Election Day

I voted! It felt great! There were several families in the polling station, and each one of them took all of their children into the voting booth and emerged smiling and excited to be part of such an historic day.

I walked down the street after voting and got a strange feeling of deja vu. When Terry and I were young, when we were hippies, there was something like the same feeling. There was an assumption of respect and trust toward fellow citizens, an egalitarianism which has since disappeared. These feelings have lain dormant all these years as another culture took over, one of suspicion, distrust, everyone-for-him/herself, which felt foreign. Now, I feel at home for the first time in decades.

It's been tempting to try to convey to the next generation what it used to be like, but every time I have tried, it has proven impossible to convey, either because I don't have the words, or because the cynicism has been so deep in the listener.

IF, of course, if Obama wins. If he doesn't I will, for the first time in decades, consider joining the marches on Washington which will protest a stolen election. This moment cannot be lost. When the last voting debacle happened, in 2000, I was in such a state of shock I didn't know how to react. People will be ready for it this time.

If I were a praying person I would pray for Obama's safety and protection. I will instead send him ultramodern energy waves of warmth and praise, in hopes that they will reach him. Is that prayer?

Dr. Atomic

I love the composer John Adams, and got some $30 senior citizen tickets (orchestra, Row O, slightly, but only slightly, off center) to see it in its new production at the Metropolitan Opera.

I didn't know what I thought, but slept on Dr. Atomic, and here's what I think.

There was no insight into Oppenheimer's suffering, or his marriage, or his brilliance, or his accomplishments. When one of the characters, a general, talked about Oppenheimer possibly having a nervous breakdown and being highstrung, I wondered what that was founded on. He seemed, throughout the opera, under pressure, but who wouldn't be?

His wife seemed a perceptive, brilliant woman, who was trying her best to support him, but I saw little of their relationship.

Even the Indians were wooden. The Manhattan Project invaded their beloved homeland, and they could do little to stop it. There is such pathos in their conflicts and their loss, and they it was all surface mining, no profundity in showing their pain.

I guess the problem, for me, was the libretto. It seemed a tour de force of Sellars's ego, having little to do with the story. If you're going to quote beautiful language, it has to have something a propos to say.

The most beautiful string of language, for me, was the amazingly rich and long poetry about hair. (The language mentioned "black hair" and the woman who was sitting on the bed, letting him run his fingers through her hair, had red hair, so I wondered what was going on there). He seemed not to be saying this to her, but to be quoting it for himself. He was obviously not saying it to seduce her, or blowing off some crazy-making steam through uncontrollable passion, because after he quoted the piece, he put on his coat and went back to work. Since the audience had no idea where most of the quotes came from, it was like looking at the pieces of a great work of art strewn on the floor and trying to put them together into one coherent piece.

The ending was too long and drawn out, of course. One did not have enough empathy for the characters to share in the suspense. If it had been truly five minutes (first siren), then two minutes (second siren) long, it would have been more effective. God knows how long it actually was, it seemed forever. I love the fact that when the bomb went off there was no reaction from the group watching it through dark glasses, no celebration of the success of something they had poured their lives into for months.

When the Japanese woman's voice entered the theatre at the very end, asking for water, I was stunned.

What was that stupid sheet strung up in back? I suppose it was the mountains, but then why did they move as the long ending played out. Was it the idea that the "earth moved?" It's all just too precious, and depends too much on the audience for interpretation.

The intellectual demands were so high that the emotional reaction was completely suffocated. Some people are so busy making a point that they forget that the point of all points is that people have to live with them. That's what was missing.

Greece Journal: 2003 part 6

As I mentioned in a previous post, I decided to continue with my plans to visit Florina to find out about the Macedonian community there, though I was cautioned to watch my step. A trip to jail in service of a culture I had only an academic attachment to would serve no productive purpose in my life, but I did not change my plans. I felt like the innocent American, trusting in peoples' good nature, and in my benign appearance.

After passing through Agios Konstantinos, I drove over scrub-and-pine-covered mountains to the north of Greece.

There are a lot of things stuck out in the middle of nowhere in Greece: churches on the top of little hills, nestled in a little grotto, with NOTHING around them at all; some old corrugated iron sheds; bus stops in the middle of nowhere; little stone houses, everything closed up, nothing anywhere in sight, along the side of the road. There are bottles, Kleenex, cups with straws sticking out of them, juice bottles and cans, pieces of paper, candy wrappers – the roadside is depressingly litter-strewn.

I got out of the car to pee and take a little walk on the hillside which was lonely and beautiful with a soft mountain breeze, and I peed in my sandal. It was so steep going up there that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to come down again, and it was hard to keep my balance.

I took a picture lying on my stomach so that I could get all the little flowers.
I had to stop to let goats run across the road in front of me. The shepherd with leathery dark reddish-brown skin, brown work pants and a blue denim jacket walked after the goats. He had a staff like goatherds in fairytales. He didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned that they were walking across the road. The goats were dark brown and black. In the best of conditions maybe they were white goats, but they weren’t white at this time. They had long hair and it was quite dirty. That’s what goats are supposed to be like.

It was Sunday and men were at work on a new railroad. There were bulldozer type things that ran on a railroad track that were cutting out the space for the track, and men laying the track. From the look of it, there had previously been a railroad here, which was being renewed.

There were mines and quarries and various large-scale industrial building up towards Florina, and huge electric plants. Huge. The line connecting these plants with the south of Greece was somehow cut once, causing a blackout across half the country.

I passed over the top of one mountain, onto the dry side. Humid air masses bump up against the mountain, unloading their moisture, but on the other side, the mountains were brown and sparsely forested. There was a green carpet of scrub below the pine trees and other evergreen trees; a few deciduous trees poking out of the rocks close to the road, but the view was decidedly more brown on this side of the mountain.

In one small town there were cones in the street, and a police car parked perpendicular to the road, apparently checking traffic coming in the other direction. Something like a road block, although you could get through.

I passed a sign for Athens, 539 kilometers (about 300 miles) away. That had been an interesting day’s drive for me, and my Toyota Varis still had plenty of gas. I lazily followed the signs to Florina up to Kozani, where signs to Florina disappeared, leaving me to wonder whether I should follow the signs to Albania. Was Florina on the way to Albania?

I came upon a man painting his fence, and stopped to ask him, in Greek, “How do I get to Florina?”

He gave me directions, and I then asked why there were no signs for Florina.

“Afti! Afti! Prepi na tous kopsoun to lemo!” “Oh them. Them!” He drew his finger across his throat. “They should cut their throats.” He said it as if he were good-naturedly talking about a rival football team.

I gulped, and persevered.

On the highway approaching Florina, I was flagged down by the police for supposedly speeding, though I wasn’t. I think I wasn’t. There were no signs that I could see stating what the speed limit was. My little Toyota was not a speedster, and my pace felt moderate at best. Cars had been passing me regularly. Could I have been speeding?

The first of two cops approached the car, motioning that I should get out. He asked for my papers, and I gave him my international driver’s license, my New Jersey driver’s license, and my passport.

“This license isn’t any good in Greece,” he frowned as he turned it over haughtily. He wrote down my passport and both license numbers.

“Really?” There was a hitch in my tummy as the vision of me in jail popped up again, but I smiled. Why had I spoken in Greek! I should have played the ignorant tourist!

His colleague, The Good Cop, who had one more stripe than the first cop, strolled over and interrupted, “I see you have a rental car. Is this your first time in this area?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Oh well, then, you can just go on your way.” He motioned that his colleague should return my papers and started back toward his car, then turned back and asked, with a smile, “By the way, why are you going to Florina?”

I didn’t answer him, just smiled and got back into my car.

“Do you have family there?”

“No,” I smiled at him and drove off.

I remembered throughout my visit that they had written down my passport number and my license numbers, and hoped I wouldn’t see them again.

These two experiences chilled me. Ethnic hatred, and ethnic cleansing were by now familiar to me, and I felt a hint of the mutual fear which religion, geography, and genes have carpeted this area with.

I continued over the flat plain to Florina. Once in the city I consulted the map which my hotel had sent over the internet, wound through the small town roads, and up an incline, past a large church with its doors wide open, bells ringing, disgorging congregants, past the Ninth Infantry Division headquarters, reminiscent of a 1920’s movie, to the hotel.

My room on the second floor was large with high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on a garden, light blue mountains in the far distance. That was Albania. The floor was tiled in stone. The tiles had fine black and peachy brown striations. In the bathroom, there were plain peach tiles on the floor and on the wall were the really fine tiles, thick, textured, beautiful. They were a very very light peach with flecks of beige in them. Their surface was naturally part matte and part shiny. They had been prepared somehow so that not all of the surface was of the same sheen. The sheen was variably dull and luminous. Besides being beautiful, they were obviously easy to keep clean. This was my first encounter with the artistry of the vaunted Albanian masons.

Two flags flew over the front door of the hotel. One was the Greek flag, and one was a flag with I didn’t recognize, dark blue with about 20 yellow stars in a circle. Given my recent experiences with ethnic distrust, I refrained from asking what the second flag was.

