I called her name so as not to shock her, or to at least minimise the shock, or prepare her a little for a moment of happiness.

I had been warned that she was weak, hard of hearing and needed lots of help around the house, in the moments I had to myself in her personal space i didn’t see any real sign of that. There was the general clutter that accumulates within a lifetime, several objects that she uses regularly within reach, the fly swatter next to the fruit bowl, her pills in a small bowl with a photo of me and my first cousins at my cousin Paul’s 12th birthday, her oil lamp and small collection of religious icons kept between the sponges and the television set, but the house was clean and cared for, lived.

As the swishing of her screen door died away my grandmother entered her kitchen and walked towards me, slowly raising her arms up to reach my shoulders, “dushko mou dushko mou” she whispered as we embraced, my hands moving over her shoulders, which had become narrow and delicate, to think that it was only 20 years or so ago that these same shoulders would take me on endless piggy back rides around the lounge room her hands reached for mine and closed firmly, their liver spitted skin now draping the easily identifiable bones. The same hands that years earlier would clinically grab chickens from the ground that I had deliberately let loose from their coop in our small East Hawthorn back yard.

We embraced for several minutes, my grandmother smothering me in motherly type phrases delivered in a variety of languages and I unable to do much more than tell her i love her and try to resist the urge to pick her up bodily and swing her around the room. I don’t often get the opportunity to experience joy, let’s face it we rarely get the opportunity to feel joy nowadays, life can be happy, jesus christ it can be wonderful and big and all encompassing but joy is an indulgence few can afford. Today i was hoarding the emotion in bucketloads, the years of anguish i experienced when i felt too trapped in work and other crap back home to be able to travel and come back to see my grandmother who helped make me the man i am, the gut wrenching days i spent when she was on the brink and i looked back on the simple decisions i would have had to make to allow me to break free of these self imposed responsibilities and travel the distance to see her, more importantly to give her the chance to see me again, all that pain melted away in her embrace.

The awesome weight of time’s sands slipped away gradually but each grain could now be cherished and remembered as it falls.

The frail old woman I was told to expect was there, but she lived in a way that defied her age, she remained quite proud and simply capable of living, communicating and understanding, she had obviously thought about our reunion and had prepared several little anecdotes, some i also remembered some i had forgotten.

One story which she repeated many times in the first hours of our reunion occurred not long after she first came to Australia. My parents had taken the opportunity to go out to a dinner dance and i stayed home with yiayia, from the events she mentioned i must have been around 7 years old. My parents had just brought a new bed and I asked dad if i could sleep on it while they were out. I remember lying on the bed many times when i was young, wondering what on earth these grown ups did with that much bed, i loved the way the patterns on the bedspread would fade away (in my eyes at least) into the distance and the gentle curve of the middle of the bed. Of course more cliched trampoline like qualities where also enjoyed, memorably resulting in the untimely death of a prancing stallion figurine.

On this particular evening however, as I fell alseep i told my grandmother that when i grow up, i was going to buy a house, not a big house, but a nice house, and i was going to buy a big bed like this one and put it in the biggest room in the house so that she can come and live with me and we can play and talk all the time. She repeated this story to my father after they came home, she was obviously moved by it and recalls it clearly almost 30 years later, from her description I was unable to make out what my father’s impressions of it were, and any psychologists out there are probably also reaching for your text books. But who cares, growing up with 2 mothers arund me has impacted on every essence of my life… I’m not one to dwell on the negative.

Thanks for everything yiayia, i cnn never repay you, you will never want to do anything than give, this i have learnt from you and as much as it makes me a “good” person it also plagues me, but it’s a gift i will always cherish.