An Urban Legend

Urban legends have an air of authenticity because they always happen to someone just a couple of degrees separated from whoever is telling the story. It didn't happen to him or to his mom, but his mom's neighbor's son. That way there's enough distance to prevent actual confirmation from occurring but close enough to provide an air of believability.



Growing up, I was almost an urban legend in my neighborhood: I had honest-to-goodness relatives living in Europe. Most of my peers thought it was cool they had a cousin in California, I trumped that with cousins in Greece. And like the ax-wielding murder in the backseat, who killed an uncle's college roommate's girlfriend, for my friends my cousins were mysteriously connected only through my immigrant grandmother.



For me of course, there was tangible evidence. Once a month, every month, my grandmother and her sister, Eleni, wrote one another. I remember looking at the letters when they arrived and asking Yia yia to translate them for me. Sometimes the letters talked about my Theia Eleni's grand kids: Yanni and Elias, who were about my age, and her granddaughter Eleni.

My grandmother and Theia Eleni had no way of knowing that in a way their tradition would be carried on by their grandchildren: Eleni and I email and Facebook frequently. That would have pleased our respective grandmothers to no end. But it gets better.

As part of Greek class, kids in Gus' school sent a holiday card to a "pen pal" in Greece. Gus insisted that he wanted his card to go to his cousin Ikaros -Eleni's son.

Today Gus received a response.



Just seeing the letter took me back to my childhood and seeing my yia yia read and reread those letters from Theia Eleni. Well, to read Ikaros' letter, we need to make use of our well-used Greek/English dictionary but that's part of the fun of it all.

Oh and it gets better: unlike in Yia yia and Theia Eleni's letter, Gus got an added bonus: