We have here the shells -- the nuts are gone

Tom Thanos was a gentleman.  In fact, he is the most gentlemanly gentleman I have ever met even up to today.  To me, as a kid, he was like an angel -- polite to a fault, always smiling, very clean, smelled good and all white.  His skin was white, his teeth were white, his eyebrows were white, his hair was white, his socks were white, his shirts were white plus he wore snow white undershirts so he almost glowed -- kind of like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer only Tom Thanos didn't drag Santa Claus around at Christmas because Tom Thanos was Greek and he owned a hat shop in East St. Louis, Illinois.

Everyone in my family always called Tom Thanos -- "Tom Thanos."  Never Thomas or Tom or Tommy or Thanassi (his Greek name) or even Mr. Thanos.  It was like "Tom Thanos was not at church today, is he sick?" or "did you ask Tom Thanos to come up for Easter?" or "has Tom Thanos said anything about the Apollo moon landing?"  I don't know why this was because he was the only Tom any of us knew.  But, that is that -- he was Tom Thanos.

His wife had been dead for years.  I never met her but whenever my father would mention Tom Thanos's wife, Tom Thanos's face would droop and his gaze would move far off, somewhere at the back of the room, not on my mom's excellent pastitsio on his plate or the baklava in his hand.  She must have been a wonderful woman because they were married for years, many years, at least twice as long as I had been alive at that point and anyone who would marry and be loved by Tom Thanos had to be an extraordinary woman.  Whenever anyone mentioned his wife, Tom Thanos always said the same thing -- "I wish God had taken me and left her here.  I don't want to be without her." 

And that is all I ever remember him saying.

Really, to be honest, I don't specifically remember him saying anything else.  Ever.  I don't remember him saying how nice my hair looked -- although it really did back then -- I don't remember him asking me how school was going -- although I would have been anxious to talk about that -- I don't remember him asking me how important I must have been to be Senior Class President -- very important -- or how talented I was to get all the leads in the plays at school -- extremely important.

If I focus on him seriously, I know he must have engaged me in some polite conversation like that -- he was, after all, always so polite about everything.  For example, although I have no specific memory of him thanking my mom for her delicious food -- packages neatly covered in plastic wrap for his ride home -- I am certain he did.  First, he was a nice guy and would never have ignored my mother's hospitality and good care of him.  Second, I cannot imagine that my parents would have continued to invite him to our house if he had been inconsiderate.  I am sure he would have thanked my father for always including him in holidays.  But, the only specific memory I have of Tom Thanos's voice is when he spoke about his wife.  And how badly he missed her.

I don't know how Tom Thanos ended up at our house every holiday -- Christmas, Greek Easter, Greek Independence Day, Dad's Name Day celebrations -- was he just a close family friend?  But how?  He was lots older than my parents.  Maybe he was a friend of my papou's or maybe my father wanted to be prepared in case hats ever came back into fashion.  Or maybe he was just a Greek man alone, living alone in a 1 bedroom apartment over his hat shop in East St. Louis, Illinois.  Knowing my father and mother as I do, I am certain that they would have never wanted him to spend holidays alone.  And, because of Jimmy and Stella, he never did.

Addressing Tom Thanos was always a dilemma for me.  I knew that I couldn't call him Tom Thanos to his face -- like all of us did when he was not around -- because that would be mean.  But I knew I couldn't call him Tom because he was so old, way my senior and I had always been taught to call old people Mr. or Mrs.  But I felt funny calling him Mr. Thanos because he was around so much and because he was such a close family friend.  But, mostly, because I was afraid calling him Mr. Thanos would remind him that once he had been married and that now his wife -- Mrs. Thanos -- was dead and gone.  It made me feel bad to think that calling him Mr. Thanos would remind him of all that so I just didn't.  Mostly, I did not call him anything.  I just passed him the keftethes (Greek meatballs) or the spanakopita (spinach pie) or the galaktobouroko (dessert based on semolina baked custard) or the baklava (no translation necessary for this Greek "food of the Gods").  While I don't remember this specifically, I am sure he always said something like "thank you, Louie" which irritated my mom -- this is the part that I actually remember -- because she specifically did NOT want anyone calling me that.  It reminded her of my papou and that was a no-no.  She liked my papou well enough but she just didn't want him and his old world ways tainting her only son, her bet on the future, that way.  Papou was her one foot in the old country; I was her progress into a successful and prestigious tomorrow.

