“Plant an Almond Tree and in the spring when it blooms, you will know that I have come to visit you.”

Those where my father’s last words to me! A Twenty-One word Greek Cultural salute to help me bury my fear that, I would lose him while being far away in Oregon without the chance to say goodbye.

I never did get that chance, so I planted that Almond tree!

As I drove to Jacksonville this morning, I noticed that the Wild Almonds on South Stage road where beginning to bloom. That sight made all that happened one day in September ten years ago come rushing into my car. I pulled up to the back of the US Hotel Ballroom where I park every morning, turned off the growling old diesel Mercedes, looked down at my shaking hands and said in Greek, “Patera Mou Lipis,” father, I miss you.

“I planted your almond tree like you told me to father and, for 10 years you have never failed to visit me.” For just a whisper I felt him sitting next to me and then I opened the car door and went to work.

At my desk in the Jacksonville Inn I turned on my computer to find out who wanted to get married, who had a food compliment or complaint, who needed kosher food for a bat mitzvah, who wanted a baby shower, who was booking a medical lecture, who forgot her favorite scarf in the Bistro last night, who was looking to produce a Greek food cooking show —and on and on—but, also, who needs to celebrate the life of someone they just lost and thus, in the eyes of a Greek son, who had an almond tree to plant.

Please know that the Almond Tree and its fruit have and hold a sacred place in Greek culture. Almond blossoms are offered to loved ones, sugared almonds served during baptisms and weddings, almond cake is cut to usher in every New Year and, almonds are placed in brandy shots at funerals to soften grief.

In one of the most painful moments of Greek History, Diakos, a hero of the Modern Greek revolution against Ottoman occupation, when facing death at the hands of Ottoman Turks, spoke an end of life poem that generations of school children would be raised to remember him by:

Oh what a time

Hades you’ve come for me

Now when the Earth births new green grass

And brings blossoms to the Almond tree

Olives and the Almonds have been the arboreal mother and father of Hellenic civilization, in whose shade philosophy was first written and, like the brandy shots at funerals, turned to for softening grief.

 

 

A Day Came when our Grandfathers immigrated to East Africa over a century ago, taking little more than their recipes with them…as our people live and think in culinary terms. In the generations to follow, some of us ended-up in Britain and America but all of us still make the obligatory pilgrimage back to Greece to climb the steps of the Parthenon.

There is one other pilgrimage. Obliged by the heart, it leads to a far-off hill overlooking the Indian Ocean outside of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania. There in the shade of a Mango surrounded by Bougainvillea and Jasmine sits my father’s grave.

Ten years ago he left us, only to return in our stories and as the blossoms of an almond tree.

A lifetime before he took his last breath, he took his first as a tiny refugee from a bitter war that trapped his mother in Athens while on leave from the African Savannah. He grew up fighting for the first half of his life in conflicts started by emperors and mad men alike.

As an eighteen year-old in a Nazi prison camp he saw the worst that humanity could become. In later years whenever he woke screaming at night, we all knew his old demons had found him again

From his older brother –our uncle Niko—we did find out that our father was offered freedom by the SS if he betrayed Niko. Unbeknownst to our father, the same offer was made to Niko, but both brothers refused to cooperate and amazingly gained the respect of their would-be executioners and eventually given their freedom.

This lesson of not betraying your brother even when threatened by death put the finishing stamp on my father’s make and model as a newly-minted adult entering the post war world

  • Model 1945
  • Made and in Greece
  • Tested by War

With the very first chance available, came the trek back to East Africa and into the incomparable liberty of the Savannah– with its noble creatures living and dying in that vast Elephant Grass sea that first spawned humankind.

Though Greeks are notorious for holding onto their cultural traditions, eventually, with enough of us white babies born into the waiting hands of Swahili midwifes, and raised in the arms of Swahili nannies, somewhere along the line, all our Greek recipes that called for oregano and rosemary, began embracing cinnamon and cloves. In our family’s kitchen, weather you were harvested on a rocky mountainside on Crete or on the lush tropical island of Zanzibar, you met and married in the harmony of the same cooking pot– there to meld into an Afro-Hellenic meal that nourished the souls of our better natures.

In this new land, the Mango tree was what the Olive and the Almond used to be in the Old Country!

Villages are centered around large Mango trees; elders hold court in its shade, pregnancies are announced by letting kin know that the bride is asking for raw mango to curb her morning sickness and in whose shade, little Greek babies are taught to walk by their nannies in those first tentative steps that will eventually lead to the steps of the Parthenon and, also in whose shade those same Greek babies would eventually bury their father.

Along this colorful journey called life, my father made friends out of enemies, allies out of adversaries and brought side aching laughter to every occasion where he was included. He avoided conflict as though it was a powerful curse that would dry-up the rain clouds bringing famine to the land. Everyone loved Dimitri Mantheakis for his horizon-wide smile and for his ability to make anyone shed their fronts to just be themselves. No one could be serious around him. With enough laughter, they all turned into teens again. He was penicillin to the vane diseases of snobbery and pretension and could make even the most reserved of proper Colonial ladies blush in anticipation of his incorrigibly naughty attention.

But beneath all that charm still lived the prisoner of war!

