Greece

On Sunday I am flying to Greece for ten days.  I imagine that this will be the last visit of my lifetime, and I wanted to see the monuments and the museums for one last time.  It was August 1962 when I first went, and I will never forget the blue of the sky nor the sharp, clear light that made the edges of buildings so startling.  The architecture of antiquity is more about light than one might imagine.  From that time I have always loved the food in Greece, I used to enjoy the simple service of restaurants, everything so unpretentious.  I loved that the waiters were always asking if you liked the water that they served out in the villages, where every town's water had it own taste.  I loved the waiters in the small eating places counting up the numbers of pieces of bread the customer had taken from the common basket when toting up the bill. I loved that when you called for the bill and the waiter said "immediately," it was a kind of signal to relax since it would never ever be coming soon.  And I truly believed that was because the Greek restauranteur somehow thought he was genuinely the host and hated to impose a bill.  I remember once when on a trip to Delphi I waited later and later for the bill, finally got fed up and left, and the next day as I was walking through the street the waiter came out of the restaurant with all geniality to hand me last night's bill!  I loved evenings from the terrace where I stayed in Athens when I lived there looking at the extraordinary light sunset purples  soaking into Mt. Hymettus.  I hated the cars in Athens, the grotesque custom of parking on the sidewalks when other space was not available, hated the smog and thank god that I lived above it.  I enjoyed the random company of a great number of young men, just chatting them up on the street, to which they responded, at times quite well aware of my preternatural fondness for young male flesh.  The taxi drivers I learned to avoid, since as a group they were the most devious in setting their charges.  Shop keepers were stern, the bread was always weighed, a kilo was a kilo and that's what you got, even if it meant cutting a piece of another loaf and shoving into the bag, the lamb roast had extra bones added to make up the weight whether you liked it or not.  Service with a smile was an unknown.  There was a stern honesty there just as the classical lines of the architecture and the light.  Times have been very hard for the Athenians in recent years I have heard dire tales of the poverty's degradation of the city ("it looks just like the south Bronx did twenty years ago now"), and my husband is not going with me because he cannot face seeing that change.  Well, I am going for the Parthenon in sunlight, the Parthenon in sunset, the agora, the theater of Dionysos, oh, I can go on and on.  I will tell you all when I come back and start up again sometime after October 26.