To me, back then as a teenager, I had other things on my mind.  Running for president of the Senior Class or trying out for the King and I or working on the next edition of Hy News -- I was one of the tri-editors -- or planning the next German Club meeting -- I was elected president my Junior year and, within 3 months, had more than doubled membership by instituting a dance -- the polka -- at the end of each meeting.  "Ausgezeichnet" said Frau Oehlrich, the German Club sponsor.  Who said German Club was only for losers!  Anyway, you see, I was a busy and modern American boy, not an old Greek white angel like polite Tom Thanos. All that high school stuff was infinitely more fascinating to me than a really nice, polite old Greek man with whom I had shared every Thanksgiving and other holidays since I could remember.

Did I mention that he owned a hat shop?  Really -- a hat shop? A men's hat shop?  In the 70's?  In dangerous, nasty, dirty, old East St. Louis where the only headwear should be military combat helmets?  To be honest, I had never even been inside a hat shop -- ANY hat shop, even Tom Thanos's hat shop. Who even wore hats anymore?  The only hats I ever met in person were lady's hats, hidden away in my mom's closet on the very tippy top shelf, each feathery and fur covered piece of femininity and elegance -- and history -- piled one on top of the other waiting for the next cotillion that would never come. Other than my mom's hats -- which I only wore when I was feeling sassy and nobody was home -- a rare event -- I had never really seen a real life hat in person.  I had only seen pictures of Papou and Uncle Andy, in the old days at church functions, wearing hats, cigarettes dangling from their thick old world lips, a glass of Ouzo or Metaxa on the table next to them. Hats were old fashioned, hats were uncool, hats were I Love Lucy sorts of things, to be looked at in pictures or in movies or on TV and to wonder what it was like before air conditioning, the Pointer Sisters and microwaves. Nobody I knew in 1976, except for Tom Thanos, ever wore a hat. Ever.

So, this hat thing, the hat shop and the really shiny black hat with 2 or 3 small feathers tucked into the side that Tom Thanos wore all the time -- along with his age -- really put him into the category of "irrelevant but a nice guy."  I knew Tom Thanos would be there for lamb at Greek Easter and ribs at the 4th of July and I would get to touch his hat when I put it away in the front closet when he first arrived.  The hat felt substantial, surprisingly, like it had a really strong, firm and important undercarriage, covered by fancy material and silk lining.  It was, in fact, an impressive piece of millinery.  But, beyond that, really, what did he matter to me?  After all, he could not cast a vote for me when I ran for Senior Class President and, try as I might, he would never dance the polka with me after a thrilling German Club meeting.

What a shame -- for me.  I walled Tom Thanos off because I never thought that he could do anything for me.  Where did I learn that from?  Not from my parents.  From today's vantage point -- never having made a good effort to get to know Tom Thanos -- all I know about him is that he loved his wife and missed her desperately, he owned a hat shop which was a losing proposition in East St. Louis or, really, anywhere.  If I dig deeper, I also knew that he was a nice, polite, friendly, elegant -- and lonely -- man.  His presence at our dinner table was, looking back, welcomed and positive.  Bravo to him for his kindness and bravo to my parents for their hospitality and their wisdom.

If Tom Thanos was a gentleman who was nice and elegant and lonely, one of the other members of my family's rag tag group of weirdos was Aunt Sophie.  She was old and, when I say old, I mean OLD.  Like dirt.  Think of an old joke and you will find her picture there, blank cataracted-up eyes staring off in 2 different directions, neither one of which is at the camera.  Neuralgia?  Had it.  Dementia?  Check.  Irritable bowels.  Oh  yes.  Hardening of the arteries?  That too.  COPD?  Ha, got ya, not invented yet!

Anyway, Aunt Sophie was -- well -- yes, old but she was not unpleasant or mean or smelly.  She was just what was called back then a "weird bird."  She kind of looked like one too -- a cross between an owl and a flamingo only she wasn't pink.  I might call her the un-Tom Thanos although this is not to say that she was impolite.