This man who had witnessed and done battle with those ugliest of monsters that lurk in the hearts of war deranged humans– now a father of six– once told me that the pain in a man’s heart can take a lifetime to heal. To ease his inner pain, his salve of choice was not the alcohol; tobacco, opium or gambling that had ruined so many Greek farmers in Africa. No! His inner pain was drowned in the arms of women.

Thus the boy who would not betray his brother when faced with the pain of death ended-up betraying his wife when faced with the pain of living.

After he was gone, my mother told me that the only way to keep my father from other women’s beds was to not allow women to live in Tanzania. If my father was made of human sugar, my mother is made of human salt. They were the unlikeliest match in all East Africa—a dysfunctional and tempestuous result of disastrous Greek matchmaking! The more spice they added to the recipe of their lives, the more the recipe was ruined, and, finally that pot burned its meal.

Divorce came in ‘73 and she moved to Greece. In ‘93 she moved back again to the old farm in Tanzania, to live next door; and, from then on they remained the strangest of friends never missing a chance to jokingly describe each other as the “Womanizer” and the “Witch.”

Yes, they both had grounds for their disaffections for each other as my mother is not without her thorns either. The “Witch” was known and is known still, as a woman of unusual powers and those that entered her garden stepped softly for fear of waking her.

The grounds of our hilltop estate have for three generations been planted with exotic trees and flowers, eventually growing into this “Garden of no Mans Eden” where Valentino and the Witch would meet over single malt sundowners surrounded by truce insuring grandchildren. An unexpected peace had finally settled between them now in the winter of their lives and, I will never forget catching them dancing a slow and gentle tango one evening in that garden after he had given her a sprig of jasmine.

He always gave her Jasmine. Jasmine was their eternal olive branch!

Then one day he left us.

We laid him to rest that September afternoon ten years ago into the red African Earth to make his final bed in the arms of his last mistress– Mother Africa. The first woman of human existence now claimed him back and; in her warm embrace all wounds are healed, all demons exorcised.

The recipe for his funeral was right out of our family’s kitchen flavored by both Hellenic and African traditions and customs and served as his last supper. Carried on the shoulders of his five Africa-born sons and then lowered into the grave with the help of friends — Black Hand over White Hand over Black Hand and into eternity. His funeral was the first time Greek Orthodox Priests—all black Tanzanians– chanted last Orthodox rights in Swahili as hundreds of Africans and dozens of guests from many other lands listened in disbelief. It could not have been more unique than if Santorini rose out of the Indian Ocean next to Zanzibar or if Kilimanjaro grew out of Thessaly to cast its mighty shadow over Olympus.

The Almond and the Mango had found their garden of No Mans Eden with two cultures uniting into an amazing end of life banquet.

Then came that sacred moment just before a grave is filled, finally making all that ever was in one’s life forever committed back to the earth. A heavy silence swallowed all sounds as though the Gods had muted the Earth and all eyes fell on my brother, Yannis. In a Greek burial tradition pre-dating even Alexander, he held up a clay plate symbolic of our father’s last meal that would no longer be needed.

Out of the hundreds that gathered, only a few Greek s knew what was about to happen. Though no one had explained to the vast African majority of guests this custom of the children of Zeus, all instinctively felt a door was about to be closed that would never again open into this garden, on this hill overlooking the Indian Ocean.

A thousand eyes followed the plate as Yannis lowered it and smashed it against the side of the grave sending shards of Red Greek Clay down into the Red African Earth.

And so it was done!

Should there be an archeologist among you who read these words, you may know of the familiar sight of unearthing pottery shards from an unmarked grave of a fallen Greek soldier found in any land where Greeks and were returned to earth. Shards of the plate that has seen its last meal!

Witnessing what happened next is something that I will carry to my own grave, when my plate too is shattered. My head still today spins with the image of my father’s grave being filled with red soil a handful at a time by hundreds of morning Tanzanians.

After waiting politely for the children of Zeus to make their peace, Africa came rushing in like an unstoppable bull elephant protecting one of its fallen sons. A small sea of grieving men that he once walked with in life now grabbed handfuls of earth and fought for a chance to throw it on to the casket below. Such raw emotion overcame this custom that a cloud of fine red dust was kicked-up eventually to settle over everyone in a kind of dry, end-of-life, African Baptism.

Two made-in-China shovels provided for this task were cast aside in honor of Swahili tradition. One handful of earth at a time, making brotherhood possible! Our family was speechless. To be stopped by the finality of death now lay in the shadow of being overwhelmingly and unforgettably moved by the finality of love.

Along with the clay plate, another barrier too was broken. There was no longer Black or White here– only Red! The Red blood of our grieving hearts…the Red dust that covers our lives. And the Red earth to which we all return to in the end. Red, the color of Brotherhood! Red the color of life! Ashes to Ashes, Red Dust to Red Dust!

It has taken ten years for me to find these words again. Ten Springs waiting for his almond tree to bloom again. However, the almond tree does not just bloom for me. For half a life I have watched countless others say goodbye to loved ones. Wakes, Celebrations of Life, Memorials are all part of what I do for a living. It is a heart-wrenching, heartwarming privilege that always leaves it mark on you. Dozens of faces framed by grief now live in a hidden album within me in a place that the mind cloaks with an empty silence. I would gladly plant an almond tree for any of them even if it made for a small forest awash in pink blossoms every Spring, on a hillside overlooking Jacksonville.

02.17.15