Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Home Again

The trip to Greece was wonderful in every way, far more than I imagined when I thought it up.  Despite the constant evocation in the press of a country on the skids, dirty, desperate and graffiti-encrusted, I found the downtown parts of Athens where we walked to museums and archeological sites, full of storefronts filled with goods, people well dressed and going about with animation.  I was most of all surprised at the change of attitude in those who must serve the foreign tourist, what we would call the hospitality industry, I guess. Unlike their exceedingly dour bretheren of yesteryear, they were almost uniformly young, attractive, outgoing and friendly, spoke excellent English, and exceedingly helpful.  Two young males I remember  best (naturally!).  One, a waiter on the rooftop restaurant at the Benake Museum, a very young fellow with serious mein who was just in his offbeat way cute enough to win our hearts, gave us serious advice on the Greek wines on offer, announcing that he was in his own way an "oenologist"-his word-. compelling enough that the young glamorous member of our party had to be restrained when she wanted to give him her address in the States.  The other, in a small town in the Peloponnesos, was the evening attendant at a very interesting museum of modern scale models of Archimedes' various inventions who in a sort of unblinking Asberger manner, lectured intelligently on the items, in a very good English which he claimed to have learned on his own because "the schools are stupid," all the while brushing the unkempt hair out of his unbelievably beautiful eyes like any techie in Sunnyvale.  The monuments we saw filled my heart as I wanted them to with a powerful nostalgia for glorious trips and stays in Greece from yesteryear; I even staggered up to the heights of the ruins at Mycenae on the arm of my cousin, amusingly enough inviting applause from other tourists seeing so old and feeble a specimen shambling along!  I invited a delightful young couple, archeologists, to a dinner on a roof looking up at the Parthenon shining bright in the night light, and we talked of times we had known together and the archeological world of which they were part and my own desire to see Greece on this trip one last time before I died,  and the young man congratulated me on speaking frankly of my anticipation of death, saying that his father dead that past spring had not managed ever to bring the subject up, nor his mother who sat daily with her rosary beads.  I don't think you can study ancient Greek literature for very long before realizing that death is the great subject the Greeks found to write about, implicitly cancelling out life's meaning and thus endowing those who make this discovery with a burning determination to live every moment to the fullest, to know that every choice and gesture counts here and now, since they have no real future.

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