I don't know why this piece of flotsam and jetsam ended up at 229 Sunset Drive either but she was there for every holiday too -- every special dinner, birthday celebration and when the electricity went out at the East St. Louis National Stockyards Hotel where she lived and had lived for the better part of 50 years.  You see, this woman was OLD.  At the time, she was the oldest person I had ever known.  In fact, she was so old that she would not tell anyone -- even my mother with whom she spent most of her time when she was at our house -- how old she was.  You could tell she was old by the fact that she was covered by liver spots, walked with halting movements and hands outstretched to catch the walls in case she started to fall and talked about things she actually remembered like the St. Louis World Fair of 1904.  Seriously.  Can you believe it???  Tell me that doesn't catch your attention when you're only 17 years old!

She was tall, monotone gray in color and skinny, skinny, skinny in my world of short, thick, dark people with Pillsbury doughboy bodies.  Her hair -- the hair that she had left -- was gray and so thin it was plastered to her head in little ringlets and circles.  She usually left the bobby pins in her hair to make sure the ringlets and circles stayed in place.  After she left our house after each holiday, we would find random bobby pins on the floor, at the dining room table and in the leftovers.  "Just pick them out" my mom would say when I complained.  Bobby pins in my food?  I didn't like it one bit.

Her skin was translucent, almost see-through -- and looked fragile -- like parchment paper.  You could see all kinds of things through and on her skin.  Moles, veins, ligaments, her kidneys.  She was like a see-through human being plucked down in a house full of olive skinned weebles who never fell down.  She was a living, breathing "BODIES" exhibit before one ever toured and sold tickets.

Suffice it to say that when Aunt Sophie was at our house, she stood out like a sore thumb -- think Margaret Hamilton as Elvira Gulch and NOT as the Wicked Witch of the West --  in a household of hairy Greek Munchkins.  Her voice was soft and wispy, weak from too many years of breathing and Newport smokes.  In fact, I could always recognize her from the wheezing sound of her faint voice -- her conversations sounded like someone squeezing the air out of a paper bag.

To be honest, Aunt Sophie wasn't even really my aunt.  I knew that because she was skinny but she had been married to Uncle Nick -- himself not even my uncle but just my papou's best friend -- for years.  When Uncle Nick died, we got possession of Aunt Sophie like she was old cedar lined trunk.  She was not even Greek which seemed, back then, a little bit naughty in my world.  None of the married adults I knew were from different places -- Mom and Dad were both Greek, Thela and Uncle Andy were both Greek, Vi and Gus were both Greek, Kles and Mary were Greek hell, even George and Athene were both Greek although Athene was from St. .Louis which made her suspect in my book.

Nobody mentioned it much but I considered Aunt Sophie and Uncle Nick to be the first mixed marriage in America.  They were blazing a new trail, rebels.  They were kind of like the Wallis Simpson and Prince Edward, the Duke of Windsor, of Southern Illinois only they didn't have any money, fame, looks or sophistication.  I mean, really, would Wallis Simpson have lived in the East St. Louis National Stockyards Hotel?  To be honest, Aunt Sophie looked a little like Wallis Simpson too.  She had kept her skinny little shape well into her 90's and always dressed pretty good, old, but good.  Everything matched.  She wore those black old lady shoes that laced up the front and looked like orthopedic shoes but weren't.  Her dresses smelled like moth balls and all of them had little prints on them like bowties or bridesmaid bouquets.  She wore cat eye glasses with gemstones in them.  She was a walking, talking, wheezing page out of a sartorial history book.

I never understood how someone could live in a hotel, much less the East St. Louis National Stockyards Hotel.  As far as I knew, the stockyards had all closed down years before and the hotel had nobody living there except for Aunt Sophie.  I suppose it could be true that, looking back, she was some sort of sad but high class hooker for down-on-their-luck weirdos with skinny granny fetishes.  But, alas, I was too young to ask the right questions back then.  If only.

One Greek Easter, Aunt Sophie was over, sitting in the back room quietly watching TV -- she was blind as a bat so "watching TV" is mostly a misnomer -- she was listening to TV.  The rest of us were scurrying around the house, doing our things, preparing the food, nibbling the food, plating the food, tasting the food, setting the table and taking care of a million other arrangements like mixing drinks -- all the men drank high balls back then -- really?  High balls?  What closeted alchy came up with that drink name?  Anyway, all of us, even the girls, were doing things like hiding the blood red Easter eggs for the hunt later on, and making sure the old people -- basically Tom Thanos and Aunt Sophie -- didn't fall and break a hip or catch a hemorrhagic disease on our watch.  This was important stuff here.

