Fifteen Minutes: Sealed with a Kiss
They met and married in the course of three weeks.
Maria was the 19-year-old friend of his youngest sister, looking for a way - any way - to leave her small village in Greece. Nick was the 37-year-old man who, more than 15 years, before had left his house, less than a mile from her own, in a crisp, clean, official military uniform. She grew up hearing stories about George and Marika's son, the boy who completed his mandatory two years of service and then left Greece to join his older brother in America. There, he moved to Chicago's Greektown, worked at a variety of odd jobs, and years later, with middle-age looming, decided that it was time to get married. So he arranged for a month off from work, called home to let his parents know when he would be arriving in Athens and cleaned up his bachelor apartment in preparation for the bride-to-be.
The rest of their story comes straight out of a medieval courtship handbook, minus the dowry that my mother's family could not afford. Boy admires girl from afar (in my parents' case, this phase lasts exactly one evening). Boy asks around the village about girl's reputation, intelligence, domestic abilities and willingness to move to America. Satisfied with his findings, boy approaches girl's father and asks for her hand in marriage. The deal is done, girl is notified of the arrangement and, two weeks later, the local kids are married in the town church. The next day, they leave Greece, my mother binding her future to a man with whom she has shared less than an hour's worth of private conversation. She knows no one in Chicago besides her husband; she understands only a handful of English words, spoken with a slight British accent.
Six years later, my 25-year-old mother is busily balancing three children, a full-time job on a factory assembly line and English-language classes at the local community college. And my father has signed up for the night shift at the baking company where he works, often logging more than 60 hours a week, between the hours of 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. Their mismatched schedules allow only brief day-to-day interactions. A cup of coffee over a rushed breakfast as my mom struggles to ready three little girls for school and my dad struggles to stay awake long enough to drive us there. A phone call home during my mom's lunch break to make sure someone remembers to pay that month's gas bill.
They were determined to make it in America, to achieve everything that any immigrant to this country has ever wanted - to own a home, to buy a car, to send their daughters to college. And they were determined to achieve this dream at almost any price. Their blue-collar jobs left them physically drained; negotiating their way in a country whose customs they did not always understand left them emotionally exhausted. They bickered constantly.
I grew up convinced that my parents' partnership grew out of a common, materialistic goal - a shared desperation to leave behind the rural poverty they had grown up with - rather than a desire to spend the rest of their lives with one another. They weren't high-school sweethearts like the parents of the girl who lived across the street. They didn't elope and get married in Las Vegas like the parents of my best friend in high school. They didn't celebrate their anniversaries with fancy dinners, diamonds that last forever or romantic getaways. When friends asked how my parents met, I never knew how to answer. How could I explain to my junior-high friends that, at the age of 13, I had never seen my parents kiss?
I saw my parents kiss two weeks ago, my father in his hospital bed, my mother leaning over him to adjust the tubes carrying oxygen to his mouth. In late January, he had an accident at work. He slipped, fell from a loading dock that was three feet off the ground and hit his head. The impact of the fall left my 62-year-old father in a three-week-long coma. One craniotomy, four blood transfusions and several minor operations later, he is slowly beginning to regain consciousness. On good days, he can whisper his name, squeeze his therapist's hand on command, and breathe for 12 continuous hours without the help of a machine. On bad days, he drifts in and out of sleep, overwhelmed by the seemingly contradictory doses of medication they pump into his stomach by the cupful. One tries to keep his heart rate active; another tries to keep his blood pressure low. They need to contain the swelling in his head, but the doctors must also keep the blood flowing properly. There are ulcers to ward off, bedsores to tend to, and never-ending bouts with pneumonia to fight.
The day he kissed my mother was a good day - one of my dad's best. I was home for spring break, spending my days alongside my mom at the downtown Chicago rehabilitative institute where my father has now been moved. His physical therapy session had just begun, and his therapist was busily testing the strength in his arms and neck, checking to see whether my father - a six-foot, three-inch-tall man who once weighed as much as a linebacker - could do something as simple as keep his back and neck in an upright, seated position. It was a test my father was failing miserably; his shoulders were hunched over, and his chin seemed glued to his chest. And in a therapy room bustling with the noise and activity coming from other patients re-learning how to walk, my father still kept falling asleep. It seemed pointless to continue the hour-long session, and my dad's therapist and I were ready to put him back into his wheelchair and try again the next day. Until, of course, my mother intervened.
She leaned in close to my dad, told him in Greek that she loved him and wanted him to come home, and asked that he try to do what the therapist was asking of him - that this was the only way he would ever be well enough to come home. He responded by straightening out his neck and lifting his chin just enough for his lips to brush against hers. The therapy session continued.
I spent the rest of the week looking for signs of the loving relationship my parents had built when the obnoxious teenager in me - reared on the fairy-tale love stories of made-for-TV movies or the cheesy teen-romance novels my local library ordered by the series - was too busy to notice. After the accident, Maria was the first name my father could say after he pronounced his own. Hers was the first face he could recognize. Last weekend, when my older sister substituted for our mom at a speech therapy session, my father immediately asked her where her mother was. It is clear to everyone - family, friends, nurses, doctors, therapists, social workers - that in the midst of the confusion and cloudiness that have seized control of my father's consciousness, my mother is the one thing he can still see clearly, the one thing that can possibly drive his desire to recuperate just enough so that he can move home.
Somewhere in the course of a 25-year marriage, my parents fell in love. They grew to see one another as more than just a partner they could pay off a mortgage with. Instead, the 19-year-old village girl and the 37-year-old bachelor had matured into people worth questioning nurses for, worth demanding second opinions for, worth protecting from hurried doctors and sloppy caretakers, worth spending nights in the emergency room for, worth putting their lives on hold for.
Theirs is a marriage worth emulating. Not the wedding part, of course. I want to know my husband for more than a week. I want to choose him just as much as he will choose me. But when we find each other, I want us to feel that we're picking a partner worth more than simply buying flowers or fancy dinners for. I want to choose someone I couldn't bear to live without.
Georgia N. Alexakis '00, a resident of John Winthrop House and a Government concentrator, was The Crimson's managing editor in 1999.