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| Saturday, 01 March 2008 14:42 | |||
THE OLD BLACKby Jack NewcastleTo her defense, my girlfriend did place a call from the Athens depot, but with our bus about to leave and the telephone answering machine still a rarity amongst octogenarian Greeks, our arrival in the agrarian town of Kalamata was going to be left unheralded. This, it turned out, was only a contributing factor in the petrification and then possible coronary of her great aunt Stamatoula, for when we came upon the old girl at the farmhouse – she, busy with some gardening - I could see there was a troubling but uncertain recognition of the golden-haired young woman who had inquisitively made calls of ‘Auntie’ in the native tongue. Sensing the same discomfort, my girlfriend began to clarify. ‘Ine Evangalia,’ she said, giving her name, ‘Aptin Nea Yorki,’ but all that came from Aunt Stamatoula was a continued look of wide-eyed horror. As for my part in this impromptu drama, it was incidental. Aunt Stamatoula was barely acknowledging my presence, preferring instead to keep the golden-haired girl in check by tightening the grip on her hoe. Collectively, we listened to the sound of lemons ripening in the orchard while even the green and yellow rooster that strut the dirt took issue with my girlfriend, for it was with complete disregard of the rules of the Barnyard Boxing Association that he suddenly flew up to deliver a cheap pugilistic right to her kidney.  ‘Look out,’ I instantly yelled, but my girlfriend, whom I had never know to be so fistically adept, had already begun to feint back, duck a peck, and deliver a crushing left hook that would send Kid Cluck to the showers with a deafening ‘Bu-kowwww!’ When the feathers cleared, Evagalia again took up her bewilderment with a now trembling Aunt Stamatoula.My own Greek being rather limited, I could only make out the gist of the conversation that followed. Evangalia noted that she was the daughter of Olga, the niece Auntie and Uncle had raised, and that together they had visited the farm just two summers prior. Had Aunt Stamatoula already forgotten? A look of relief finally came to the woman’s face, but, to be sure, it wasn’t of the very great variety. Cocking her head and turning a querulous palm, she next indicated my girlfriend’s attire. Evangalia’s cultural faux pas, it seemed, was the entire source of her apprehension. Dry-throated, and evidently not thinking herself in the clear, Aunt Stamatoula asked, ‘Alla yeti foras to mavro?’ Ugh. 'But why are you wearing black?' That much I did understand, and I immediately realized how harrowing it must have been for poor Stamatoula. There she was - a woman of her eighties - tending her garden, when out of nowhere appears a golden-haired girl clad in the rig-out of death - black blouse, black jeans, black shoes – and, in fact, after four and a half hours on a Greek bus, we already had the stink of rotten meat on us, so perhaps all Evangalia needed was a scythe tossed over her shoulder to complete the picture and send half the town into cardiac arrest. For out there in the Greek farmlands, we learned that black isn’t New York black, and it isn’t cool or aloof black, and it certainly isn’t metal-goth-beatnik-bongo-playing black. It’s dead black - as black as the grave and you’re never coming back black. This is the black that spooks the livestock and the one we seem to have lost touch with here in the States. This, as we were made so painfully aware, is funeral black. Of course, it’s easy for us to forget about the Jungian power of black because we don’t see much of it any more. All we see is the everyday black of boardrooms, dance clubs, and nursery schools (an inordinate amount of babies in Misfits t-shirts nowadays) but with times a-changing what we get at memorial services is red and green and pink and khaki, all of which, at one time or another, have been called ‘the new black’, so perhaps in a way those colors are wholly acceptable for mourning. And as much as my traditionalism tells me I should be objecting to this, as well as to the spate of cargo shorts and tennis shoes that have funereally turned up, I’m unsure if this trend of the come-as-you-are interment is illustrating a lack of respect for the dead as much as it is heralding Western culture’s new healthy way of accepting the inevitable. Perhaps by donning nothing more than the daily wear of the street and office, mourners aren’t being lazy, as we tend to believe, but are simply coming to view the day of death as just another day in the life. We get up. We miss the train. We expire. Oom-bye, Uncle Ed. I’ll see you on the other side. I imagine, however, that Aunt Stamatoula would have thought this argument nothing but syllogistic chicanery. She probably would have said that death, and all its trappings, needs to have its own color, its own look, so as to be culturally identifiable lest one be unable to recognize it when it comes plodding down the garden path. I now write about Aunt Stamatoula in the subjunctive because a few years back, Death – the real one - did wander up to that farmhouse of broken stone and battered roof. It was on a quiet morning, just before the call of the crow, that Aunt Stamatoula passed, and though I met her the once, as I soldier on toward my end, I realize the lesson she taught has become one of the most important I’ve ever learned: if you want to cheat death, make sure your rooster can duck a left hook.
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