Slugfest
By: susan peterson stamis
Tags: aunt, cousins, foreign service, greek, home leave, rain, slugs
Category: Uncategorized
During home leave in 1962, we visited with a variety of cousins, firsts, seconds and those folks we called cousins, Greek style, even though we weren’t related. All that was needed was a brush sweeping through the clan, connecting us through familiarity and love and culture.
On a different day in this same garden, there was a torrential downpour that submerged the grass in rainwater. In a delirious rain dance, we cousins sloshed around drenched and barefoot in the swampy mess; until my Aunt Nia appeared with a bucket, declaring war on the thousands of slugs rising to the surface of the lawn.
Until the rains came and drove them aboveground for air, the spongey little creatures had been living in their carefully crafted underground network, blithely minding their own sluggy business. We cousins meant them no harm, but, because in those days children didn’t say no, we were indentured for the afternoon to decimate the slug population of La Mirada.
I don’t know what happened to that bucketful of slugs, and I don’t recall what we had for dinner, but I’m pretty sure I’d have remembered a plateful of escargots.
About Me
My father was a Consular Officer in the United States Foreign Service. He was first stationed in post World War II Berlin, where I was born in 1950. Subsequently, we lived in the Philippines; Jamaica; Guatemala; Washington, DC; Greece; Ceylon and Mexico; visiting many places in between. I was reared by my parents and nurtured by the various amahs, nannies, and housemaids who, every two years or so, entered and exited my little life.
I was educated in American Schools in “foreign lands,” but the most fascinating classrooms were the exotic locales where we lived, and the most inspiring teachers were the colorful people of those exotic and ancient cultures.
The bi-annual “home leaves” which my family spent at my grandparents’ homes in Los Angeles, California provided a sense of constancy to our nomadic lifestyle. My many aunts, uncles and cousins lived there and I eagerly looked forward to those vacations. We were 1st and 2nd generation Greek Americans (all 4 of my grandparents had immigrated at the turn of the century), and thus had foreignness stamped onto us even though we were Americans.
Two of my father’s siblings were also in the diplomatic service, and we world-traveling cousins were a source of endless curiosity to our domestic counterparts when we came home speaking English with unusual accents, reducing the statesiders to hysterics.With his various cameras, Kodachrome, Ektachrome, 16 millimeter, Super 8 and Polaroid, my father rarely lost an opportunity to document the events unfolding around us. After years of waiting patiently in boxes under the stairs, these photographic records are now fulfilling their purpose as mnemonic retrievals of my little life.
Mnemonic Retrievals 