Dinner was between adequate and good, the service was amateur but pleasant. I had the feeling that everyone was watching me, monitoring me, but after my door was closed behind me, I slept.

Greece Journal: 2003 part 5

The Drive from Athens to Florina, part 1.
My car was a Toyota Yaris, a nifty little car which handled very well. It had a clear display in the middle of the dashboard so I didn’t have to hunt around.
At the toll station the toll taker didn’t look at me. She was talking to/at her colleague, “Tha fai xilo ean tha to kanie” (“He will eat wood (he will be beaten) if he does this.”) She handed me the ticket out the window, then realized she had to give me change, which she did, still without looking at me.
There were no English stations, like the BBC or the American Forces Radio, so I listened to Greek music.
The hills have trees creeping back on to them. When I lived in Athens my apartment looked out on Mount Hymettos, which appeared barren, though up close it was covered with small vegetation and glorious wildflowers in season. My Greek neighbor told me that Hymettos had been stripped of trees over the decades of the 20th century when war, poverty, and famine turned the population desperate. At first I had found the barrenness depressing, but as I took my walks there, I realized that the hillsides were rich with wild greens, wildflowers, grasses, birds, and small animals. Many times I walked on wild irises, beds of chamomile, and through hundreds of kinds of wildflower. They are not visible from a distance, but are thrilling up close. Still, it was good to see taller trees growing on the hillsides as I drove up the eastern coast.
There might have been a sign giving the speed limit, but I didn’t see it. If there is, nobody is paying any attention. I am going 110 kph, and many people have passed me on the right and on the left, or across two lines in front of me, going twice that fast. The one cop car I saw waited for me to pull into the right so that he could pass. Imagine that. The cop car obeyed the traffic rules.
Large wheeled metal containers, like half-size construction containers, show up from time to time at the side of the road, both in the city and in the country. They are for the garbage, and are mechanically lifted and dumped into the garbage trucks. There are no open bags on the street as there had been when I lived here.
Between Thebes and Lamia lay a fertile plain where great hoses spewed irrigation water. Huge sprinklers 30 feet high sprayed water in twenty or thirty yard circles. So much of the water is wasted that way, I wondered why they didn’t use drip irrigation.
The road wa spotted with little industries too. There are also many unfinished buildings. One was a concrete structure with no front or back, just the concrete of the floors, with a big sign “Café.”
There was a large lake to my right. The water lay in a basin surrounded by round, brown hills. There were no houses built around the lakel. I don’t know whether it is a reservoir or just an unused recreation area. Obviously, the seashore is more popular with the Greeks than lakes. Since my trip to Greece this lake – isolated, sparkling – has appeared in my meditations. I close my eyes and see myself walking across a field which looks barren from afar but is actually covered in tiny wild flowers, and cross to stand at the edge of this clear lake, entering into it and exploring its many levels. It has become a vehicle with which to plumb my own subconscious.
I passed two trucks with three deckers of sheep, their tails swishing back and forth slowly, their legs moving back and forth to keep their balance, providing an interesting geometry of view. They were probably on their way to getting their throats slit.
Coming down from the mountains, the island of Evia came into view across a misty sea. It looked like the water was evaporating, making a band of white vapor right above the water line. Evia was two miles or so to the right, and to the left there were the rounded, old hills that abound in Greece. Between the rounded old hills and the beach, which is twenty yards to my right, were olive groves. I stopped for a while to walk around in the fields and smell the wildflowers. There were wild gladioli growing out in the middle of fields. There were masses of rounded plants bursting with yellow blooms. I thought maybe it was Broom. Pines covered the mountains.
As I drove off again, I passed Evia and the land mass of Greece once again showed itself as hazy, barely outlined mountains. “Mountain” is perhaps an exaggeration there. They are round old hills with faces of beige and pinky beige on them, occasionally gouged out for marble. Trees slowly were covering the scars. There continued to be many cement skeletons. They just leave them there. A Greek once commented, “They don’t think ahead, and they run out of money.”
Many white or pale yellow, beigy, pinky beigy, sometimes sand colored, sometimes whitewashed houses with orange tile roofs, sometimes sporting a grape arbor, ranged along the hills. The effect is similar to Tuscany. Some of them have a fenced-in yard. Some of them don’t. Some of them are just plunked into the middle of a field or an olive grove.
The olive trees swayed, the leaves turning their silvery undersides over so as to make a highly textured picture. They are a grayish, dusky green, not an open green like the pines and the other trees about. There are also fruit trees.
In Agios Konstantinos there was a large white urch right on the water. Near it was marina filled with boats, and hotels and other places to stay. The place has an air of isolation, smack on the sea. Evia protects this enclave from wind and sea. Sheltered high in the pines there were very square, white bright white modern buildings which must be very cool and pleasant in the summer time and have a very beautiful view, but would be a hefty hike from the seashore.
Oleander bloomed along the road. Poppies and purple flowers stood high, along the line of heather or something heather-like.
Someone just passed me on the shoulder on the right, and gave me a dirty look like, “What kind of stupid woman are you?” They are very impatient drivers. That is number one what they are. Greeks, especially Greek men, will sit all day in their cafeneion flopping their worry beads, observing, and chatting with other men who sit all day in the caefeneion flipping their worry beads. When they get out on the road, they push and push impatiently.
There were colored photographs of Kostas Simitis for miles on every telephone pole. There must be an election coming up. There were ads for the Communist Party on the radio saying that they would pay attention to health issues and social security issues. Social security is a key issue with now. They are overhauling the social security system, apparently disastrously according to one newspaper article I read.
Some of the mountains declined straight into the sea, looking like rounded, fuzzy buffalo foreheads.
The toilets were the water-saving kind that have just a tiny bit of water in the toilet to begin with and flush in short spurts. Sometimes they require a second or third flush. They are square-shaped with rounded corners (whatever that is called), and usually extremely clean. I remembered the hygiene facilities when I lived here, 25 years before. They ranged from a hole in the ground to toilets where you had to put the toilet paper in a waste basket, to newspaper toilet paper, and they were by no means always clean. Such toilets are not easy to clean in the first place.
A very small truck pulled up ahead of me and disgorged an old lady in a dusty black skirt and blouse and two small children, who ran around her as she leaned over at the waist to pick wild greens at the side of the road. I realized he had brought her out to pick wild greens (horta) for their dinner. Women were driven up to Hymettos near Athens to do the same thing, and, in the season for greens, were a common sight.
I passed a little quarry by the side of the road called “Asvisterion”. I guess they mine asbestos. I am suspicious of all the dust around here.
I have come halfway and have only used a quarter of a tank.
Turning inland, my ears popped. The grade was very steep, and as a consequence, the road began to meander.
I saw on the news this morning that a cloud mass bearing a lot of rain was coming in from the west. As I drove high into the mountains outside Lamia on the way to Larissa I could see clouds to the west. Everything was shrouded in mist today.
About ten yards to the left of the road, on a flat piece of land before it plunged downward, were about twenty beehives, wooden, painted light blue and yellow.
The face of the hills I was passing through were red on the left and sand-colored on the right. There were bits of vegetation holding the soil in place. The rock looked friable, easily broken up by a very very big hand. It is sort of shale-like, lying in sheets one on top of the other. Sometimes it was brown. Different colored mountains. There is a riot of yellow bushes with yellow flowers on top, about three feet high. Here the stronger cars overtook me in my tiny Toyota, made for four very small people. It has no trunk to it really, and a very flat front. It’s a little box that moves, but it does the trick admirably.
I am up very high now. I can look at great distance into the valley below. It is shrouded in mist, so I can’t see as far as I could see if it were clear, but a long way, and I thought my, how tidy the battles must have been around here. They’d find a little bit of flat land and have a battle there. All the rest is just hills to be cleared before you arrived at the battlefield. We just passed Thermopylae, for example, which is a flat swath between the sea and some rather steep high mountains. Where else could you fight around there? It’s not like the American revolution where you could run behind trees and fight a guerilla war. In those days you could have been seen from a very great distance, and somebody was going to be up in the hills watching you. No tree cover. No other kind of cover. Come in by sea and boom! Or walk over the mountains or through the valley. It’s pretty clearly delineated where you could slaughter each other.
So friable are the rocks in this place where I am starting to go down the mountain, that they have veiled them in wire mesh.
The monastery of Atini Sakis (I think it was called) isolated on top of a mountain, isolated, seemed good place to say prayers.
The only other time I have had the feeling of complete isolation, yet touched by human attentions, was driving through the Swiss mountains in the summertime. Up here they may get a little dusting of snow, but mostly a riot of purple, yellow, fuscia and bright red wild flowers, and bright red poppies. Aside from the small monastery, the beehives, and the occasional closed-up building, it is completely deserted. I guess you can’t grow anything up here, and it’s not suitable for tourists. Once in every long long while, someone has set up a roadside stand where they were selling cherries. I didn’t see any orchards, so they must be sheltered out of sight.

Greece journal: 2003 part 5

I will meander along the road toward Florina in this post, taking my time to observe the landscape, towns, and people along the way.

My car was a Toyota Yaris, much too small and handy to be sold in the U.S.

