Mia vita..

My over-achieving mother and father since a young age , believe it or not, wanted the best for me. That concept was really hard for me to understand in the beginning, and to this day, I still have difficulty with it. My mother's idea of "I want the best for you" was to alienate me from my friends every single summer starting at the age of 6. As a child, I was very anxious to grow up. Little did I know that with the coming of "Yay, now I can read" came my mother's ultimatum " You are now officially eligible to join my private English courses". I say ultimatum, and you are probably laughing at me knowing how not-so-tall my mother is, but I don't think she has ever silenced you with only the use of one eye, so yes, it is easy for you to speak.
In Saranda, my lovely hometown, my mother's expensive-at-the-time English courses were quite elite for the population, yet, quite worth it, considering: her expertise in the language, her soft voice, and her very pretty deep blue eyes. Oh sorry, I might have forgotten to mention the 11,345 English language books and Encyclopedias that were always present at the office - it might have had something to do with her popularity too.
Given all the information, you can only imagine my dread when she mentioned that starting now, the now being 6 years old and able to read and write, I had to join my mother's English language courses. So, poor me, together with 10 other entry-level students of English joined Dolores' one of many torturous courses. I say torturous because each day of the entry-level course involved spelling 100 times each new word we learned. Mind you...in an entry level course Everything constitutes a new word. I gladly (at times) put up with this torture knowing that the summer would come, and the Ionian sea would welcome me in its bosom for a luxurious amazing period of three whole months. Little did I know (yet again) that summers for me, after the age of 6, would never be the same again. No more basking in the sun. No more running around with my friends rescuing lonely kittens and puppy's and bringing them home to adopt them. No more playing "housewives" in old dilapidated Saranda buildings. Instead I had to sit at home and read English books, highlight all the words I did not know and memorize 2 pages each day. Later on, when my mother would get back from work, I had to recite to her the 2 pages I had memorized and show her my dictionary of unknown words. I still remember one poem she made me memorize: "An elephant goes like this and that, he's awfully tall and awfully fat, he has no fingers has no tows, but oh my goodness what a nose!!!"...yes, elephant was one of the words I did not know so here we go...100 times!

I guess I have nothing to complain about now, considering that when I came to the United States for college, I did not have to sit in the cafeteria with the rest of the Albanians that did not speak English. Now that I think about it, that would have been very challenging indeed considering that I was the only Albanian at Menlo.

If only English were the only torture my parents put me through...no no no, three languages by the age of 6 are never enough..oh, is the math not adding up for some of you? I might have forgotten to mention that my father is Greek , and my grandmother's knowledge of the Albanian language at the time evolved around a couple of curse words she would yell at us once in a while. Naturally, I together with my other siblings (Jonika and Renato- who you will have the pleasue of knowing later on in this blogg once they annoy me enough to want to write about it) had the pleasure of speaking to our grandparents in Greek. So it was: Albanian at school, Greek with the grandparents and English with mom and dad.
As I mentioned before, it turns out that 3 languages were not enough for my parents. At the amazing age of 12 (when I was entering the glorious years of temper tantrums and "What is wrong with wearing makup?") I decided to enroll in Italian language courses.
Oh yes, very amazing years indeed, not sure how I kept up with everything. English here, Italian there, Greek at home, Albanian at school and PIANO lessons of all holy things. I am going to skip right past the political unrest in Albanian and being in fear of getting killed-or something much worse altogether-on our way to Tirana because my sister has been working on a novel around those matters for the past 3 years now; I don't want to steal her glory...she did mention that it's not autobiographical though so maybe the heroine does get not survive after all, we will have to buy the book to find out I guess.
Ok back to my piano lessons. In the midst of struggling to pay for rent and putting food on the table, my aristocratic mother (the aristocratic part might be covered in my mother's book this time, so I am skipping right past it again) decides to buy me a present for my birthday. I was not really expecting a birthday considering our dire economic situation, much less was I expecting a piano! I guess I should have been prepared for the grandiosity of presents that particular year given that my sister's high-school graduation present was " We are sending you to another continent to go to college, so now stop crying and pack your bags." Well, maybe those exact words were not spoken, but you get my point.
So here it was, a huge, awesome, brown, one of a kind, church organo- we all refered to it as a piano though- so for the intents and purposes of this blogg it was a piano. I was so in love with it, I couldn't stop staring afraid that it would vanish in the morning. I did have quite a lot of competition though; my mom was sitting right next to me on the chair staring at the exact same spot. Next morning she tells me to arrange my time in a week so that I had 5 hours a day for homework, two hours a day for foreign language courses, and 3 hours per week for piano lessons.
Very excited about becoming a grand maestro or maestra (to be gramatically correct) I agreed. I finished my homework the next day and I headed to my piano teacher's house. I knock on the door. It was opened by this cute, shiny, perfect-smile perfect-hair, perfect-everything 20-year old guy, he tells me to "please come in"....
Go in I did, with a dumbfounded expression of course, and praying to God that this Greek god (pun intended) might be my piano teacher. Providence had other things in store for me unfortunately and the Greek god was shortly after substituted by my real piano teacher- his mother. Before his mother came in her studio however, I did take a last glance at him and I saw that he was having a party at the other room. Turns out, it was his good-bye party as in less than two weeks he would be on his way to Germany to study something I could not pronounce. German was not one of the four language I spoke you see. I continued going to my piano lessons faithfully each week, and as my piano expertise continued so did my adolescent tantrums.
Between all the havoc that my piano teacher's son's memories created, I forgot to mention that my sister was safely and soundly shipped to the United States. Alabama of all states, but again, I will leave that part of her life to be recounted by her..don't want to step on any writer's toes here; she does have a violent streak in her and I don't want to wake up the Nemesis in her.

Anywho, back to crazy adolescent years. I might have forgotten to mention the fact that my mother's sense of propriety exceeded all limits. She insisted that I went to school each day with my hair combed in two side-braids. Evidently (it was only evident to my mother) ,it expressed to my teachers just how humble and modest I really was. Well, the teachers might have gotten that impression, heck if I ever found out! I was too concentrated on my friends' song every time I walked in class:

" They're creepy and they're kooky,
Mysterious and spooky,
They're all together ooky,
The Addams Family"

You see, to them I represented Wednesday from the Addams Family...