(I posted this exactly two years ago, both here and in the Huffington Post, but I think it's still as relevant today.)
On the occasion
of her 80th birthday, Maria Agustina Castillo returned to Sacred Heart in New Orleans,
where she attended high school under the strict supervision of the nuns
in the early 1950s.
“I feel like, as
women, we’re always trying to figure out the rules of the world around us. We’re raised to listen to the rules of
society, as opposed to men, and I sort of realized by the time you figure out
the rules, they’ve all changed. Older
women carry so many worlds inside them—both the societies that don’t exist
anymore and themselves at a younger age.
I like how they (older women) are kind of uncensored. People of that age stop worrying about what
others think.”
Eleni’s book is about three generations of women in
Nicaragua and the secrets and tensions between them. Her favorite character is the grandmother,
Isabella, who was sent as a teenager from her home in Nicaragua to finishing
school in New Orleans where she learned things like how to get into a cab
properly, how to set a nice table, and how to make fudge. This character is based on Eleni’s Nicaraguan
husband’s grandmother, who is still alive today to dispense advice on proper
behavior. Isabella, in the book, is the
mother to Ninexin, a heroine of Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution. She lost her
husband to a bullet, is devoting herself to building a new Nicaragua, and is
frequently reminded by her daughter Maria and others, “You couldn’t have been a
good revolutionary and a good mother.”
As Eleni commented to the Telegram,
“Guilt is hard to escape, especially for women.
You’re expected to do certain things, raise your kids in a certain way.”
Years before Eleni was born, I discovered the difficulties
of learning the rules of the game when I married a man from a close-knit Greek
family. I was a very naïve Presbyterian
from Minnesota. Nick and his sisters had
suffered starvation and worse during the Greek civil war and eventually escaped
in 1949, coming to Worcester, MA to join their father, a cook, whom nine-year-old
Nick had never met. As retribution for
engineering the escape of her children from their Communist-held Greek village,
Nick’s mother was imprisoned, tortured and executed. (He told her story in the
book “Eleni” which was later made into a 1985 film.)
Once I married Nick in September of 1970, I realized I was
involved in a game to which I did not know the rules, especially after our son
Christos was born ten months later. We
lived in an apartment in Manhattan but would drive nearly every weekend to
Worcester, MA, to visit Nick’s elderly father and his four older sisters. I was always breaking rules without realizing
it. At our son’s baptism, which culminated
in Greek line dancing while Nick’s father Christos balanced a glass of Coca
Cola on his head, I was wearing a long dress. In church, while my baby was being
dunked and tonsured, and holy oil was put on his hair, I would nervously, in
the front row, cross my legs. Every time,
my father-in-law would stand up, walk across the church and tell me in a stage
whisper that I was not supposed to cross my legs in church. (It was a long
dress, people!) Also, when I took the
baby home, while the party was still rollicking, I washed the holy oil out of
his hair. Big mistake!
Nick once told me, in the early years of our marriage, that
a Greek wife must always be ready to feed unexpected guests at a moment’s
notice. And I have never been a good
cook. But luckily he is.
Over the next 45 years I learned—to cook moussaka, to do
Greek dances, to speak Greek. And I had
two daughters, including Eleni—although having a son first, Christos, gave me a
major boost in the eyes of the Greeks. (The three requirements Nick spelled out
when we decided to get married, were 1. Quit smoking, 2. Name the first two
children after his parents and 3. Marry in his Greek Orthodox Church.)
Well I did all that—It helped that The New York Times sent our family to live in Greece for five years
while Nick was their correspondent in the Middle East. Along with our children, I learned the
language and the rules of the game. Years later, back in the U.S., when strange
odors emanated from my teenaged son’s closet, I wasn’t surprised to find in the
pocket of his church-going suit a bulb of garlic that one aunt had hidden against
the evil eye. It’s now an ordinary
occurrence to have my future read in my coffee grounds by one of Nick’s sisters
and, when things seem to all be going wrong at once, the kids and I regularly
ask another aunt to do an exorcism against the evil eye.
Eleni said in last week’s article that, as she was growing
up, I would point out rituals and
celebrations to her—the rules of our game. She became so interested in them
that she majored in folklore and mythology at Harvard, learning things she has
put to good use as an author of three books. (Her second, “Other Waters” was about an Indian psychiatrist in New York who
thinks her family has been cursed.)
It was very gratifying to learn that my early efforts to
discover the rules of the game sparked a lifetime’s education and writing
career in my daughter. (Well, the Telegram’s
reporter referred to me as “Jane” instead of “Joan” but whatever.) The part of
Eleni’s statement about older women that gave me the greatest encouragement was:
“I like how they (older women) are kind
of uncensored. [That’s me, for sure.] “People
of that age stop worrying about what others think.” [I hope that will be
me, as well!]