At the first toll station out of Athens the toll taker was talking at her colleague, and didn't turn her head to look at me.

“Tha fai ksilo ean tha to kani” ("He will eat wood(he will be beaten) if he does this.") She handed me the ticket out the window, then realized she had to give me change. Still without even looking at me, she handed me the change.

I couldn’t find either the BBC or the American Forces radio on the car radio. I didn’t have a radio in my hotel room so I couldn’t test the stations.

Many hills had trees creeping back onto them. I wondered if they were doing reforestation. The hills weren’t grey and barren. There were trees – s not just low vegetation, but tall trees. It was good to see. Greece used to be heavily forested. I was told that during the various wars and disasters which befell them, they stripped the trees for fuel. Maybe they were coming back.

There might have been a sign which said what the speed limit was, but if there was I didn't see it. If there was, nobody was paying any attention. I was going 110 kph in my little Toyota, and many people passed me on the right and on the left, or across two lines in front of me or whatever, going twice that fast. One cop car sat behind me while I was going 110 kph. He waited for me to pull into the right so that he could pass. Imagine that. The cop car obeyed the traffic rules!

Garbage collection was in what looked like half construction containers, wheeled, heavy metal. There was a special top on them so they could be dumped into the garbage trucks. No open bags on the street, even out in the country.

I was going across the plain between Thebes and Lamia. Great hoses spewed irrigation water on the crops in farm after farm. I was surprised they didn't use drip irrigation. The huge sprinklers, about 30 feet high, sprayed a circumference of maybe 30 yards in every direction. So much of the water is lost to evaporation that way.

The way was spotted with little industries too. A couple of factories made things for cars and the like. I passed a building that had no front or back, just the concrete of the floors, with a large sign “Café.” The cafe had held some energy when the old road, which entered the new highway here at an angle, had been traveled, but now was dead as a doornail.

There was a large lake to the right. There were no houses around it at all. I thought it might be a reservoir or maybe an unused recreation area. The seashore is more popular with Greeks than lakes. This lake has appeared many times in my mind's eye since then -- deserted, surrounded by barren hills, blue cloudly sky above. During a guided meditation at a retreat one weekend we were asked to imagine ourselves approaching a body of water, and this was what came to mind. I have done that meditation many times since, walking through sparse but striking wild flowers in the sere landscape to get to the clear water.

Two trucks passed carrying three deckers of sheep, their tails swishing back and forth slowly and their legs moving back and forth to keep their balance. It was an interesting geometry of view. They were probably on their way to get their throats slit.

Coming down off the mountains the island of Evia appeared across a misty sea. It looked like the water was evaporating and making a band of evaporation vapor right above the water line, which presented itself as a white line. It formed a vague fuzzy white line along the bottom of the mountains of Evia, which are about two miles away to the right. To the left there are these rounded, old hills that abound in Greece. Between the rounded old hills and the beach, which was twenty yards to the right, were olive groves. There were wild gladioli growing everywhere – maybe they had been planted at some point, but they were now growing in fields in the middle of nowhere. What yellow plant was that? Yellow broom? Some sort of broom. Pines covered the mountains.

Beyond Evia the land mass of Greece once again showed itself as hazy, hazy, barely outlined mountains. “Mountain” is perhaps an exaggeration there. They are round old hills with faces of beige and pinky beige, occasionally gouged out for marble. The scars from the gouging are being slowly covered by trees growing back.

Unfinished hotel to my right. Just the cement skeleton. There are many cement skeletons. They just leave them there. Apparently they didn’t think ahead enough, and run out of money.

There were white, or pale yellow, beigy, pinky beigy, sometimes sand colored, sometimes whitewashed houses with orange tile roofs. Sometimes they had a grape arbor by them. The effect was orange and sand color, very similar to Tuscany. Some of them had a fenced-in yard. Some of them didn’t. Some of them were plunked into the middle of a field or an olive grove.

The olive swayed, with the leaves turning their silvery undersides over so as to make a highly textured sight. Olive trees are a grayish, dusky green, not an open green like the pines. There were also fruit trees.

I was next in Agios Konstantinos. There was a big church right on the water, and a marina filled with boats, a lot of hotels and places to stay, and houses up on the hill. It would be a hike to get from the beach on the right up to those houses. they are highly isolated. I don’t know whether they were here before, but now it’s a great resort spot, smack on the sea. The sea is probably benign here, protected as it is by the island of Evia. Sheltered high in the pines there were very square, white, bright, modern buildings which must be very cool and pleasant in the summer time and have a very beautiful view.

Oleander blooms along the road. Poppies and purple flowers stood high. They reminded me of heather, though I don't know if heather grows this far sougth. I know if I got out of the car and just walked along the side, I would find dozens of varieties of wild flowers.

Some cars passed me on the shoulder on the right. One driver gave me a dirty look like, “What kind of stupid woman are you?” Greeks are so very impatient. They will sit all day in their cafeneion flopping their beads and staring, and then they get out on the road or they go somewhere where they are interacting with others and they push and push.

There were colored election posters with photographs of Kostas Simitis for miles on every telephone pole. There must be an election coming up. There have also been ads for the Communist Party on the radio saying that they will pay attention to health issues and social security issues. Social security is a hot issue now. They are overhauling the social security system, disastrously according to one newspaper article I read.

As I progressed up the coast, some mountains went directly into the sea, looking like rounded, fuzzy buffalo foreheads.

The toilets are the water-saving kind that have just a tiny bit of water in the toilet to begin with and flush in short spurts. You have to flush it twice sometimes to get it completely flushed. They are square-shaped, with rounded corners (whatever that is called) a rectangle with rounded corners. When I was last here the hygiene facilities were constantly surprise, from a hole in the ground to primitive toilets with newspaper for toilet paper. This time, they were extremely clean toilets.

This Toyota is a nifty little car which handles very very well. It has a nice display in the middle of the dashboard so you don’t have to hunt around for what it is you are lokoing for. Halfway to Florina I had only used a quarter of a tank.

An old lady in black, wearing a dusty black skirt and blouse, leaned over at the waist to pick wild greens at the side of the road. There were two small children running around her as she did this. She was delivered to the spot by a man in a very small truck. He had brought her out to go picking wild greens for their dinner, just as they used to do in the hills around Athens when the "horta" (wild greens) season was at its peak.

On the right side of the road was a quarry called an “Asvisterion”. I guess they mine asbestos. I am suspicious of all the dust around here.

The road turned inland, and my ears popped. We were going at a very steep grade uphill. The roadi s going to begin to meander after a while because the grades that we will be going up will be so steep.
I saw on the news this morning that a cloud mass bearing a lot of rain is comingin from the west, and as we go up high on the mountains outside Lamia on the way to Larissa I can see cloud cover to the west and I wonder if this is the rain coming in. Everything is very misty, not foggy, just shrouded in mist today.
On the left side of the road, about ten yards from the road on a flat piece of land before it plunges downward, there were about twenty beehives, wooden, painted light blue and yellow.
The face of the hills I am passing through is now red on the left and sand-colored on the right, mostly red though, there are just outcroppings of sand-colored. There are beginning to be bits of vegetation growing in it to hold it in place. The rock looks friable to a very very big hand. It is sort of shale-like, lying in sheets one on top of the other. Now it is brown. Different colored mountains. There is a riot of yellow bushes, bushes with yellow flowers on top. Different kinds of bushes. They are about there feet high. And from a distance give the impression of strong, yellow. Clump after clump or straggle after straggle depending on what kind of yellow plant they are. Here the stronger cars are certainly overtaking me in my little tiny Toyota, made for four very small people. With no trunk to it really. And a very flat front. It’s a little box that moves. But it does the trick.
I am up very high now. I can look at a great distance into the valley below. It is shrouded in mist, so I can’t see exactly as far as I could see if it were clear. But a long way, and I think my, how tidy the battles must have been around here. They’d find a little bit of flat land and have a battle there . All the rest is just hills to be conquered before you arrive at the battlefield. It’s a fact of history. We just passed Thermopylae, for examplt, which is a flat swathe between the sea and some rather steep high mountains. So where else could you fight around there. It’s not like the American revolution where you could go run behind trees and fight a guerilla war. In those days you could have been seen from a very great distance, because somebody is going to be up in the hills watching you. No tree cover. No other kind of cover. Come in by sea and boom.. Or walk over the mountains or through the valley. It’s pretty clearly delineated where you could slaughter each other.
So friable are the rocks in this place where I am starting to go down the mountain, that they have veiled them in wire mesh.
Right after the monastery of Atini Sakis, I think it was called, way up on the top of a mountain, isolated, good place to say your prayers.
Here you have none of the feeling that you have driving through the Swiss mountains in the summertime. Of course the mountains here are not as high, but sometimes they are this size, you have the feeling always that they are prepared for the snow in the wintertime. Up here they may get a little dusting of snow. Mostly what they have to prepare for is this riot of purple and yellow and fuscia and bright red wild flowers and bright red poppies. That’s their invasion. Also, I these mountains there is not a soul. There was a monastery, an occasional single building. The rest of it is completely deserted. I guess you can’t grow anything up here. Not suitable for tourists. Just maybe a retreat would be nice, a retreat house or a spa or something. They are selling cherries and every once in a very long while, every several miles, there is a little roadside stand, where they are selling cherries. There is another hillside covered with bee hives. So since they are selling cherries, I assume there must be some orchards up here. I haven’t found them yet – there they are. What I know about the cherry tree – it’s some kind of fruit tree, not an olive, not a pine, or a cypress, it’s just a fruit tree. So that must be where they grow their cherries.
Small green plants a small crop which is now only small green plants, has been lpanted at regular intervals here.

