How I Won a $50 Gift Card To a Local Restaurant

Last night I received a message informing me that I won a $50 gift card to a local restaurant.

The contest to win the gift card came from a local movie theater on social media, who asked a question, and said the best answer will get an undisclosed prize. The question was: "What two movies from two different time periods, preferably one classic and one modern, would make a great double feature?" For fun I submitted an answer, and out of over 300 responses my choices won.

It's sort of by a combination of circumstance and reflection that I gave the winning answer. Here's the story.

A few weekends ago one of my favorite local theaters, a cinema that dates back over a hundred years, reopened after many months, and their first weekend they showed Casablanca, so I went to see it. It's a classic great film that I usually try to see on the big screen whenever I get an opportunity.

An American Boy With His Greek Communist Uncle

 

A few weeks ago my uncle Niko, the brother of my father, passed away, as I mentioned in my last post, and today I learned another uncle of mine, Philipa, the husband of my father's sister, died in Athens. Like my uncle Niko, I had not seen nor spoken with my uncle Philipa since 2001.

My uncle Philipa was an interesting character. Most of my stories with him go back to the summers of 1991 and 1992, when I spent some time with him.

What was interesting about my uncle Philipa was that he was a Greek communist, whose every fiber of his being was deeply political. And of all the members of my family, all his anger at both the government and ecclesiastical system was projected onto me. He wanted me, though I was only a fifteen year old American, to understand his perspective on politics and the Church. Why? I'm not sure. My thinking at the time was he either wanted me to believe things like him, because I seemed to be the only intellectual in the family, or he wanted someone like me to understand him and justify his thinking.

A Summer With My Uncle

A photo from a few years ago of my uncle Niko (left) and my father Panagioti (right).

Yesterday morning my father woke me up with a text message in Greek informing me that my uncle Nicholas, known to me as Theio Niko, had died in Greece. The text simply read, with my dad's characteristic spelling errors: "Γιαννη ω θιος πεθανε", which basically translates as "John your uncle died". He was 81 years old and simply died of old age, having lost his ability to walk about a month ago. I felt bad hearing this news for two reasons: first, I felt bad for my father who lost his only brother, and second, because I had not talked to my uncle since I last saw him twenty years ago in 2001. And as I began my day hearing this news, my thoughts primarily went back to the summer of 1991, which is the only time I really spent any significant time with him, and it is because of him and a few others that summer that I probably had the most formative period of my life, and it could perhaps be said that it was because of that summer that the Mystagogy Resource Center exists today.