One of my mother's millions of chores was to look in on Aunt Sophie from time to time to make sure her drink was full and that she was still breathing.  Hey, why set another place at the table if it wasn't needed?  Anyway, on the 14th or 15th check, my mom looked in on her and noticed that she was a bit rumpled and dissheveled.  In particular, Aunt Sophie's stockings must have come loose from those old fashioned garters she still wore for special occasions.  Her stockings had fallen and were all gathered around her ankles.  "Sophie," my mom yelled because Aunt Sophie was nearly deaf, " pull your stockings up, honey, they're drooping and all wrinkled around your ankles."

"Stella, I'm not wearing any stockings" came Aunt Sophie's immediate reply without surprise or embarrassment.

Well, okay then.

Let me tell you about Aunt Sophie's beloved right cheek -- the one on her face, you sickos.  Apparently, at some point in the early 70's, Aunt Sophie had had some sort of operation -- she had seen a doctor, gone to the hospital, had anesthesia and everything.  I remember it because Aunst Sophie asked my mother to take a brown paper bag full of her underwear to our house so nobody would look at it in the hospital.  Well, you know I looked at it and nearly went blind.  Anyway -- back to the operation.  Aunt Sophie had some sort of gland removed from the right side of her face, where her right cheek turned into her wrinkled blotchy neck.  I don't know if they were lymph nodes or salivary glands or whatever -- suffice it to say that they were sub-lingual or sub-mandibular glands of some sort -- total old lady sort of surgery.  You could see the scar along her jaw line if the lights were bright or when she was in the sunshine which wasn't very often.  Thank God.

Anyway, ever since she she had that operation to remove the unidentified sub-mandibular gland, she leaked a little when she ate.  Yes, you heard me -- Aunt Sophie leaked.  Saliva would be generated somewhere deep inside, make its journey through her little old lady body and end up oozing through her transparent skin just below her right ear.  Never, before or since, have I hever heard of such a malady.

I am certain this must have caused her some alarm or at least distress but, to me, it was incredibly fascinating to the point of obsession.  This was especially true because the only times I saw her were holidays when we were eating -- and not just a little bit either -- and eating made the gland-less cheek on her right side leak like a son of a bitch.  At my mom's house, if you -- or Aunt Sophie -- were there for a meal like Greek Easter or Thanksgiving, you were going to be eating lots and lots of food for many hours.  Think Greek Easter ceremony that starts at 10 pm on Saturday night and isn't over until 2 or 3 Sunday morning.

Our family feasts could often start at 2 in the afternoon and not end until late, say 10 in the evening. Not that we would be eating non-stop for 8 hours, that would be sick.  But we would have course after course, plate after plate, of food.  So much food that the tables couldn't handle it all -- plates and bowls of food were stacked up on the buffet, on the planter box, everywhere.  First there would be salads -- regular lettuce American salads, but also pasta salads and Greek salads of tomatoes, green peppers, onions, feta cheese and cucumbers.  Home made breads of all thicknesses and colors.  Then the soup usually avgolemono soup which is basically chicken rice soup flavored with thick egg sauce and lemon juice, a staple in Greek households.  Plain macaroni and cheese for Barry.  After that, the feeding crescendoed into a frenzy.  If it was Greek Easter, there was of course the lamb that had been -- if the weather was good -- roasted on a spit in the backyard for hours.  Along with the lamb, there would be manestra cooked for hours with tomato sauce and cheese and onions -- oh my God so good -- and roasted potatoes smelling of oregano and lemons.  Cauliflower with olive oil and lemon.  Pastitsio with cinnamon and allspice.  Spinach pie.  Potato Salad because, you see, my family was addicted to potato salad.  The desserts would come later and would sit on the table for hours being passed from person to person.  The rest of us would just sit and talk and laugh and enjoy the good times.

In the midst of it all was Aunt Sophie.  Leaking up a storm on her pencil thin neck.  Leaking like a motherfucker (this one's for you, Lisa).  Aunt Sophie wouldn't say much at the table.  Her slow plodding methodic old person movements to cut the food and deliver it to her over lipsticked mouth were about all she could handle, multi-tasking with a napkin to stem the flow of her gland-less existence.

