Polaroids From the Past

by Bailey Graf (United States of America)

I didn't expect to find Greece

I couldn’t understand enough Greek to decipher the story that was unfolding in front of me, just like I couldn’t translate the words on the back of the photographs found in my grandfather’s closet after he passed. That was my Mom's job. Six strangers sat together with intertwined tales, and similar stories told of familial roots. Translations and stories attempted to untangle the gnarled branches of our family tree. We traveled 4,945 miles to unravel the secrets of my grandfather's life. No words were ever spoken about why he left. 47 years ago, he changed his name and took a boat to Ellis Island. He was an immigrant with a camera in search of a place to live and a place to forget. When he passed, we found enough pictures to piece together some clues. Our adventure took us through the mainland and a few of the islands as discovered from the photos developed by my grandfather during his adolescence in Greece. It was a scavenger hunt, matching pictures to mountain tops and boat docks and crescent shaped bays. The Greek Civil War ravaged through the country in the 1940’s. My grandfather wrote about men shooting at each other from balconies and falling into the street below. Quite possibly the same streets we had been walking down just a few days earlier. We took a ferry to our island, just as my grandfather would have. The boat rocked so hard that even the captain got seasick. The entire town met us on this warm summer night, all six people who resided there, each of us related in ways we didn't yet know. The cicadas buzzed like blenders and our thighs stuck to the plastic chairs that sat under the blazing mediteranean sun. Our cousin and Mayor of the town, Maki, pulled my mother and I away. Tucked into a small red car, we wound down the road lined by olive trees and stray goats, pointing at crumbling buildings and speaking in broken English. Three people squeezed in two seats, strangers by nature but family by blood. He stopped once to pick a few ripe apricots, dribbling sweet juice down our chins. “This was your father's house,” he put his arms around my mother's shoulders and pointed to a pile of rubble. Earthquakes trembled through the islands soon after my grandfather came over to the states. The 40’s and 50’s brought Greece one devastation after another. The quakes destroyed most of the architecture seen in the photos that sparked this journey. Only stones and rubble remained of my grandfather's house. “This is not what I wanted to show you,” Maki guided us back in the car and continued to drive- closer to the edge of the cliff, closer to the last bits of sun. He drove slower now, hugging the white rocks where the ocean lapped at the water below. We squeezed out of the old car and walked to the edge, my mother clutching the photographs in one hand, my hand in her other. “It’s beautiful,” my mother said. “Your father's favorite spot,” Maki replied. My mother shuffled through the photos, this view a perfect match to the last sepia toned 4x6. This photo had nothing written on it. No explanation. My grandfather’s secret, only slightly changed by the tectonic shifts that morphed the landscape years ago. The sky changed slowly into a dark blue; stars began to sparkle in my mother's watery eyes. The same ones that my grandfather had sat here and gazed up to years ago. Tragedy had struck this small island, war and natural disaster shifting and shaping the island and its inhabitants. The photographs capture only a moment, but the stories behind them reveal more than we ever could have imagined. Eventually we would add our own snapshots to the stack of photos my mother held. Our own stories to pass to the next generation. Perhaps one day I too will seek refuge on foreign shores. But, unlike my grandfather, I now know a second home. A welcome smile awaits me everytime my boat reaches these friendly mediteranean waters.