Andy & Me and the Hospital by Pascal Dennis

Author:Pascal Dennis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CRC Press

“Tell me about your family,” Dr. Vogel says.

I describe Mama and Dad, growing up with Harry in the Humpty Dumpty. I talk about Mama and Dad growing up as young children in Greece, enduring Nazi occupation, the great famine of 1944–45, and the brutal Civil War of 1946–49.

I tell Dr. Vogel all the stories they had told me. The communist guerrillas gathering up the children, taking them from their families and spiriting them away to grow up as good communists behind the Iron Curtain. Dad’s father, my grandfather and namesake, killed fighting them. Dad’s uncle and Harry’s namesake forced to join the communists at the point of a gun, escaping finally and rejoining the nationalist forces. Then coming to America, Dad and his widowed mother desperately poor, living with Uncle Spiro and family in that tiny Astoria flat.

Dad quitting school and joining Uncle Spiro, God rest his soul, in the restaurant business, learning the trade, saving his pennies. Then meeting Mama at St. Irene’s Sunday school, a good girl from a luckier family that had escaped the worst of the tumult. And how they took Dad in and became his second family, especially after his mother died.

Before long I’m in tears. Sorry, I tell him, don’t know where all that came from. It’s been a hard day.

“You love your parents very much,” says Dr. Vogel.

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