Greece journal: 2003 part 4

As I went to breakfast in the hotel, I saw a poster for a linguistics conference to be held in Plaka. It was an unseen hand telling me what I was doing here, and of course I went, though it cost me $80.
Most of the linguistics students in Greece, as in America, are young women. They talked constantly, much to everyone’s annoyance. The conference seemed to be more or less for the benefit of the professors who badgered each other, trying to poke holes in each other’s theories with questions. It deepened my past observations that although fascinating linguistics research has been done, little information from this research has leaked out to the general public. Linguists talk to other linguists about it.
I continue baffled at Saki’s silence. I would call it rude but it is also perhaps an indication of his poor health.
The afternoon presentations at the linguistics conference were quite incomprehensible, except for Professor Athanasios Phivos Christidis, from Thessaloniki. He was 65 or more, a bit shorter than I am, but he had luxuriant white, longish hair and a handsome face. As he took to the podium he said he would rather stand than sit because as a heavy smoker, it helped his breathing. Every time he breathed in it was labored and audible, though he didn’t cough. More emphysema than cancer. When I met him afterwards his eyes were red from the smoke. He probably has a cigarette in his mouth most of the time.
His talk about language in the twentieth century included one small reference to about Chomsky, and all the rest was about Piaget and de Saussure, etc. After it was over I asked him about the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. He had been part of the team which wrote the proposal to present to the Greek government asking them to accept this Charter, which recognizes and provides support for minority languages. The only language which they recognize in Greece is Turkish, which is the result of a hundred-year-old treaty. This is why Kostas at the Educational Ministry, could work in the field of educating Turkish children in Thrace. Christides said that he felt that Greece should be open-minded, that it would not hurt to let people openly speak their preferred language, but other people did not agree with him, and Greece refused to sign it. “They are afraid,” he opined.
The purpose of my upcoming trip to Florina was partly to report on the health of the Macedonian language there. The sticking point between the Greeks and the Greek Macedonians is language and, in a larger sense, culture.
While nibbling on cookies over lunch I had told a couple of the linguists at the conference about my upcoming trip, and they told me to be careful. One of them said, “People have been put in jail for a lot less than you are planning to do.” This was sobering. Did I want to spend time in jail for the cause of the Macedonians? Their cause meant nothing to me personally, though it was professionally of interest.
Professor Christides spoke without alarm about my trip. He did, however, acknowledge with a smile that “We live in the Balkans and this is a dangerous neighborhood. We are not Sweden and Norway.” He has taught and lived in Thessaloniki, formerly a hub of Macedonian culture. They had seen a lot of this conflict around Thessaloniki during Professor Christides’s lifetime. I thought for a brief while of calling off my trip to Florina and going instead to someplace welcoming, warm, and non-threatening, but talked myself back into it.
I wandered out in Plaka near Monastiraki, and found a cozy square with chairs and tables from several restaurants. It was a sunny day and the trees in the square provided a comfortable shade. The waiter was more interested in chatting with the other waiters at some distance than in finding out whether I wanted to eat anything. I don’t know what it is about cobblestones that is relaxing, but they relaxed me. The light played off the pastel old buildings around the square; the people at the tables made quite a lot of noise; there were babies and old ladies; I drank a carafe of retsina.
I talked to a woman who was Polish who did something about Semantics and Pragmatics, and talked to the guy who gave the lecture about habitus. They seemed fairly uninterested because I am nobody. They wanted to talk to each other.
The young Greek women were a pain in the ass, chattering and whispering all the time. They are very controlling people, who are only happy when they are on the inside. They do things to make it so they are on the inside, gaggling up together and talking on their cell phones so that we see how popular they are. When they are on the outside they are neither polite nor hospitable nor friendly; they are extremely rude. When I lived there, was part of a Greek family, and was on the inside, they were warm, as long as I behaved the way I was supposed to behave. One lecture, on the passive voice, was given by I think a Japanese man, Junichi Toyota. He had a lisp, stuttered badly, and had an accent. A couple of the young women left the room, and just outside, while they were going up the stairs, they were making fun of him. His lecture was pretty much incomprehensible to me in both style and substance, but I was offended at the women’s rudeness.
Going back to the hotel, I saw a man leading a blind man out into the street wagging his finger for a taxi. This is quite the opposite of what it would be in New York. He would try to hide the fact that the man was blind because it would hold up the taxi and he wouldn’t pick you up. Here you expect, as the Greeks always do, to take the poor and wounded under their wing. It’s when you are hale and hearty that you have trouble.
Tomorrow I leave for Florina, and I think I will sleep restlessly tonight as I wonder whether I will get in any trouble up there. I am not used to living in a repressive society, and must be aware of the signals as I run into them. As a freewheeling American, I might not pick them up quickly enough. I have lived in Greece, speak the language, and thus have the advantage, but it’s been twenty-five years……

Greece Journal: 2003 part 3

On my first day, I rested. I didn't really wake up until around 1:00, which would be about right; that would be 6:00 in the morning for me.

Saki (the hotel's proprietor, and an old friend/acquaintance) did not contact me. I didn’t know what kind of cat-and-mouse game this was. How should I contact him? I could have left him a little note, but he knew I was there. I wanted to hear about his last 25 years and show him pictures of my children. I had quite a 25-year story to tell myself. He was sending me the correct message that, while I had one of the best rooms in the hotel, I was not truly a close friend of his. He looked in very poor health, hunched and drawn, with sallow skin and hollow eyes. Maybe that was why I didn't hear from him.

I was both exhilarated and cautious. Athens was my home for 11 years, but that was long ago. I knew nobody there in 2003. The tastes and inner feelings which I experienced there came alive to my memory cells. Not all of either tastes or feelings were pleasant; in fact, I had not regretted leaving, and would have left long before if I had had the money to go to Paris. Still, it was my home. The exhilaration came more from the journalistic nature of the trip. I would be investigating, learning, traveling, meeting people in search of material for my Master's Thesis on the language conflict between Greek Macedonians and other Greeks. Not knowing what would happen was a big part of the fun.

Before traveling there, I had been in contact with linguists and some Macedonians in Greece. My first meeting was lunch with Kostas from the Education Ministry.

I apologized for being late arriving at the Papaspyriou bookstore at the corner of Akadimias and Hippokratous. Though I had walked that area a thousand times when I lived in Athens, it seemed quite unfamiliar. A woman gave me incorrect directions.

Kostas was shorter than I, with a beard, dark hair, and a most welcoming, friendly manner. Not in the boastful Greek “See how hospitable I am” way, but in the truly friendly way. He had a bunch of flowers for me.

We walked to a modest outdoor cafe with aqua chairs laid out in a large square in front of the restaurant between two buildings. He greeted various people whom he sees almost every day when he goes there to eat lunch. There were people at only three of the tables. We discussed the menu and I decided to have kolokothiki tiganetes, which is zucchini pancakes, which arrived with a yoghurt and dill sauce. They were very tasty, certainly something I could take home with me as a recipe. Then I had eggplant with small onions. The squares of eggplant had a juicy sauce around them. It was also very tasty. Kostas had a stuffed pepper and a stuffed tomato, stuffed with rice and dill. He gave me a bite, and that was very tasty too. I knew that in Athens one must choose restaurants with care, because the food at most of them is, to me, inedible. It always pays to know someone in the place you are visiting.

Kostas worked in the Ministry on pedagogy -- how to teach Muslim children Greek. He said that many more Moslems had come here, especially to Thrace, or Thraki, which is in the northeast corner of Greece, quite far away, near Turkey. It used to be just Turks, but now there are three different communities of Muslims. I had notice many women in hijab in Athens, and many Africans, some in their customary colorful national dress. When I lived there, exotic intrusions from the outside world were few. My hippy long skirts had attracted attention, but these looked very ordinary next to the strong African patterns and Arab hijab.

The terms of the old treaty devised when there was a large population exchange in the beginning of the 20th century provided for a certain degree of independence for the Moslems of Thrace. Kostas said that one of the issues was the desire of the Moslems to have prayers in school. They resolved the issue by allowing one hour for religious education in the day, and during that time they could have prayers if they liked; otherwise, they prayed before and after school.

The situation of the Moslems in Thrace was at that time becoming marginally better for two reasons: 1) Greece was becoming much more cosmopolitan, and 2) there were many more Moslems than before.

Walking back to the hotel, I passed a couple of places that had tiropites. I had been looking for those. When I used to teach there, I would often stop at one of the small shops that sells pites, or pies, of all sorts, and eat one as I walked -- walnut, meat, cheese. They were always fresh and delicious.

