When I was very young, I always wanted my mother, once so badly I got hit by a car. She was choosing fruits and vegetables from the truck that came down the street once a week. A neighbor, committed to watching me, turned for a bit of gossip, and I dashed. I still see my mother’s green dress, the vegetable man filling her bag, and the headlight of a black car barreling toward me. I still hear her screams, “Stop! No!”, too late to matter.
Thrown in the air, I landed with a thud, unconscious. My mother scooped me up and jumped in the car that hit me. She had no license, no car of her own, and no other recourse. “Hospital!”, she commanded. I woke up howling in the foreign surroundings of a sterile room. A man in a white coat assured my mother: “There are no broken bones, but she has a severe concussion. We will set up appointments.” Though shaken, my mother was much relieved I was not dead or too broken. She then thought to ask, “What is the cost of such a plan?” Money was more than scarce. The doctor peered over his glasses and said, “I am a medical man, not involved with such matters.” Once again, she lifted me into her arms and promised to arrange payment for his day’s work, on a weekly schedule.
When informed of my accident and medical prognosis, my distant father was grateful I was alive and relatively intact. My mother was thankful he refrained from his typical pointy-headed, rabbit hole solutions, a result of the education he was relentlessly pursuing, often rendering him too busy to get more involved anyway. Rather than setting up “the appointments” the man in the white coat had prescribed, my mother quickly ran to the best medicine people she knew: her father (our patriarch) a myriad of elderly relatives, and her six siblings. When my erudite father heard of this, he proclaimed “Voodoo!” Though not formally educated, my mother turned from his judgement, trusting more the wisdom of her clan.
She was born into a family of poor Greek immigrants who fled poverty , war, and suffering in the old country for jobs in textile mills on the rocky coast of Maine before scattering to northeast cities for better paying jobs and start-up luncheonettes. She had grown up with their legendary home-grown remedies and natural prescriptions for better health. Peculiar herbs, mountain teas, and specific foods were always in the mix. Fresh killed chickens, fresh caught fish and fresh garden vegetables were a must. Each summer, she and her five sisters freed themselves of their hard working, narrow minded -husbands and brought all of their young children to spend the whole summer in the Maine fishing village where they were born, claiming it to be a necessary undertaking to proactively ensure their health and wellness.
We stayed in the rickety beach cottage of my gruff and weathered grandfather, where he lived all year round. It was small and crowded with all of us sharing beds, one pull chain toilet, a pot belly stove, and a copper tub for collective bathing. Our ranks also included his skinny dog and a suspicious cat. There were cooped chickens and ducks that we fed as pets and mourned on the occasion of their appearance, plucked and roasted, at our communal table.
At his direction, we spent our days catching fish, digging clams, and netting crabs, while he tended to his eccentric garden, growing vegetables we recognized and some that scared us. We never dared to question his edicts of eating, often holding our noses when he sat us all down to concoctions of strange boiled greens covered with mountains of mashed garlic and potatoes, claiming in his very broken English: “Eat! Eat! Gonna make you strong like bull!” When we stepped on fish hooks or cut our hands on sharp edges of razor clams, he simply soaked our injured body parts in the cold, healing salt waters and we carried on. When we burned our skin in the high sun, he covered us with vinegar and stopped the sting. A water-logged ear was cured with heated drops of the thick Greek olive oil he used for cooking everything. In spite of our crowded, clamorous living circumstance, we never got sick.
In the colder months, after we tearfully left our place of health and protection from all illness to head back to our grumpy fathers and cloistered lives of school and too many rules, trips back north were always in the mix when sickness emerged. After a cousin contracted scarlet fever, a mystical great aunt read the grounds at the bottom of a coffee cup and prescribed pinning an evil eye on an article of clothing, spitting three times on the ground by her feet –“Ptou, Ptou, Ptou” – and travelling north. “Take her to Maine to breath the air, and be sure to soak her feet in the ebb tide.” An uncle suffering a pneumonia was advised the same journey with explicit directives. “Take food from the ocean. Suck the meat from a sea urchin! Eat an oily mackerel and pick on the bones!” A young relative, worried over a difficult pregnancy, was driven fourteen hours to face the full moon at low tide while a withered, revered elder swung a scissor on a string back and forth over her belly to hold the baby that was coming.
So it was that soon after my early childhood run in with a speeding black car , I was carried off to Maine in the spring for the medicine I needed most. After arriving, I ate fresh caught fish and vegetables from the summer before. I helped my grandfather plant his new garden for the upcoming season, fertilizing it with the skeletons and heads of the fish we had just consumed. I had him, my mother, and visits from wrinkled old relatives all to myself while I healed and waited for summer and the arrival of my cousins and their mothers to join me. “This ocean all for you! Look Here! Look There! You learn everything!” my wizened grandfather proclaimed as he rowed me in his old wooden boat to explore small islands covered with seals, gulls, and blankets of shells, providing lessons that would encourage my damaged head to be curious, think beyond, and repair.
As with most affairs, mine with medicine began in innocence and the need of a moment. I was too young to understand that the time and way I spent protected from sickness in my childhood summers and in the healing hands of the folk medicine of my heritage when I was wounded flew in the face of conventional medical advice. I was cheating on progress, entering into an affair I would come to rely on and believe in, that would one day save me again.
In the years to come, as my grandfather and the old sages dwindled to natural deaths, their voices faded in the distance. New sickness and modern medicine entered our lives more and more. Too young, my mother was diagnosed with a killing disease, and, at the hands of my highly educated father, was whisked away to scalpels, machines, surgeries, and toxic drips that would only serve to prolong her suffering. I was barely out of my teens, but begged her for what I knew. “I will take you north! I will hold you in the salt water. I will catch and grow good things for you to eat. You will breath in the air!” Her clouded eyes and faint voice promised, “Once I am well enough to make the trip, we will go”. They were some of her last words to me. Soon after, she was taken. I wept with the conviction that even if that trip was too late to save her, a final a dose of the medicine she needed most might have eased her passage. I never forgave my father for his arrogant dismissal of her heritage of healing.
As life continued without her, I held her legacy with the same fierceness that she, my grandfather, and my elderly relatives instilled in me: an affair with the best kind of medicine that informed my healing as a child and that of so many others in my family. Every year, I have carried myself and my own children to the same Maine ocean and salt waters, the same fish to catch and air to breath, encouraging their affairs with the power of this medicine. When I too was diagnosed with a killing disease, new medicines provided me with treatments that, in spite of their modern powers, indicated I would have but little time left. I thanked the men in their white coats for their honesty, just as my mother did a man in his white coat so many years ago. I turned from their judgement and followed in her wise footsteps, continuing my yearly journey with my now grown sons and their small children to the place where my affair with this medicine began.
I continue to defy my doctors’ predictions, leaving many who made them scratching their heads. When they ask me, “How?”, I tell them of the affair that I will never quit, and invite them to do the same. “Try it,” I say. “Go north. Plant your feet in the ebb tide, breath in the salt air, eat what you catch and pick the bones. You never know. You may just want to start an affair of your own.”