Seeing The Light In America & Letter To A Kindred Soul

VazamBam

by Vassilis Zambaras

“Thomas Alva Edison, 1949”

kai eipen ho Theos genēthētō phōs kai egeneto phōs*

I knew who Thomas Alva was by heart;
he was always twenty-five, suspended

over my bed like a bat, though
he was really a light bulb.

Thomas must have flickered and died
about twenty-five times before Momma said

she’d had enough, I’d go blind reading
comics in that bad light. She was right,

besides, it was cheaper
so she burned them all one night.

Dear Thomas Alva,

wherever you are, you helped me
with the English I know,

it was all Greek to me, though
you never knew it—

I hope you’re resting
yours truly, your enlightened

incandescent soul.

MELIGALAS, Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—9/27/10—With the help of some ‘marvel’-ous comic book friends, a few American buddies and Edison in the guise of a 25-watt light bulb, I found myself speaking fluent English and reading it in a little over a year. Precocious? Perhaps, but unfortunately, by the time I was six and in the first grade, my mother’s dire prediction of blindness had almost come true: astigmatism and myopia, two Greek words that were Greek to me at that time, made their ugly appearance in my America and before I’d entered the second grade, I was wearing Coke-bottle-thick spectacles and had the dubious distinction of being the shortest, blindest kid in class, destined to be hailed as “Shorty etc.” and “Four Eyes et al” by my male classmates. Did I feel humiliated, second-rate, downright inferior, burning inside? You bet I did but, on the other hand, I was also burning to find a quick exterior solution to my problem.

For a while I toyed with the idea of signing up for a Joe Atlas muscle-building course. Some of you “older” folks out there might remember the unforgettable advertisements showing a scrawny skeleton of a man having sand kicked in his face by a muscular behemoth who then proceeds to walk off with the dejected and rejected weakling’s girlfriend. Such pitches always sent twinges of revenge and jealousy up my pint-sized spine and I used to spend hours daydreaming about how I would cream the pants off the first bully who dared to make fun of either my wispy frame or my thick, horn-rimmed glasses.

In the end, my better sense convinced me of the folly of such a plan but I still had to do something: I had to invent a way to sidestep such demeaning jibes aimed at my diminutive 5’ 2 ½” body and soon all my energies were focused on getting better grades than all the other boys in my classes. Later on, I discovered  that even this wasn’t enough to stop some prematurely developed athletic types from harassing  me, so I turned to sports and, by the time I was a sophomore, I think I was the “brightest,” shortest, first-string basketball player in SW Washington State and—lo and behold—no one was giving me a bad time anymore.

And now you know how Thomas Alva Edison—God rest his soul—helped to enlighten me.

*If the asterisked phrase is Greek to you, let me enlighten you: It means And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.