Climbing St. Friday: A Coming-of-Age Story

By Dena Kouremetis

Climbing St. Friday is a poignant, nostalgic look at the 1970s adventures of a young Greek-American girl who is sent by her parents from a small town in the Midwest to Athens, Greece, for a year of college. As she spreads her wings in the land that introduced democratic ideals to the world, she does so against the backdrop of a country recently taken over by an oppressive military regime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dena Kouremetis
• Release date: Sep 13, 2010
• ISBN: 9780615389783

Dena Kouremetis

Having written about a variety of topics from America’s housing, to midlife romance, to celebrity profiles, Dena Kouremetis currently writes three columns for Examiner.com.Author, co-author and professional consultant for four books, Kouremetis is a past columnist for the Sacramento Bee and has written articles and feature stories for newspapers across the country. Several of her personal stories have appeared in books, including Heavenly Miracles (Morrow Press) and Raging Gracefully:Smart Women on Life Love, and Coming into Your Own (Adams Media). Profiled in Professional Women magazine in 2004.Kouremetis is also a public speaker and professional trainer.

Book preview

CLIMBING ST. FRIDAY: A COMING-OF-AGE STORY

by

Dena Kouremetis

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Dena Kouremetis on Smashwords

Climbing St. Friday: A Coming-of-Age Story

Copyright © 2010 by Dena Kouremetis

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. Requests to the author for permission should be addressed to:

[e-mail]

This is a work of non-fiction, however people’s names have been changed throughout the story for privacy reasons. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, including song and movie titles, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

First edition, September 2010

ISBN-13: 978-0-615-38978-3

Visit Dena Kouremetis on the web at http://communic8or.com

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Epilogue: The path taken

Acknowledgements

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Introduction

The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.

– St. Augustine

I find the anticipation of travel—whether for business or pleasure—delicious. Even now, knowing I must pull off shoes, fiddle with laptops, remove coats, and empty pockets, I am one of those strange individuals who gets butterflies in her stomach at the prospect of boarding a plane and feeling the giant bird lift off the ground. You’ll recognize me right away: I’m the only middle-aged woman who respectfully interrupts any ongoing conversation she may be having with the person next to her in order to press her nose against the cabin window during take-off.

I acquired this affliction by osmosis—by way of my father’s off-the-charts enthusiasm about anything travel-related. He’d drag the family to local travelogue presentations, usher us to the TV set for a travel documentary, and pile up stacks of strategically placed National Geographic magazines all over the living room so that we’d ask questions about them. (Okay, he would selectively remove the ones containing nudity.) But if his contention that travel-as-a-form-of-education is viable, then my dad no doubt received a doctorate of travel during his lifetime. He earned this degree not only for the amount of traveling he did, but also for passing this legacy on to his three children, two of whom work in the travel industry and another who used to but now enjoys writing about how it has affected her life.

Making the transition from small-town life in the U.S. to sample life in Europe has happened twice in my family: once to my father and once to me, and at precisely the same age. This is not by happenstance. Even though these two events occurred more than thirty years apart, I have no doubt that my father and I were at the same crossroads in our lives: feeling stifled by limits while knowing there was so much out there waiting to be seen.

This story covers only a year of my life. It was a year that greatly influenced my future, yet remains a tiny part of my existence and a mere fraction of my formal education. The people I describe are real, although their names have been changed for privacy reasons. The experiences, too, are both real and uniquely my own, still remarkably vivid through a filter of decades.

This 1970s story is of another era, when peace would guide the planets and love would steer the stars, despite the tanks and uniforms as far as the eye could see in a country that coined the word democracy. It is also the story of a young woman finding her footing, while discovering herself by accident. It will forever remain as my year.

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Chapter One

Over my dead body, was my father’s response over several international times zones. I fought the urge to hang up my dormitory’s 1950s-style telephone after nonchalantly informing him that my intent was to spend another year in Greece. Pop was the master of cliché, and this one was meant to demonstrate his resolve.

I’ll just get a job here this summer and live with some friends, I offered. I swear I could hear my mother sobbing in the background. It was a lost cause. My father made it clear: my time in Greece was up.

I had spent a year in the old country far from home, attending a tiny American college in the suburbs of Athens, Greece. My parents had taken a big leap in sending me away to school on another continent, and I knew it would be cruel to play the rebel at this point.

But I digress. Taking stock of the events that warranted this phone conversation means learning a bit about the path that led there. My father figured prominently in all this.

Aside from my dad’s uncanny ability to remember every joke he had ever been told, he could have my brothers and me riveted with the gripping details of his own parents’ struggle to get to this country from Greece. Curiously enough, new details would surface each time Pop told these tales. I could never be quite sure if these small revelations were meant to embellish and impress, or were really untold tidbits unwittingly omitted in days past.

It took more than a decade for my popou (the Greek word for grandfather) to become an American. Through sketchy stories told to us by my father, we learned that his father, leaving his family behind in a tiny Peloponnesian village, traveled with two cousins to Montreal, Canada, to set up a joint business venture around 1905. Left destitute after and illness only a year later, Popou was considered indigent by Canadian immigration officials, and was deported back to Greece. He worked for another six years to earn enough for his passage to board the Prinzess Irene, this time to be processed through New York’s Ellis Island. With only a third-grade education and no knowledge of English, he found his way to Chicago and then south to Indiana, where a first cousin awaited him in Muncie. Starting out with a horse and an ice cream cart, he worked three more years before he had enough money to send for his wife and two sons. By the time four more children were born, he had opened a small business. And by the time they were grown, he had secured half a city block housing a dry cleaner, a restaurant, a bookstore, and several apartments.

Pop, as he was known all over town, was a familiar sight, tooling around on a substantial old bicycle with a huge basket attached to the front with which he would haul groceries home to my grandmother. On the day he died in 1965, this Albert Einstein look-alike, who never lost his thick Greek accent and generous shock of thick, white hair, was honored by the townspeople with flags flown at half-mast at public buildings. To honor him further, we were told that his #1 bicycle license plate was retired in perpetuity.

My paternal grandmother was equally as colorful. As with other immigrant groups whose children and grandchildren find themselves amidst two ethnic worlds, communication with her necessitated hand gestures as well as sentences mixing two languages. To outsiders, it might have seemed likely many immigrant women like my grandmother used their poor English skills as an excuse to get away with feigning ignorance on a lot of things. Through a child’s eyes, however, all I knew was that she regularly cheated when playing Chinese checkers, skipping over diagonal spaces with great abandon as she moved her marbles across the board. When I repeatedly pointed this out, she would girlishly shrug her shoulders, as if it were a silly mistake.

Tale-spinning at its finest

My father was the youngest of six children, and as the smallest boy, he adopted a somewhat feisty demeanor. He became known for his colorfully-told stories that repeatedly sucked us in when he got into one of his tale-spinning moods. Sometimes he would recount verbal snapshots of himself as the son of immigrants growing up in Muncie, where few immigrants lived. One that we loved to hear was his account of the white-hooded Ku Klux Klan gang threatening our grandparents. Having operated one of the town’s most popular hat store/shoeshine stands, Popou recognized the men who hid behind the cowardly capes by their shoes. He shamed them in his broken