Remembering those twice-daily walks to the Hellenic-American Union, where I taught English, caused me to veer up the hill to visit it. When I was there it was a part of the United States Information Service. They sponsored cultural programs, which I remember well; one was a movie which showed doo-wop groups, black men dressed in identical red suits, I remember, who choreographed their swooping, jiving movements to go with their music. When they began to perform the Greek audience of a couple of hundred shocked me by bursting out in laughter. I took it as a personal insult but got over it quickly. They had never seen anything like it. It was there that I nearly burst my tummy laughing at the first Buster Keaton movie I had ever seen (The General), and there that I gave my first concert of American folk songs. It was a big hit.

So I had many expectations as I turned up the very familiar street to the school. It was more than twice as big as it had been, and glitzy. In my new role as investigative reports, I went to the director's office and introduced myself as a former teacher. Christine was Greek but spoke perfect English. She was abrupt and rushed since she was leaving for the U.S. the next day. If only I had called ahead of time .... (she would have told me she couldn't see me). We chatted for a while anyway. That’s what happens when you are a reporter, you just barge in on people, take their time.

Clearly the school is larger than before, and things have changed a great deal since Greece joined the European Union. Many Greeks now work in Germany, and Americans cannot work in Greece. They don’t want people who are not members of the EU. When I worked there the visas was a minor detail, taken care of by the school. They were delighted to have native Americans teaching at the Hellenic American Union, where students came to get hip and get ahead by learning American English.

I recalled vividly my first days in Athens as I walked away from the now-unfamiliar school. I could not face coming back to New York, where I had been isolated and lonely, and had met a Greek man who wanted me to stay there. (Sheesh, that's another story.) I walked around to various schools where English was taught, and talked to the directors. I was still undecided. On Tuesday the director of the Hellenic American Union telephoned and said I was teaching beginning Thursday. "Is that what I said?" I asked him, laughing. "Not exactly, but that's what you're going to do." That's how I got hired., and I continued working there from 1967 to 1975. My Master's Degree in English got me hired somewhere after all. Now I was working on another M.A., and it was leading to other exciting things.

In 2003 only one teacher in ten was allowed to be American. Though the school still has the name "American" in its title, it is not at all attached to the United States, except that the Cultural Affairs Minister of the embassy is on the Board of Directors. When I taught there, bomb threats (fortunately always empty) came every year or so as public opinion turned against America for one reason or another. Maybe it's just as well that the link has been severed.

After my abrupt chat with Christine, I went to an internet café to send reassurances of my safe arrival to my family. MTV blasted in the background. I could not send a message to more than one person on their email system, so I sent the same message four or five times. There were other people there, mostly young, many of them on their cell phones, and all of them smoking. Smoking. Smoking. Smoking everywhere.

I had dinner in my room, then went out for a twilight walk. It was quarter to eight and there was a rosey light falling on the white buildings on the cliff at Lykavittos and on the Parthenon. The road running next to the Parthenon had been turned into a pedestrian walkway up a gentle slope to the Acropolis. Very impressive. Very beautiful. They made Athens so much more beautiful. Some of it was in preparation for the Olympics, and some a simple reflection of increased prosperity.

Political journal: 2008 part 1

There are all kinds of journeys -- forays into new territory. I took a new one last night as I watched the Republican convention.

I dutifully soldiered through not only Palin's speech, but Giuliani's as well, took an anti-nausea pill and went to sleep. This morning I woke up reviewing the real estate prices in the south of France, but Terry turned himself to more productive ends. Statistician that he is, he has been following some interesting websites which go beyond the most recent poll, He scribbled and scribbled, and came up with the reassuring fact that Obama has a good lock on 220 electoral votes (McCain 150), with a better-than-decent chance at filling in the remaining electoral votes from several states where he is ahead, though not by so much as to constitute a "lock."

This could all change, but I doubt that it will change other than fleetingly after the nasty, ungenerous speeches last night. Where did they get all those raving Republicans? They must have scoured the country, and I'm sure they did, for people who find ridicule as a political policy hilarious. Giuliani is already ugly, but Palin is holding her Dorian Gray portrait in the attic -- it has deepening wrinkles, disfiguring frown lines, bloodless skin, and her hair is thinning. Some day, an adventurous soul is going to steal it from the attic and show it to the world.

So put away the cyanide, tear up those tickets to the south of France -- no, put them away just in case....

After the recent "family values" displays, I am feeling entirely normal, which is also reassuring.

Greece Journal: 2003 part 2

I awoke in my hotel in Florina, ready to drive to Ioannina.

I was coughing a lot in the morning and felt congestion in my throat throughout the day. I think it was these damned cigarettes around me all the time. We get so spoiled in America.

I ate in the open, light dining room, from which I would see Macedonia, and in the farther distance, they told me, Albania. Breakfast was served on a plate with six slices of two-inch across salami. I just tasted a little, and it was savory and nicely textured. There was a little, cheese, a croque monsieur with ham and cheese, some pound cake, toast and little metal containers of individual servings of strawberry jam orange marmalade, and three pieces of toast, plus coffee.

Over breakfast I reviewed my route. The map showed a straight-ish line, then a squiggly, squiggly line, then another straightish line. When I set out, I looked up in front of me and saw the mountains of the first squiggly line.

The roads from Florina to Ioannina are mountainous and curvy, but there are customs for dealing with that. They use the shoulder extensively, for example. If you want to go slowly, you pull over to the shoulder and everybody passes you. There is a feeling that you are communicating with the drivers of other cars. When I pull over to let somebody pass me, he beeps his horn in acknowledgement. If somebody wanted to pass me he blinked his lights at me. In America, it’s as if everybody is driving their own road, obeying the same laws, but not communicating with each other. This Greek, and European, custom makes me feel safer, although the drivers are eccentric from time to time. Under this system, safety depends on one’s awareness of the other drivers, so one is more likely to detect unusual driving behavior.

Nobody pays any attention to whether there is a dotted or straight line. Their passing decisions are made by a combination of each driver’s need and each driver’s judgment. I was not afraid driving on these roads.

Mountains stretched to the left in declining shades of blue, ever paler as they went farther into the distance. Closer, where the sun strikes them, they are green.

The countryside in the mountains there was quite deserted. There was an occasional church or homestead, bunches of sheep with a shepherd every once in a while, but long long stretches of beautiful nobody at all.

At long intervals, there were villages, sited strategically along the ancient road. The reasons for the original strategic choice for choosing this site for the village could only be imagined. A trade route perhaps? Protection from invaders? Protection from storms? Maybe a group was fleeing persecution. So much has happened throughout history in these hills that one could only guess.

I came around a curve to a little town. It consisted of several hundred houses with orange tile roofs, staggered along the mountain, all clumped together but in rows of ever-higher houses.

The village was cut in two by the road, and today was market day. On either side of the road were fruit and vegetable stands, and people walking around shopping and visiting. I was coming one way, two cars were coming the other way. The man selling potatoes was standing in the road next to his stall. There were three cars trying to get past. He didn’t move over or look at us. So someone stepped up to guide us around this blockage.

Black-clad old women with market baskets on their arms ambled across the road and back again. A man drove along in a van with a microphone announcing “cucumbers, I have cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, romaine, and onions, potatoes”. He goes around the neighborhoods and the ladies buy from him, and today he was trolling through the market. I was wondering what all the loudspeakers were that I heard as I went around Florina. I heard them in Athens too. Now I know. They are the Greek equivalent of Mr. Softee, only bearing much more crucial, and healthier, goods.

Going through the market I had to drive at walking speed as the townspeople were ignoring cars. Not many pass through anyway, and if they do, they are ignored, putting avoidance of pedestrians squarely in the hands of the drivers.

On the road from Florina to Kastoria they grow grapes for wine.

Back on the open road, I passed a vegetable truck almost stopped, going maybe 5 kilometers an hour, in the middle of this highway, then I passed a tractor which had some lethal looking things sticking out from the side. It was extremely wide, taking up the whole lane and then a bit. In order to pass it you had to go well over into the opposing lane. Then I passed a car which was right in the middle of the right-hand lane, where I was driving, going backwards. You keep your wits about you out here.

I listened to Greek folk music. It is harsh, rhythmic, but the rhythms are hard to count out sometimes. The line of the music is very long. I love this stuff. The mountains cut out the reception and so I fade from one station into another.

For much of the ride, I was all alone on the mountain road and it was green like the Adirondacks, thick with trees and flowers by the road. Poppies appeared as exclamation points of poppies in the middle of lemon-yellow sprays of flowers, drapes of white blooms, and dome-shaped bushes with fragile white lacy blossoms. I identified one flower as primroses, some sort of rose, the lush pink blossoms shone on the bushes, the limbs of which I could see clearly under the blossoms.

Trees were lightly leaved so that their dark limbs also showed through, with pink blossoms fatly lounging on them. Tall trees had clusters of white blossoms in the shapes of grapes, with an elongated tip.

