This is the end of our first taxi ride. The giant plane trees and the fountain mini-park receded in the rearview mirror along with the memory they had awakened. I glanced to my right to glimpse Noula’s house. Decades of growth created a screen of glossy, green-leafed...
As we continued to retrace our first taxi ride, Makrohori’s Main Street receded in the rear-view mirror. The memory of Theo Pavlos and the 10-year-old me on the bus seeing a taxi with a partially exposed coffin remained with me as we made our way to Veria. The city is...
As the Carnavali (Mardi Gras) festivities wind down on Kathara Deftera, (Clean Monday), Greeks and their households are immersed in the Lenten period. Attending church services and fasting are a constant for forty days leading into the much anticipated celebration of...
After one last look at the gate and the cemetery at Agia Paraskevi, our red jeep put a distance between us and that childhood memory. A somber cloud floated in the car, leaving each of us in our own thoughts as Lena drove closer to where we lived 65 yrs ago. “I can’t...
Retracing our first taxi ride. I was still basking in the excitement and self-satisfaction of my memoir’s publication. In those first months, whenever I picked up a copy of Taxi to America, A Greek Orphan’s Adoption Journey, I ran my palm over the cover slowly, as if...
What do I do when things aren’t going the way I expect them to go? I remind myself of the resilience I employed as a young child without even knowing that’s what I was doing. Like the time I entered the sixth-grade classroom, not speaking any English. I had arrived...
