The 12 Eggs - Τα 12 αυγά

Δώδεκα αυγά

Twelve eggs

This one is real. She was alive. Sean had come to Greece to meet Greece, and none of us knew yet that he would become part of my family.

I fed him first. Of course I did. I am my mother's daughter and my grandmother's granddaughter, and a guest in our house never goes unfed. Eggs, bread, coffee, the whole thing. He ate it all, happy, full, finished.

And just as he finished, the door opened. No knock. There is no knocking in a proper Greek home, no trace of privacy, a closed door is only a door that someone has not opened yet. My mother came up the stairs holding a spoon, glowing, ecstatic, and she greeted this boy she barely knew with the word that gave the whole future away.

"Hey, Son!" Greeks can pronounce "Sh" as in Sean!

Not Sean. Son. She called him son, this stranger, years before anyone said out loud what he would become. She did not even hear herself do it.

"I made breakfast for you!"

He had, at that exact moment, finished mine. It did not matter. She was so happy, so proud, so delighted to feed him, that there was nothing to be done. She swept him up and walked him downstairs, to her house, to my grandmother, where the real campaign was waiting.

The two of them took one look at him, and one silent agreement passed between my mother and my grandmother, older than language. This poor boy was hungry. He was not hungry. It did not matter.

«Πεινάει το παιδί. Δεν φαίνεται;» The boy is hungry. Can you not see it?

What followed was not a meal. It was a campaign.

Twelve eggs. I counted. Homemade λουκουμάδες, dripping honey. Greek cake. Then, because it was Christmas, μελομακάρονα and κουραμπιέδες. Then λουκάνικα, in case the boy needed something savory to balance all the sweet. Plate after plate, and every time he cleared one, another arrived, because a clean plate is not a sign that a man is finished. A clean plate is a compliment, and a compliment must be answered.

And Sean, my sweet Sean, could not say no. You cannot say no to two Greek women feeding you. It is not physically possible. There is no word for no that survives contact with a yiayia holding a serving spoon. He understood, dimly, that his life might depend on continuing to eat, and also that his life might end if he continued to eat, and both things were true.

I had to leave. I had a class to teach in Kallithea. I left him there, at the table, already outnumbered, and I gave him a look that said, I am sorry, be brave, I will come back for you.

I came back five hours later.

He was in the same chair. In the same spot. Still eating. Five hours. My grandmother and my mother flanking him like two generals who had found the war of their lives. And Sean looked up at me, and his face, I will never forget his face, was pure happiness and pure despair at the exact same time. The face of a man who has never felt so loved and so full in his life, and does not know if he will survive either one.

And when at last they released him, when he was finally allowed to rise and leave the table and go somewhere, anywhere, my grandmother stopped him at the door. She pressed something into his hand.

A μανταρίνι.

«Πάρε. Για το δρόμο. Και για να χωνέψεις.» Take it. For the road. And to help you digest.

To help him digest. After twelve eggs and half a bakery, the cure she prescribed was one more piece of fruit.

That was the day she decided he was ours, years before any of us said it out loud. She did not have the words for him in English and he did not have them in Greek. So she used the only language she was fluent in, and she fed him until he was family. He married me. But he was hers first, from the moment he cleared the first plate and she reached, smiling, for the second.

She is gone now. But every mandarin in every story I will ever write is that mandarin. For the road. To help you digest. From a woman who loved you before she had any reason to, in the only way she knew how, which was completely, and far too much, and exactly enough.

I dedicate this story, and every other story I will ever write, to all the Greek grandmothers we had, we have, and we will have. The ones who spoil us, who love us, who feed us, who care about us.

To all the grandmothers we did not get the chance to say goodbye to, who left this life while we were an ocean and a continent away.

To everyone who feels the pain of ξενιτιά, who is hungry for a yiayia's love and her connection.

To us, who lost something, and who fight so far from home to keep the light on.

In her memory.