With Love, Oily Rat

Ruminant With A View

“Father Theologos, whose sentimental education had progressed apace over the winter, showed up at our house one spring morning to find the doctor and me on our verandah, me drying my hip-length masses of just-washed hair (those were the days) in the thin, Greek sunshine. I must have resembled The Addams Family’s ‘It,’ with my mane thrown forward over my face and, for some reason, Theologos, normally reserved if always smiling, like an Orthodox Mona Lisa, found the sight of me indescribably amusing.”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Note: Earlier this month, on the very day I wrote to wish him a happy Easter, Father Theologos died, after a brief illness, in Ano Mera, Mykonos. I learned about his death on Facebook, when a friend posted a photograph of him, wishing him “A Good Paradise,” in time-honored Greek tradition. The following essay was written in 2007, collected in a book of my columns no longer in print. I offer it here as a tribute to a humble, merry, generous, and steadfastly loving monk I shall always remember with unabashed love.

BRIDGE & TUNNEL New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—3/31/2014—In our 5’ X 5’ New Jersey kitchen, hanging just above the trash bin, in the only spot of wall space in the room (which would give my subject a giggle), is a portrait I painted, some 30 years ago now, of a young Greek Orthodox monk, Father Theologos, or Father “Word-of-God,” sitting in one of my Greek kitchen chairs, grinning enigmatically, like a Da Vinci.

Every time I walk past this full-length portrait, I smile, and Father Theologos smiles back at me.

When I met Word-of-God, he was a gangly, black-bearded neophyte monk in a none-too-tidy blue habit and scuffed shoes (one pair, for the duration of our acquaintance), with all the physical gravitas of Goofy—Walt Disney’s Goofy.

But, even back then, stumbling over his hem and/or the words of the liturgy, Theologos had something utterly unique. He was no God’s-Fool of a monk; no dim, younger brother consigned to the monastery (or the army): he was just quiet, thoughtful, sure of his small space in the greater universe, and merry, always merry.

A lifelong depressive and a brand-new foreign bride stranded in a Greek village, I found Theologos—even, ever, in his smiling-and-silent mode—just a joy to be around, and he was around a lot.

When we met, I was in the process of being married to the local doctor of Ano Mera, Mykonos, a village about as big as Mayberry, and every bit as sophisticated.

The doctor, however, was an outlander, as, certainly, was I, and he’d let it be known we’d either be married at home, in our own literal Ano Mera house, or not. The monastery’s Igoumenos, or Bishop, was thus placed firmly between a rock and a hard place: in Greece, in rural, 1970s Greece, people married in churches. Period.

But the doctor, though young, wasn’t budging from his position, and the one person you really, really don’t want to be on the wrong side of in Mayberry is the town’s only physician.

So, our wedding—such as it was—took place in a private home, an unheated, draughty stone villa on a hill, with the extremely myopic Bishop, and Father Theologos (who I don’t think had ever officiated at anyone’s marriage prior to ours) performing the ceremony.

And performance it was. The groom was several sheets to the wind, Theologos kept forgetting his lines (at which junctures, the Bishop would pause in utter silence, and then smack him with whatever was handy, usually the Bible). Both bride and groom had no idea what they were supposed to do or say next, so there was a lot of onstage prompting and hissing, and people dissolving in hysterics. The Best Man broke the full-length candle he was supposed to carry; the Matron of Honor forgot the ring; the newlyweds got tangled in their Greek Orthodox wedding crowns and “danced” around the “altar” the wrong way, being pelted, hell for leather, with rice by the overly energetic grammar school teacher.

Theologos took the brunt of the abuse and laughter, playing Laurel to the Bishop’s Hardy, but he still maintained more composure than anyone else present and, at the end of the service, two more young fools who would divorce one another a few years down the road, were duly married.

Then began Theologos’s almost daily visits to our home. As the only foreign woman in town, and now safely married, I proved an endless source of entertainment.

In Ano Mera, a small group of unlikely individuals characteristically hung out together—just as in Mayberry—as they, we, comprised the informally-designated “aristocracy” of the village. We were in charge of whatever there was to be in charge of.

So, the Bishop, the Mayor, the doctor, the Town Secretary, the two elementary school teachers, Theologos, and I, in descending order of importance, were “it,” as far as the high society of Ano Mera went, God help us. And what we did, primarily, that long, dull winter of 1979, was congregate together wherever it was warmest, and tell stories or, unwittingly, “star” in stories. 

I could never invent half the stuff that happened to us all, or in front of us all, in Ano Mera that year.

One evening, we were sitting, en masse, at Vangelis’s Taverna on the town square, when a terrier-mix came ripping past us, a set of human dentures in his mouth. Following on his heels came Sinefos (“Cloud”), screaming, if toothlessly, bloody murder. (Sinefos and all his siblings had been named for celestial objects—Cloud, Star, Sky—which veritably flies in the face of the Greek tradition of naming all children after both a saint and a grandparent. I guess Sinefos père wanted a bit of variety in his life.)