Being alone out there, stopping every once in a while on a deserted hillside to soak it up, have a drink of water, pee in the bushes, was inspiring and refreshing. Armies of angry people, including battalions of the furious faithful of one religion, then another, had washed across these mountains for thousands of years, uprooting one group, then another in their search for domination. Fleeing was part of life here for a very long time. The sense of distance and hardship hung in the air at all times here, but on that day, it gave a heightened poignancy and power to my sense of isolation, beauty, and security. I was far from police and persecution. Maybe I felt the liberation that some of those fleeing groups had felt as they settled in these mountains.

Greece Journal: 2003 part 1

I lived in Athens, Greece from 1965-1976. I speak Greek quite fluently. Between 1976 and 2003, I lived in the U.S., raised children, worked, worked, and worked, but in 2003 I returned. That is a gap of more than 25 years.

I was traveling alone, and thus felt much more comfortable having a purpose to my trip. I would do linguistics research on the situation of the Macedonian community in northern Greece. ( The research has since been presented at an academic conference at Ohio State, and gained me an A as I finished my M.A., so in the end my mission was accomplished.)

Greece was preparing for the Olympics, and construction construction was everywhere in Athens. There was a new airport.

I hopped on a bus to go to the Royal Olympic Hotel, owned by Saki Papadimitriou, whom I had last seen some time before 1976. A friend had been his girlfriend, and we saw him quite often. I wrote to tell him I was coming, and he wrote me back saying that it would be nice to see me, and my stay would be complementary. I was gratified at his warmth and generosity. After all, we hadn't seen each other in 25 years.

The bus driver asked where the bus passengers were staying, and seemed open to suggestion as to where he should stop. Giggling, excited American tourists were asking him to take them to their hotels, and he flourished many an "okay." When I asked him in Greek to take me to the Royal Olympic. He lifted his chin toward the ceiling -- the "no" gesture. "We don't go there."

"But you're stopping at many other hotels. Couldn't you stop at this one?"

"Oxi -- no." Abrupt.

I sullenly took my seat on the bus, prepared to either haul around my suitcases or get a cab when we got to Athens. One by one the tourists were dropped at their hotels, leaving me the lone passenger.

"Hey!" He called back in Greek. "Where do you want to go?"

I went up to stand next to him "The Royal Olympic."

"I know where that is. Are you Greek?" He began to chat with me, taking one hand off the wheel for frequent hand flourishes.

Though he had irritated me, he had me where he wanted me, and I didn't want to piss him off. He might change his mind.

"No. I'm American."

"How come you speak Greek?"

"I used to live here."

He laughed. "You speak Greek well."

"I haven't been here for 25 years."

He gave me a rundown on what had happened in the last 25 years. He said I should be sure to see the new Acropolis area, and declared Athens "beautiful now."

"I've read that the air is very polluted. Is that true?"

He wrinkled his brow upward and raised an open hand from the steering wheel. "What can we do? That's progress."

He not only took me to the hotel, but he helped me with my bags, chatting and laughing.

I realized I was back in the Greece I knew and didn't like so much. They toy with you. Their reactions to you have nothing to do with anything more than whim. First they insult you brazenly, then embrace you as if you were family.

I had an unpleasant feeling in my stomach as I entered the hotel and asked for Saki. I was looking forward to hearing about his last 25 years. He's an interesting man.

"He is in the bar," the woman at the front desk said, and I left my bags there and walked up the marble stairs into the bar.

How is it that two men sitting at a table having a coffee can look like conspirators in an international plot? That is how Saki looked in the corner of the bar. Greek men love to look "spudeos -- important," and nothing is as spudeos as having a secret, so they often speak as if they had one. It always looked silly to me.

I was delighted to see Saki, and it showed in my smile as I reached my arms out as I walked across the marble floor toward him. I was shocked to see how old and frail he looked as he rose from his seat. His skin was sallow, his body strained.

From the way he greeted me, I realized that he did NOT want me joining his conspiracy in the corner. It flitted across my mind that since I was a 60 year old woman, not a 30 year old beauty, I would be of no use at his conspirators' table. If I had been a 30 year old prize to show off, no conspiracy could have kept him from flaunting me..

He said he was busy now, and made no offer to see me any other time. I wrote him a note on the hotel stationery, saying I'd love to see him, but never heard back. Despite his generous offer of a gratis shotel room, I got a bill and, of course, did not protest. Saki owed me nothing. His offer had been an empty flourish. It did annoy me because his hotel is not cheap, and I had not factored in the hundreds of dollars it would cost me.

So I was greeted with the same kinds of brazen rudeness and self-interested crassness that I had always experienced in Greece. I had spent many years observing and experiencing Greek ways, and needed no more than a few hours to realize that despite the shiny Olympic veneer, it was the same old place. The only difference was that now I was better able to protect myself, and had a nuanced perception of the motives behind their ways.

The Royal Olympic is very close to where I and my husband used to live, and the first thing I did was to see what had happened to that house. We lived in the large first floor of a house owned by Mrs. Bambouki, an elderly woman whose son had a gambling habit bad enough to cause her to ultimately lose the house. There was a courtyard and garden out the back, and a large terrace along the street.

The location of this apartment had been ideal. It was an easy walk from Syntagma and Kolonaki Squares, right next to the stadium, across from the Royal Gardens and, most importantly of all, was on a hill seaward of the city, so the sea breezes cooled and refreshed the apartment through its high windows. I often did my laundry and strung it on the roof, where sheets would have flapped dry by the time I had hung up the rest of the laundry. It was a matter of stringing up the laundry, then bringing it right down.

I was quite sure that this taste of old Athens had been torn down and replaced by a square, generic apartment building, but was surprised to find it still there. The whole area had been gentrified, with a cobblestone street with plantings along it. The area under the terrace was now a garage. There were expensive, lovely curtains blowing in the wind through the open terrace doors. It had cost us 3000 drachmas a month (about a hundred dollars in those days). What could it possibly cost now?

When I was there we often strolled to either Syntagma or Kolonaki and sat at cafe tables, watching life go by. There were cafes on sidewalks all around both squares. As we sat there, we were always sure to see one of our friends or acquaintances passing by. It was an easygoing, enjoyable cafe life. People didn't usually meet in homes. They ran into each other at cafes. There were hardly any cafes left now. Syntagma's busiest cafe had been replaced by a MacDonald's, and the only one left in Kolonaki was the one where I had loved to eat loukoumades, deep fried puffs, which were always made fresh as you ordered them, and covered in honey sauce. They no longer made loukoumades. Too time consuming.

I went to a Linguistics conference which happened to be happening on the very days I was there, and walked around the equally gentrified Acropolis. There was little for me to do there though. My friends were all gone. The apartment of one of my closest friends there, Muriel, was now an embassy.

I couldn't wait to pick up my car and head north to Florina.

Hawaii Journal: 2007 part 6

We flew back to Honolulu for our one night of pampering at the Moana Surfrider before returning to Newark. Our room was on a high floor, giving us a perfect view of the hundreds of surfers in the water outside the hotel.

When we arrived at the Surfrider, two young women in muu muus greeted us. One gave us a cup of real guava juice, not guava punch, which tastes like .. well, never mind, and the other placed a lei around my neck (Terry’s was of black beads). I was stunned by the heady fragrance of the pungent yellow plumeria. I got the point of leis. They feel like the smoothest velvet and smell like paradise, lying with a pleasant, evenly distributed weight around the neck. I’m going to pack mine and dry the flowers when I get home to see if I can preserve this fragrance, which climbs into your hair, your skin, your mouth, your nose.

“Partly cloudy, chance of showers” is the weather forecast every day. It is 6:45 am., the sun is shining, and the surfers are out. The trade winds are not blowing, so the surf is up on the south side of the island. The surfers lie in wait far offshore (at least it’s far if you are swimming), a few popping up to catch the waves of their choice. Some of them ride the waves laterally as they break almost into shore, others wipe out as soon as they mount their boards. There is a separate world out there, fun, dangerous at times, pleasant, congenial, physically demanding. They probably have their own means of eating and drinking on their boards, they spend so much time there. The aquatic version of a golf cart gave a ride back to shore to one of them. They take water safety seriously in Hawaii, as 20 or so people drown here every year.

I plan to go for a morning swim as soon as I finish writing this. I swam a long time yesterday, and never have had so much fun in the water. One can swim in Hawaii’s sea, and I lapped the beach 6 or 7 times. The water is powerful, playing with you, lifting you up, twisting you a little, crashing here and there. There was a sense of play stronger than any other place I have swum and I was exhilarated. We have asked for late checkout as our flight isn’t until 9:00 tonight, and I plan to swim as many times as I can.

I experimented by swimming once before and once after a mai tai. The swims proved nothing, as they were pretty much the same, but it was fun noting sensations with and without alcohol. I indulged once in a tropical drink, seated in a beach chair watching the sea. Terry had a margarita with some exotic red stuff around the rim—it had cayenne and sugar in it, I think, and some other tasty, but Hawaiian additions.

