurant floating in the middle up the lake had to be abandoned, because nobody wanted to come dine and relax on top of grandma's lake.  Few know this story today, and those who do must c...

  I was up early that morning for i had to catch the early bus to Athens, to be at the consulate and ask for a visa. I was trying to keep my eyes shut but the sunrise was forcing its light between the eyelids so i watched its beauty with gratitude instead for a while. I must have slept still and when i woke up the young man sitting next to me told me about the dream that he had. I do not think he ever told me his name, maybe he did but i do not remember. But his eyes were kind, and he was ready to open up and speak, so i got ready and open to listening to his story. He had dreamt of an island that was born from, and rose to the top of the sea. And the island looked like a flower, growing and blooming in the sun and supported by the sea. He could see it from his window (even though he was sleeping, and this was happening in his dream), and had an description of its intricate construction and metamorphosis. It was early in the morning and i could visualize his dream in my mind, ...

 Chris has asked for a red story and i am happy to oblige We biked in the clear sunlight of the morning to the bread shop. The bread shop sat across the street from the church, and was opening early, before our wake-up time. Kiria Angelikh stood there, straight, with the hands resting on the counter and dressed in black. She was dressed in black today, and was probably going to wear black for the rest of her life, because she was a widow. But she was also wearing a smile, because she had other family left to care for, and be cared for by. She was selling bread and koulourakia. The sunny air around the church was witness to how fresh the bread was. Perhaps the church's bells were ringing happy because of that smell this morning, even though it was lent. She handed us our bread, and cookies and her fingers were red. There was not need to ask the question, she had been dyeing eggs, and all we had to do was answer to her: “Kalh Anasthash” before walking out the door! And the day was go...

Would the color of love be pink? Or does it look more like a purple rain pouring down hard from a loudspeaker and into the air of our ballroom. I want to know What is your vision for love's color, not the one of the valentine's days cutouts.  As for me, i was lucky to benefit first from the unconditional love of my family, and second the understanding version of love from my friends. They still make efforts for the sake of our relationships who need occasional mending, and i love them for that in all colors. Third, i felt love even in solitude, when surrounded by wide open spaces - and their color is usually green. Could it be that the color of love is green? I had befriended the asphalt of larger cities, the shaped cobblestones of medieval towns, but I always needed more space. I tried to find it by climbing at the top of tall buildings and looking at the sky and them down. ANd the immensity of the view almost got me, but still i could see the narrow asphalted roads, somehow o...

 The eggs were always white, and the butter was always white and sweaty with salty water. The lines were long at the store, while we were waiting to shop for either of these.  it must have been february, which at times masqueraded as spring. The snow in the city was turning yellow, and you could see the ice melting and making room for the asphalt to show its color. But this treacherous ice is also what made the old man fall. He tried to hold up the bag holding his eggs, but he hit the asphalt and most of the eggs must have cracked. his patient efforts, and his waiting in line were not just for him, but to feed the young in the family and there was no reward for him. He got up, defeated for the day. But he was going to to try again the next day, because this is what surviving demands.