The World According to Grandma

My grandmother is eighty-four years-old, exactly, and this is a fact that she hangs over all of our heads. Eighty-four years-old means a heck of a lot more years than however old you are, so you better listen to what she has to say. So this is the world according to my grandmother, a world that I never want to forget.

Every morning from the months of May through September she goes for a swim in the sea. She swims one hundred meters out, sixty meters to the right, and then thirty meters diagonally back in towards the shore so that she swims in the shape of a large right triangle. When my dad pointed out the obvious fact that her numbers might be slightly off, according to the Pythagorean Theorem, my grandmother disagreed. Pythagoras, old as he was, is not today, in fact, eighty-four years-old.

In either case, this morning in the middle of her one hundred meter swim out into the ocean depths, she met one of her friends from her circle of fellow retirees. She used to sing with them every night at the gazebo on the beach before her arthritis got so bad it hurt for her to walk. But, you see, my grandmother has a very beautiful voice and loves to sing, and her friend said so. My grandmother took this as her cue.

In the middle of the ocean, a little less than one hundred meters out, she belted her heart out, all the old songs that came to her memory. The other swimmers were totally unfazed. In fact, according to my grandmother herself, they all started to clap.

“Wait a minute,” my father interrupts my grandmother’s story. “How is that even possible? How can they clap and swim at the same time? Wouldn’t they drown?”

“They clapped,” my grandmother insists. They clapped because she sang.

It’s already the beginning of August, and she does not have a lot of time left. She has to get one hundred total swims in for the summer season in order to ensure a light winter with minimal sickness. So you guys heard it here first–if she has not, in fact, completed all 100 swims by winter, we’ll all know it. Probably not because the winter is rough and we’ve all come down with colds, but because she’ll let us know it. She’ll sing us a song about it. And let me be perfectly clear here: I love my grandmother’s songs, whether sung in the middle of the ocean or in the middle of dinner, I don’t care.

So next time you’re on a ship passing through the Mediterranean and you see an eighty-four year-old woman swimming exactly one hundred meters out and who occasionally but nevertheless loudly starts to sing in the middle of the sea, wave hello. But whatever you do, if you’re swimming along beside her, please don’t start to applaud. She’ll single-handedly drown half the populace of Greece if she keeps this up.

–Marie-Irene

My First Day in Athens: A Travel Blog

The best-kept secret in Greece has to be the food. I’m not talking about gyros or that other bland tourist-y stuff, I mean the real thing: steamed zucchini in lemon olive-oil sauce, stuffed grape leaves, and cheese pies with a crust that is so bready you can dip it in the leftover olive oil on the bottom of your tomato-and-cucumber salad. The fruit and veg are fresh here, sweeter somehow, as if they have been left to ripen on the tree (which they probably have). Later on in the summer, our neighbors’ fig trees will be overrun with so much fruit they will be giving basketfuls away. And this isn’t even in the countryside. No, whenever my family visits Greece we opt to stay in the suburbs outside Athens, just a couple of blocks away from the city’s first public beach. It is beautiful here, more beautiful still when figs are in season because I have to admit that I like figs the way that I love chocolate–a lot. You could even call it passionate. Let’s be honest here: if I could I would have a love affair with figs and chocolate.

Greece’s second best-kept secret has to be my grandmother, though. She is what some people like to call a character. Last night my aunt was telling me that the last time she and my grandmother spoke on the phone, poor Yaya was very upset, so much so that she ended up ending the phone call abruptly because she needed to go lie down. Why was she so upset? Well, she had only relieved herself once that day instead of the obligatory two times. We take our bowel movements very seriously here. And she loves to sing. If she could, she would sing almost all the time. She can sing even when there is no music to sing to. Her hands hurt her when she plays the guitar, so she has lent her father’s own antique instrument to my brother on the condition that he learns the songs she loves to sing so that they can make music together.

So for the next four weeks this New Yorker will be in Greece, land of good food, sunny days, and my grandmother’s songs. And this makes me very, very happy.

–Marie-Irene