The Surfrider is filled with Japanese. A large Japanese group ate next to us last night, laughing a lot, the women mainly silent. I felt I had a glimpse into Japanese family life. There was the nerdy one, the misfit 21 year old with his spikey hairdo, sitting glum and disapproving at the far end of the table, the hip middle-aged man, with a white mesh shirt over a t shirt of another color, a baseball cap on sideways, the talkative storytelling woman, whose words always brought laughter, the woman sitting prim and silent most of the meal, smiling at the jokes – like a family anywhere, I suppose. Though I couldn’t understand the language, I had the impression that no serious subjects were touched upon – no common remembrances, or plan making, or heaven forbid, politics.

My opinion of Hawaiian music has changed somewhat – not that I would buy any CD’s of it to take home, but sitting outside on a terrace having a lovely dinner, watching the light catch the breaking waves, it sounds lovely in the background, especially with a singer like the one featured in the group at The Surfrider, a pure, high soprano, melting one note into the next as sweetly as you could possibly sing.

As we left the hotel a Japanese bride and groom arrived in a stretch limousine. She was petite, with creamy white skin and a pretty face. She looked like exploding cotton candy. The groom stood by in his silver tails looking concerned and awestruck, afraid to interfere, as two women bustled around the poof of a bride, gathering up great billows of fluff in their arms.

We’re in for a nine hour plane ride, but they always turn out to be not quite as bad as one thinks. It’s time to get home and get on with reality. It intrigues me to see how, with masses of people sometimes crushed together, as in an airport, or simply coexisting, as in a hotel, they get along. Driving along the roads in the north of Kaua’i, with their one-lane bridges, calls for a high degree of cooperation, yet drivers instinctively fall into the protocols, even if they have never been here before. At the airport there is tolerance for the other guy. The surfers are working in with each other, as they crowd behind the waves. The animal instincts which preserve us are calculating and projecting beneath our consciousness, making it possible for great numbers of people to slide frictionless past each other to their destinations, without spoken rules, and without a common language. Occasionally there is an asshole, but it seems to me that everyone else forms a block of solidarity when that happens, oddly making the bonds among those willing to cooperate even stronger. Traveling is a pain in the neck, but has gone as smoothly as one could ever expect for us.

Thoughts are turning to home. What do I have to do tomorrow? There is a six-hour time difference, so I will be a little peculiar for a while.

Hawaii Journal: 2007 part 5

I went swimming this morning, about five minutes by car from our B&B. Terry walked in the water for a while, then retreated to a spot under a wide-spreading tree to read. We passed several beaches which were either down a steep wooded hillside, or had warning signs about tides and waves and currents, until we reached a protected, accessible beach. The warning signs are mainly for other seasons. In May the sea around Hawaii is, we are told, as benign as it ever is. I don't even swim in a pool without someone watching. All you need is one little problem in the water. It's not like land.

Since I was wearing goggles, I could study the sea bed. There were deep canyons in the ocean bed. I was swimming over them, but if I had been walking I would have suddenly stepped into crevices which would have swallowed me to my shoulders. Fish too numerous to count hugged the canyons.

In the afternoon we tried again to see the vaunted Hawaii sunset, but it was once again was a bust. A bust for Hawaii, that is. The sky was still infinite, with patches of clouds coming from Japan, and rosy, but not the display that this place is famous for.

We played GO on the seashore at the Hanalei public beach. There was a surfing school, sailboats, a jetty with a gazebo at the end, and picnic tables. Dozens of people were watching the sunset with us. It is cloying to imagine that if one lived here, one could stroll out to such a place virtually every night of the year. I suppose that, like the many Greeks I knew who hadn't ever visited the Acropolis, familiarity breeds contempt.

At the nature preserve at the Wailua Lighthouse there were Frigate Birds, Albatross, Red- and White-Tailed Boobies, Shearwaters. Birdwatching was easy as taking candy from a baby -- there hundreds of birds. They are serious about preservation here.

We always search for fine dining, and were well satisfied at the Bar Acuda. Tapas – goat cheese cheesecake (not sweet), Guinness Stout Chocolate Cake. The delightful maitresse d’ was a former New York lawyer who moved out here in January, and lives with the non-necessarily-logical confidence (let's call it "faith") that her student loans will get paid off. She has just joined an outrigger canoe team and cannot imagine ever leaving.

Hawaii journal: 2007 part 4

The Farmer’s Market in Hanalei specializes in tropical fruits – pineapple, mangos, some unpronounceable things, something that looks like grapefruit, lychee, tomatoes, some cucumbers, salad greens, mustard greens, bok choy, onions, odd looking sweet potatoes, and arts and crafts of various kinds, the most interesting of which were the bowls made of moli (meli?) and kau woods. The bowls are sculpted, very thin, with fascinating grain running through them. The loveliest one, which would be used as a salad bowl, I guess, cost $500.

Speaking off expensive things, a fisherman we talked to for a while says that Hawaii is getting so expensive that many people are retiring to Las Vegas. Interesting how we are supporting our children’s education, and our old people through the questionable proceeds of gambling. I have heard that Las Vegas has its charms, but it would be quite a letdown from Hawaii.

I asked in the fish store if the fish was fresh, and got an ambivalent answer about when they were cutting the fish. The man who had just delivered his catch engaged us in a long conversation. He fishes near Nihau, the island off the western coast of Kauai which is owned by the Robinson family. There are 250 Hawaiians living more or less as they have always lived on Nihau, supported in part by the Robinson family, and tourists are not allowed. Nobody but the residents and the Robinsons are allowed, in fact. Rumor has it that if courtesy doesn’t do the trick, some very large Hawaiians make their appearance to make sure nobody trespasses.

This fisherman fishes around, not on, the island. He says that ocean fish should be hung for three days before cutting them up. Eating them straight out of the sea results in a rubbery texture. The secret is that the fish must be put on ice the minute they are caught, and then “hung”(how you can hang something on ice I don’t know) for the three days, after which the meat has somehow matured and become more tasty. His favorite fish is sea bass, but very few are caught near Hawaii. They have mostly tuna of various kinds, shark, snappers, and some fish whose names were in Hawaiian and I have no idea what they were. We bought ahpoh and something I should have written down, but is something like musti ghaou. We’re hoping for the best. We can cook at the B&B. The other night we had a nice dinner of leftover restaurant bouillabaisse and grilled vegetables and fruits. It was delicious. Tonight it’s eggplant, cucumbers and tomatoes, a salad, and the mystery fish.

He says the dark meat tuna is good only for sushi. Cooked, it tastes like Chicken of the Sea. I agree. In his opinion albacore tuna isn’t good for anything at all. I might agree with that, too.

The plan now is to drive to Princeville (the 7^th most expensive vacation home community in the country) and watch the rich people while we have a drink on the terrace well known for sunset-watching. No eating there is planned.

I was tired of living in everybody else’s world and took a nap and lazed around this morning. We then watched the end of the Yankees-Mets game and just missed the Preakness, but saw a rerun. It felt good to do something we would ordinarily do at home. This might be a good night for a laze in the hot tub too.

Hawaii journal: 2007 part 3

Last night we walked to Waihina’s little shop, the Hanalei version of the 7/11. The leisure of walking drew us closer into the community along the road. Many of the houses are modernized and interesting architecturally. About a third of them are occupied by families who have been here a long time, with old tools rusting in the front yard, overgrown back yards, falling down front porches. Without changes of season, there are never any deadlines for cleaning things up. As with everything else in Hawaii, much is obscured by the huge fronds and spraying flowers. One old Hawaiian woman wearing a brightly patterned pareo was sitting in the front yard of her house, almost camouflaged in the heavy foliage around her. She was wearing a lei around her neck, and smiled warmly as I greeted her, white teeth in dark skin.

The hostess at the B&B, Kirby, taught me how to tie my pareo, and I wear it around the B&B. Kirby and her friends wear pareos when they go out, but I will not. I would feel fake. Kirby goes to hula class twice a week. The hula unites the women in her class into a very special kind of friendship, which has lasted for years.

We walked over the two-lane bridge on the way to Waihina’s. Efforts to widen the bridges on this part of the island were resisted by the locals, who wanted to limit construction in this part of the island. Since cement trucks and other heavy trucks can’t traverse the one-lane bridges, building is restricted without bothering with zoning.

As we walked over the bridge bullfrogs honked loudly in the water below. There were rings spreading outward in the water where the frogs were moving around. On the road were two paper-thin roadkill bullfrogs. Even after losing a couple of their number to automobiles, there were still enough to make a hell of a racket.

We played GO last night seated at the kitchen bar, with the host, Toby, kibbitzing. He arrived in Hawaii 29 years ago with a bicycle and $450, on his way to China from Wyoming, and never left. He makes his living with the B&B and doing odd jobs. His next job was painting somebody’s truck. He didn’t like his given name, Milton, and so named himself after his dog, Toby. The hostess is named after her uncle, Kirby. Toby thinks the World Trade Center was an inside job. Bush and Silverstein. One can pretty much think whatever one wants at such a remove from Ground Zero. I think the reverberations from Pearl Harbor have passed, and Hawaii, especially Kauai, doesn't feel like any kind of target now.

As we were leaving for Waimea Canyon this morning I said, “Okey dokey,” to Kirby.

“You’re really catching onto the language,” Terry teased. The language is all vowels and lilt.