As she ate, her missing gland would leap into action, secreting saliva not just inside her mouth, but right through her god damn cheek to the outside of her fucking face.  Every so often, her skinny fencepost-long left arm with the veiny left hand would grab a napkin and proceed -- ever so slowly -- up to the right side of her gray sagging face to wipe up the accumulation of seeping lamb-flavored saliva.  I couldn't take my eye off it.  My other eye was on the one neat fork that my sister and I always fought over.  The neat fork was the one modern looking utensil my mom had in her collection of scrolly, old fashioned silverwear.  I would usually snag it early in the day and lick it, tine by tine, up to the handle so my sister Sharon couldn't lay claim to it.  Ha ha ha VICTORY was mine!!!  But, sometimes, Sharon would grab it from me when I wasn't paying attention, wash it quickly, tine by tine, up to the handle and then use it herself.  So I had to keep one eye on the neat fork.

Anyway, sometimes Aunt Sophie would be too involved in the food or the conversation to notice how quickly her right cheek was oozing and the saliva would accumulate and drip down her neck onto the collar of her blouse or -- oh God -- if I was lucky -- onto the bodice, yes, bodice, of her blouse or dress.  If that happened -- look out -- she would have to squirrel the veiny see-through left hand underneath her blouse -- yes, underneath -- in order to dry herself off.  In order to dry her girls off.  Right in the middle of my family's Easter meal and when that happened I could sometimes catch a glimpse or a sideways view of her old lady brassiere!  In spite of all the food, all the activity, all the love I remember at all these holiday dinners, Aunt Sophie and her leaking face was the highlight, the star of the show.  A holiday dinner, fun in and of itself because of all my family being there, became a wicked little medico-porno show when Aunt Sophie was around. 

By the end of Greek Easter or Thanksgiving, Aunt Sophie would have gone through an entire pile of napkins.  Mom always gave her paper napkins because it was easier for Aunt Sophie to sop up the oozing oregano-flavored saliva with them.  Sharon, Jeri and I always fought over who had to clean up the paper napkins on the floor, wet and heavy with the baklava-flavored saliva that had dripped through Aunt Sophie's right cheek, down her wrinkled neck and -- if I was lucky -- onto her old lady boobies.  Usually, my dad just got tired of our fighting and he picked up her napkins himself with his bare hands.  What a stud.  If I had to pick up the Aunt Sophie napkins, my mother always warned me to wash my hands thoroughly afterward.  I think she thought Aunt Sophie's saliva, if it got into my system, could make me lose a gland from my right cheek too and she did not want that to happen.

Because of her wrinkled see-through skin and her leaky chin, Aunt Sophie became more of a cartoon character to me than a real person and I certainly did not consider her my real aunt like Thela.  Again, I say to myself now, what a shame that I never got to know her, really know her, and hear the stories she must have had from living in the 1800's to having her house in the East St. Louis National Stockyards Hotel to actually having attended the St. Louis World Fair in 1904.  Damn those droopy, saggy ankles and her oozing, leaky, glandless right cheek.

Tom Thanos and Aunt Sophie were not the only people my parents gathered for our family dinners but they are among the most memorable.  All of them together created a collection of characters, history and yes love that I took advantage of but did not learn enough from.  My parents and immediate family were enough to make me what I am today.  But I can only imagine how different, richer, patient I would be today if I had allowed this menagerie of people to be included in my own personal lessons of living.

I know that Tom Thanos and Aunt Sophie went to heaven years ago.  At the pearly gates, when they were asked about their lives, I am certain that they mentioned dinners at Jimmy and Stella's house and how good they felt there -- how good my parents made them feel -- being included in the fun and the conversation and the noise and the hub-bub.  I am also certain that they do not mention me, Lew, because -- for whatever reason -- I was just not able at that time to invest in them, to pay attention to them.  Back then, I thought that my parents were crazy to invite these crazy old people into our home.  I thought that these old people were just nuts, crazies and cast-offs, abandoned by the world for some reason I did not know and did not care to know.  Maybe I was really worried that there wouldn't be enough food for me or Stephanie or Dad.  Yeh, like that could happen in my mom's Greek kitchen for the stars.  Maybe I feared that someone would listen to these nuts when they should be listening to me.  To be completely honest, I worried mostly that I would have to sit next to one of them and I would have nothing to say.  I thought they were boring, had nothing to add, their time in the world had passed by.  I couldn't have been further from the truth.

I hope that I have learned the lessons now that I did not learn then.  Old people, hat sellers and, yes, even oozing leaking skinny ancient widows with wrinkled ankles can be every bit as interesting as Senior Class Presidents, high school newspaper editors or the King of Siam.  Refreshing to know that, isn't it?