Preservation of American Hellenic History
Preservation of American Hellenic History
by Jason C. Mavrovitis
After ten weeks at rustic Camp Waramaug (no electricity, no telephone) we thought ourselves as members of lost battalion returned from the rigors of the "front" and were eager to make an impression on the young women. I doubt that we did, except as rowdy teenagers.
When we returned to the cabin, hamburgers and hot dogs were sizzling on the barbecue. The picnic tables ~ there were two set under the trees ~ were loaded with platters of hot dogs, hamburgers, and cold fried chicken, bowls of macaroni salad, potato chips, roast peppers, mixed green salad, and coleslaw, cheese and olives, hot dog and hamburger buns, soft drinks, beer, and wine, jars of condiments ~ pickles, mustard, mayonnaise, relish, and catsup, a mountain of steaming golden corn dripping with hot butter, and desserts ~ Ebinger's apple pie and chocolate cake. We made my mother smile. Starved savages, we each devoured two or more hamburgers and two or more hot dogs, a breast or leg of chicken, and one or more generous portions of everything else on the table.
Temporarily satisfied, we lay down under the trees while waiting for our stomachs to make room for dessert. Frank Johnson, a wiry, short, and olive skinned Norwegian-American (about half of us were still hyphenated) with very white teeth stretched, got up, and walked around the cabins kicking at small stones and clumps of grass that were in his path. In a few minutes he came back to show us an enormous molar that he had taken from a horse or cow jaw he had found behind one of the cabins. Popping it in his mouth he stumbled to the table where my grandfather and Adela were seated, groaned, and spat the tooth out onto the table moaning, "My tooth, my tooth!"
Adela, startled, looked at the tooth and picked it up in her fingers. She scowled and declared authoritatively: "Dat's-a-not-a-you-a-toot. It's-a-horse-a-toot!" We all burst out laughing. We never forgot the picnic, and "It's a-horse-a-toot!"
Miss Morrow taught an elementary music class at our school and recruited private piano students from her first and second grade students. Nitsa and I studied with her for several years.
She was a middle-aged spinster who lived with her brother and a German shepherd in a first floor apartment dominated by the 5' 6" grand piano that filled her living room. It was in this room and on that piano that her students performed in the annual recital.
Parents jammed the living room and its adjoining dining room in tightly placed, folding chairs. It was usually hot with the proud recital-goers discomfort minimally relieved by the cross ventilation of an open front door and raised windows. Miss Morrow must have made some appeasing gestures to neighbors for her annual intrusion on their otherwise peaceful existences. In the hallway that led to the apartment's bedrooms, we students waited nervously standing or squatting in the order that we were to perform.
Nitsa and I usually took our lessons on the same afternoon, Friday, between 3:30 and 4:30. Nitsa had her lesson first while I took the German shepherd for a walk.
I hated that dog! Winter and summer, sunshine and rain, often in the snow, I walked that dog to the empty lot around the corner hoping that it would take care of its needs. Miss Morrow invariably asked, "Did he do his business?" just as I sat at the piano for my lesson.
During my lesson, I would sometimes hear footsteps in the hallway, murmuring directed at the dog, and perhaps a noise in the kitchen. I knew it was Miss Morrow's brother but felt threatened nonetheless. He was a mystery. Neither my sister nor I ever saw him. We knew he was back there only because we heard him.
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