One year ago today—October 15, 2023—my mother Stella Nepolis Saltas died. All of her children were there. Everyone had been at her side those last ominous days, starting not long prior when she was pulled over for speeding while driving home from bingo. The day before—October 14, 2023—was her 96th birthday. Happy birthday, Mama.
Yesterday morning, a week after returning from the City Weekly Greece trip, I arose and drove alone to her gravesite to deposit some flowers, among them roses, her favorite flower and the one which gave her the middle name of Rose. It was the first time in 70 years I did not speak to her on her birthday. Well, I did, of course, but I'm not sure she heard me.
I spoke to my dad, too, for good measure—he beating her to their dual resting place by nearly 20 years. He did hear me. I know because nothing got by that guy. Nothing.
I pulled their mutual urn from the headstone and added a pink rose, several red ones, a couple white daisies, bundled with a bunch of mint—an homage to her father, who grew mint all over the place in his Bingham Canyon garden. Among the flowers and mint (all taken from my yard) I attached a small piece of embroidery that I'd recently purchased at the St. John the Baptist Monastery (Makrinou) that lies between the ancestral Saltas vineyards and home in Megara, Greece (from where my grandparents departed for the USA in 1906) and the sea resort town of Alepohori that lies on the Gulf of Corinth below.
It's a beautiful monastery and one of my mother's favorite places on earth. It was conceived, organized and built by my dad's first cousin, Makrini, starting in 1960. Eighty nuns live there currently, but not Makrini herself, having died a couple of years ago to COVID.
My mom used to love buying little kitschy things from shops all over Greece. But one of her favorite places to buy anything remotely religious was from the small shop at the Megara monastery. That simple embroidery was just a little something I wanted to give her when I got back this year. So, I pinned it to the flowers, said a little something, visited the multiple relatives buried nearby and drove home.
Today, the whole shebang was missing. I'm pissed, but it reminds me that people copped flowers that my mom had regularly left upon her parents' grave in the same cemetery and how she'd just shrug it off. I wish I had more of that forgiveness gene, I really do, but sometimes I'm quite bereft of it. Like today.
To the day she died, my mom was 100% against anything and all that Donald Trump stood for. She probably called him more nasty names than all of his ex-wives and his female victims combined. He was the visual antithesis of everything she ever stood for, starting with being kindhearted, giving and sharing. She had no use for the fellow and would say things like, "Daddy (her Cretan father) would hate that man."
Yes, he would, but there's little point in bringing that up to a generation of people who don't like to be reminded of dangerous, recent events, let alone those that shaped the mind of a "dirty, no good, swarthy, treacherous, lying, lazy, sick, thieving, keep your hands off our women, we don't want your kind here, go back home" immigrant Greek who was scared and only 20 years old when he started digging for the monopolist coal industry in 1906.
Thank goodness there were decent Utah citizens who were not so bigoted and mean—my grandfather married one, after all. Utah changed, or so it appeared. Why, even such men as Gov. Spencer J. Cox proclaimed as much, presenting his masked face to a new generation of Utahns that he was a healer, a person who could be trusted by all Utahns—including ethnic, social and religious minorities—to at least lend them an ear.
But Spencer has revealed himself as a special kind of mean person of late. A bigot? Yeah, I'd say so. Now that he's endorsed Donald Trump—guided by "faith," no less—he's pretty much out of the closet on that one.
Since the Cox endorsement, Trump has gotten far worse in his crazy utterances, his deeper embracement of racism and his allowance of Nazi symbolism at his organized events. Cox has left the closet of bigotry, has augered in, and cannot even denounce the overt fascists that left members of my family dead in Greece during World War II. Cox apparently imagines that "faith" is expressed by simply writing notes about it.
I'm not a deeply religious person. I don't talk about my faith, shallow as it is, and I don't preach about it. I don't mind hectoring hypocrites, however.
This year, I entered scads of new and ancient monasteries and churches all over Greece for a look-see. In each of them—especially on the island of Tinos, where women crawl on their hands and knees from the seaport to the hilltop church that honors the Virgin Mary there—I witnessed more exhibitions of "faith" than Cox will ever accumulate in his sanctimonious ballpoint pen.
When Cox bitched about his personal "faith" being offended by the opening ceremonies of the Olympic games, I wrote here that I'd buy him an Orthodox icon called the Mysticos Deipnos (Mystical Dinner) that predates the Last Supper (the imagery that Cox cited as central to his being "offended") by centuries as a gesture that he might expand his understanding of other faiths.
Well, I found one and bought it. But it's not going to Cox—he's not worthy. You're welcome, Mom.
Send comments to john@cityweekly.net