Anyway, after the dog and Cloud went by, the two young, athletic schoolteachers took off, also in hot pursuit, and the rest of us rushed out to a vantage point where we could observe the terrier feinting back and forth in the fields (successfully) amongst his pursuers. At some point, in the gloaming, dog and dentures parted company, a ploy missed by all his human followers, till they at last tackled him, and came up empty-handed. Sinefos was out deep into the night, then, with a flashlight, roaring in misery, and searching for his teeth (à la Polyphemos for his eye).

Eventually, he found them and, eventually, the audience on the square managed to stand up straight again and stop weeping and/or wetting themselves. You could have heard Theologos’s bellowing laugh in the next hamlet, had there been one.

Another evening; another gathering. We were all at the monastery, for some reason, probably a saint’s day celebration, for which event, Taroula, the 250-pound, mustachioed, 65-years-old-with-heart-of-gold church cleaning lady had got gussied up for the affair in uncharacteristic yards of black spandex, taffeta and heels. She was corseted and cinched like a jet-black racehorse, and loaded for bear. (Well, you get the picture.)

Taroula was just in the process of making her entrance to the courtyard (from on high, as it were), which involved descending two flights of stairs that executed a sharp right in mid-descent . . . when she tripped. Those unfamiliar high heels, of course!

Once again, we, the inevitable Greek chorus at these “events,” were standing in a semi-circle at the foot of the stairs. We edged back just a bit. We could no more assist Taroula in her plunge than we could turn back time. All we could do was bear witness.

She fell like . . . well, like what? Like a huge, charismatic mega-fauna defying gravity. We were transfixed. At every bump in the vertical road, at every step, Taroula emitted a high-pitched, feminine squeak, like a giant squeeze-toy. We were treated to the sight of masses of black petticoats and bloomers, garters, heaving bosoms . . . bounce, bounce, bounce, all the way down. Slowly.

She arrived at our feet only slightly dishabille, and sitting up, like a big doll, legs outstretched.

Not without compassion, if bent double with mirth, we rushed forward—the doctor in our midst—and determined, after some gentle prodding and pulling, and the administration of brandy, that, amidst all that fabric, she was OK, unbroken in any way, unhurt, if laughing her head off. The night went off brilliantly after that, with Taroula waited on by all and sundry. (She attributed her successful fall to a tightly-knit wool cummerbund, which I also now use when I “throw my back out,” as she made one for me on her loom after the whole affair of the stairs was history. Taroula, may you rest in peace, and remember us all kindly.)

A few more escapades like this, and the long, drear winter passed. (And, oh, there were more escapades.) A select few of our august number, the doctor, Theologos, and I not among them, joined an X-Rated video rental club-by-mail out of Athens and met to watch “films” on Friday nights at Town Hall, with all the blinds drawn. They were found out by a curious villager who managed to peer in through a window not completely blacked out by curtain: a scandal of monumental proportions erupted.

In related news, one of the schoolteachers carried on a torrid, clandestine affair with a student’s mother and, of course, hid in the armoire when her husband arrived home unexpectedly one afternoon. Again, scandal erupted, lives were threatened, and the teacher was forthwith relocated to another school on another island.

Father Theologos, whose sentimental education had progressed apace over the winter, showed up at our house one spring morning to find the doctor and me on our verandah, me drying my hip-length masses of just-washed hair (those were the days) in the thin, Greek sunshine.

I must have resembled The Addams Family’s “It,” with my mane thrown forward over my face and, for some reason, Theologos, normally reserved if always smiling, like an Orthodox Mona Lisa, found the sight of me indescribably amusing.

In Greek, he sputtered, “You look, you look . . . just like . . . énas laderós pontikós! Just like an oily rat!” He shouted, then, with great energy, “Oily rat! Oily rat!” The doctor (and his two African Grey parrots took up the refrain).

Of course, there was nothing for it but for Theologos to learn how to say “oily rat” in English, and I obliged him, writing out the phrase phonetically (and preserving it, little did I know, for posterity). He learned to say it pitch-perfectly.

And so, thereafter, whenever I returned to Ano Mera for my annual pilgrimage, to eat at Vangelis’s Taverna, to visit the monastery, and to see Father Theologos, his beard gone white, and his figure filled out a bit, I knew what I was in for.

Invariably, I showed up in the evening, when the monastery opens its doors to throngs of quiet, pious visitors, and there was Theologos, also invariably, sitting on a bench just to the left of the main church door.

He spied me from a distance and rose, his arms outstretched. Laughing heartily—not for nothing does this man sing the liturgy—he scuttled towards me, bellowing again and again, “Oily rat! Oily rat! Oily rat!”

Tourists scattered in shock, the Bishop clucked disapprovingly into his beard, and I fell into my old friend’s embrace.

So . . . Father Word-of-God, Kaló Parádeisos, now, from the always-made-merrier-by-you-Oily-Rat. With all my love, Father, “a Good Paradise.”