We drove to the 40 miles to the other side of the island to see Waimea Canyon. Legend has it that Mark Twain dubbed it the “Grand Canyon of the Pacific,” but legend is wrong, because Mark Twain never visited Kauai. Its moniker is not, however, wrong. It was too vast to capture in photographs -- layers of geological eternity, with the Hawaiian touch of green.

Around the canyon were masses of white egrets. About 30 of them were spread over a soccer field, reminding me of the plague of geese in N.J. They looked like so many white flags on a golf course.

At the top of the canyon someone was asking if anyone had lost a dog. During a short hike down one of the side trails we found a transparent corn chips bag with a note inside it lying on a bright green towel. The note asked anyone who found a dog to call the number on the note. We asked around at the top, then drove down to the lodge, where the woman at the counter knew the couple with the dog (everyone knows everyone around here), and said it would be either at the lost dog pound halfway down the mountain, or the people who found the dog would take it home with them and call the people who had lost it. The whole of Kauai is like a small town.

Passion fruit, called “lolikoi,” is a tasteless experience in New Jersey, but in Hawaii it is fresh, and ubiquitous. The salad dressing at lunch at the Moke’e Park Lodge was Honey Mustard, with lolikoi wasabe. We had a Passion Fruit Chiffon Pie at Gaylord’s, the top end restaurant on the island, a former plantation house. We had excellent wine, good food, and delightful service. The dining tables sit under a horseshoe shaped covered patio, with flowers in the grassy middle, craggy mountains in the distance. Beauty is simply taken for granted everywhere you go here, though much of it reminds me of elsewhere, from Tuscany to Greece to New England. The difference in Hawaii is that you don’t have to drive to see the beauty, it surrounds you almost everywhere.

The religious wars started by American missionaries so long ago continue on Hawaii, as evidenced by the variety and persistent presence of churches of all sorts – far more churches than would fit the population. I counted the churches on the way back from Waimea Canyon today, driving the 40 miles back to the B&B. Here is a list, incomplete, of course, because I wasn’t paying attention everywhere:

Seventh Day Adventist (2) Kaliki Adventist Park and School Baptist

Latter Day Saints First Hawaiian Church

Holy Cross Catholic Kapa’a Missionary Church

Methodist All Saints Episcopal

Zen Temple Kapa’a First Hawaiian Church

United Church of Christ Church of the Pacific (United Church

Hanapepe Mission Church of Christ)

Kalaheo Missionary Church Mormon Center

Kalako Bible Church

The landmarks in Hawaii are mileposts and elementary schools. The schools are on the map as a church might be in a New England town. Hawaiian royalty left the proceeds from selling most of Waikiki and Honolulu’s land to a foundation for the education of Hawaiian children. There has been disgraceful fraud involving those funds, but they are getting it under control, and the money will once again be used to educate Hawaiian children, not to buy golf courses outside of Washington DC where the members of the foundation’s board can entertain Washington policymakers for their own purposes.

We stopped at the Kauai Coffee Company to poke around. They are the largest producer of coffee in the U.S., with 3,100 acres. (No sooner do the acres and acres of coffee plants end than the acres and acres of sugar cane begin.) Terry noted that all they needed now was a dairy farm and they’d have coffee with milk and sugar. There was, in fact, a dairy farm a little farther on. Or maybe they were beef cattle.

The Kona coffee came in different shapes and sizes, and was expensive. They had a tasting room with tiny cups for sipping each variety of coffee. I didn’t find it that much better, if better all, than some kinds of coffee I get at home. The peaberry was $16 a pound, and the decaf $19 a pound. It wasn’t worth the extra money to us.

Back at the B&B after an adventurous and tiring day, we played some GO (split the games, with me playing at a handicap) and thudded into our round yellow bed in the Pineapple Room worn out and in need of some rejuvenating sleep before another day on Kauai.

Hawaii journal: 2007 part 2

In a blog called Don’t Tell Me No, there is very little to say about Hawaii, which generally says “yes.” It is a non-confrontational place.

At Waimea Beach, for example, I had a chat with an “American Adventurer” who hauls his home, a converted VW beatle painted with red, white and blue stripes, around behind his motorcycle. He comes from Alaska and has been to all 50 states but found Hawaii the most hospitable. He says nobody bothers him here. His choice was aided by the weather I am sure, which allows him to sleep in his VW trailer without freezing to death. He lives on donations and odd jobs. I was wearing only my bathing suit so was carrying no money, and I felt badly taking pictures of him and his gear without making a donation, but he was happy to tell tales. He was married once, but the experiences he had as a child in a broken family hindered his embracing commitment, and the marriage ended. His former wife is now a lawyer, and he took off on his motorcycle. There are free spirits, or maybe lost souls, like this peppered around Hawaii. They seem to cause less trouble here than they would in, say, New York City, though I don’t know Hawaii well enough to say.

The birds, plants, and trees provide a textured background to every move in Hawaii. One small soft grey dove sat placidly as if on an egg in the middle of the road at the Waimea Audubon Center yesterday. We had to stop the car for it, the way drivers have to stop for a herd of goats in Spain, or a crossing deer in Pennsylvania.

I love the cardinals in my New Jersey back yard, but the cardinals here were more flamboyantly red. Like the American Adventurer, this bird is not afraid of making a display. We also saw peacocks, which are not native to Hawaii, but were walking around as if they owned the place. A flock of tiny birds barely bigger than hummingbirds flocked together, pecking seeds out of the ground. I thought at first they were leaves, but they swarmed upward and flitted to another seed mine. Studying the Audubon materials didn’t completely satisfy my desire to name these tiny creatures, but they looked like the plover in a photograph which was twice the size of the bird itself.

The Waimea Valley was a wonder. We saw our first Banyan Tree, and enormous, arching, tentacled, reaching trees of several sorts. People swam in the pool beneath a waterfall. The snack bar had great smoothies. There was peace and hushing all over. The Hawaiians lived there until floods and drought drove them out in 1895 and they never came back. Don’t know why. Can’t imagine why not. There were replicas of their huts, the huts being optional, used only in bad weather.

The whole windward side from Waikiki to Waimea, is lined with white beaches, most of them deserted. With so many beaches, it would take an invasion of many more tourists to fill them all. Further into our Hawaiian trip, we came to be more wary of the seas around the islands, more hesitant to simply jump in. The waters are treacherous, sometimes dangerous. These islands are isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by sea life, currents and winds which belong in the open sea. In the way that opposites are often contained in the same object, the stunning waters bear danger. The beautiful sea is a Circe.

Since Sunset Beach, the Banzai Pipeline, and Waimea are the world centers of surfing, there were a lot more people on those beaches, though the people were spread widely apart. Waimea River flows through the Waimea Valley and opens onto Waimea Bay, a pocket of beauty which was once reserved for royalty. Only royalty could surf there. The surf yesterday was as tame as the Jersey shore, but everywhere are posters and instructions about what to do when the surf is 30 feet high. One poster told of an unsuspecting tourist who sauntered out onto the rocks, only to run for his life when a 30 foot wave bore down on him, and then a second, and then a third, and a fourth. The waves come in sets of three or four.

I swam laps of the beach at Puukua. I felt in the water the way I sometimes felt on the land in Africa. I didn’t know what life was swimming near me, could not read the tides and waters well, and would have needed several more swims to get comfortable.

Hawaiian names sound the same to me. English flows from consonant to consonant, with vowels in between. In the Hawaiian language words flow from vowel to vowel. Kakaako, Kaimuki, Kaaawa, Kahala, Kailua, Kalihi, Kaneohe, Makakilo, Mililani, Nuuano, Wahiawa, Waianae, Waipahu, Waimanalo. They look and sound the same, though I am getting used to them and am more capable than before of remembering which street to take, Kalakaua, Kahala, or Kalanianaole.

The hostess at the B&B had given the room we originally booked to another couple. The husband of the other couple had health problems, which we heard all about at breakfast; past knee problems were all solved with a knee knee replacement (which he actually didn’t take that long to recover from, which surprised him). Now he suffers diabetic peripheral neuropathy, which bothers his feet some of the time – not all of the time, mind you – when he goes up steps. He asked his daughter for a garage door opener so that when he visits her, he can go up the stairs from the garage rather than the entry stairs. The stairs going up to the room we had originally wanted were difficult. They gave him pain in his this and pain in his that, and he is so grateful that we were willing to change rooms. Whew.

In the new room we are sleeping on an enormous bed, which was at one time the bed or Princess Ruth, a 400 pound titan of Hawaiian aristocracy. I lost Terry in it a couple of times during the night.

Breakfast was fresh fruit (half a papaya, mango, pineapple, strawberries, bananas), hard boiled egg, delicious toast with some exotic marmalade, and asparagus wrapped in cheese and ham. It was served by Sumiko, a humorous Japanese elderly lady, whose precise and tidy hand is everywhere in evidence in the house. The friendly, American-type owner is a pack rat whose overwhelmed but tasteful hand is also in evidence everywhere.

After breakfast the sun was shining, the breeze was breezing, and wandered through Waikiki.