Recently I was able to have lunch with a woman who had grown up in Greece, in my mother's village with my cousins, other relatives and the grandmother for whom I was named but had never met. When she saw me she gasped, "You look just like your grandmother". I knew I looked like my mother and knew she was supposed to have looked like her mother, yet I still found it strange to be told my face it that of someone I will never meet.
Our lives have crossed a few times over the years but we really have not known each other. How strange it was to hear a talking history of so much of my family that feels close but has been out of reach. Talking for almost three hours seemed like moments. We shared and understood the other despite having led totally incongruent lives. There was no 'white space' in the entire three hours. She has been in this country long enough to speak adequate English but her preferred language is still Greek. I heard her speak the same 'kitchen Greek" with which I had been raised. Since there is no one else in my life with whom I currently speak the language, it was a surprise to see how quickly vocabulary came back to me. We spoke in both languages and I left knowing more about her family than I needed and a great deal more of my own than I had ever known before. There were no 'aha!' kinds of information, just some pleasant 'color casting' as they do in sports and racing...someone who knows the sport well and describes what is happening with a much broader perspective than just calling out what happened or who is ahead.
Our conversation ended, we hugged a goodbye, and a warmth was felt akin to what siblings separated in the East and West by the Berlin Wall felt when the wall came tumbling down.
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