The 25th Meeting-versary, Part III: Sparta & Athens
In front of the Olive Oil Museum of Sparta, which we loved and the children declared hands-down the most boring part of the trip.
From this exalted solitude a new certainty grows. The heroic example of the Ancient People, gone for most of a millennium, draws near to her: “The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an attempt to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element that is life itself—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.”
—Benjamin Taylor on Song of the Lark from Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather
That I am beginning this three weeks after returning from Greece says too much about our New York restaurant-owner reality. A concert, book event, wine dinner later in capacity as host plus the gift of the US Open women’s final, Melissa Etheridge’s tour de force Broadway show, My Window, and a couple of dear friends’ birthday parties illustrates just how much can happen in a New York minute. I am grateful to be coming up for air en route to Florida for Bret’s dad’s birthday, to have pulled out our Greece wardrobe for one last warm weekend before fall lands in earnest. Packing I inhaled the scent of the clothes as if from someone recently departed, a mix of the fragrance and detergent I used when there. That I can still feel Greece and the gift—the privilege—of having gotten to travel with my family abroad amidst our many business challenges is testament to the power of place and the strength of my topophilia—love of place—for this country without which I would not have Bret nor these precious kids that chance allowed us to make.
Eros, filia, agape. These three Greek words for love are inscribed inside Bret’s and my wedding rings. Going in reverse, agape means unconditional “forever” love, critical to the lifelong project of marriage. Filia or friendship—liking each other—is also vital, and eros, well, you don’t need me to tell you about that one. Let’s just say Greece is good for all three. But these words don’t cover so many other loves: sibling love, language love, travel love. So many forms of love were on full display during our priceless two weeks to the hour on the ground in Greece, a time during which we worked too much and read too little, but time we got.
Now, for those just joining our little love story, after three nights in Hydra and six in Messinia, we embarked on the last chapter beginning in Sparta. Two hours from Costa Navarino, we planned lunch midway in Kalamata, excited to get souvenirs from the source. Unfortunately the town is, well, the pits. Good to know as it’s the main airport in those parts and could be useful in the future, but we’ll not plan to stay over. We bolted down lunch on the relatively pleasant port then raced to Sparta, ever conscious when traveling that until one lays eyes on the next spot, any number of surprises could await. On arrival—an increasingly dubious journey as we climbed higher and further from the visible town—we pulled into The Melies Hotel and, as in Hydra, it didn’t take long to nix our next stop. The site of Mt. Taygetus, the highest point in Greece, and our hotel against it was akin to my first view of Santa Fe, utterly striking in its contrast to the littoral and every bit as beautiful.
There was no way we were leaving after one day, initially intended for a mission to Mystras fortress town, the last center of Byzantine culture in the 14th and 15th centuries and the area’s greatest attraction. A return to coastal catle Monemvasia, where Bret and I had spent a day with our theatre group in 1998, would have to wait. We needed to stay put, to soak up the hospitality of what we would learn was another family business, to let the kids swim their fool heads off in yet another pool, to appreciate the beautiful design of our roomiest home yet, and to just BE.
As it turned out, another gift from the gods in the form of friendship was made. I light up inside every time I think about Caitlin and Michael Doemner, a magical couple of Californians who are traveling the world (indefinitely) with their three kiddos, much like my best friend Sara Banks traveled for two years with her four. They were visiting Sparta from Athens for one night before heading west where we’d just been, and together we were the only residents of the hotel (another example of how Greece drops the mic late August). After chatting briefly by day and more lengthily at night, we made plans to visit Mystras and the Olive Oil Museum together the next day.
Mystras simply overdelivered, and over the span of a few scalding hours, we got to know each other while getting to know cosmopolitan Byzantium, with its stunning frescoes and savvy protective design. The kids got lost and found. We all got overheated and went to lunch before the museum, a love letter to the fruit that does it all, and then the olive souvenir store with its very tense shopkeeper who hilariously hated our lovely children (who were admittedly scarfing down samples). One day felt like ten, and such was our connection that we made plans to also see them again back in Athens or “in the City,” much like we would refer to New York back home.
The next two days were a torrent, surfacing all the millipedes of Sparta, which thrilled us with disgust. Our hotel in Athens couldn’t take us early, so we stayed one more day than desired, but one’s hands were tied in such weather, so we stayed happily ensconced in our now-private villa (apart from the millipedes) and had nothing to do but brave Sparta town the next day. Ah, Sparta. To be burdened with such a name and so very past one’s prime. Yet there was pride and energy there: it only took an above-par taverna lunch and a passionate over-educated pharmacist, as we stocked up on toiletries, to give us a positive glimpse of striving daily life in Sparta.
Still raining on departure day, we had to make a break for it. The heavens parted just long enough for us to see Mycenae, the mind-bogglingly ancient town (think 1600 to about 1100 BC!) that Bret’s and my group had gone in 1998. It was a quick brush with our past to say we did it (having forgone Monemvasia) and to show our children Lion Gate, the largest surviving sculpture in the prehistoric Aegean, along with the apocryphal Tomb of Clytemnestra. It was fun quickly giving them the quick bloody history en route, how Cly and her new beau Aegisthus promptly killed Agamemnon and his Trojan slave-mistress Cassandra in the tub on their return from Troy. She waited ten years to pay him back for sacrificing their 12-year-old daughter Iphigenia in the name of wind and war. Sounds pretty fair to me—you don’t mess with mommies.
Athens was intended to be a glorious spate of philanthropy in its literal sense, “love of people.” We’d planned three meetings in two days in a way that made me feel incredibly local and cool, but the floods precluded reunioning with our friends from Hydra, who we’ll get to see in New York in May, so we were able to swallow that disappointment. The rain limited my dream of doing a good Athens run or much of anything, but it also limited us in positive ways. We got to fall in love with the world’s best coffee shop/bar/bookstore next door—I think we visited it about five times in two days—and we returned to the far-finer sister hotel (the Herodion) of our residence where Cordelia had spilled an expensive fresh-squeezed juice, not once but twice, five years earlier. Best of all, we got to see the Doemner family again for a lunch with an Acropolis view and the best laugh of our trip as Caitlin and I traded stories of our respective stints as waitresses in youth, mine a notable failure. Heaven preserve servers!
I have saved mention of our most special experience in Athens for last. Thanks to my friendship with poet and classicist Rachel Hadas, I’d been connected with one of our greatest living poets and translators, Alicia Stallings. We’d arranged to meet at Alicia’s home and then walk to dinner together with her and her husband, journalist John Psaropoulos. She is a poet whose work I’ve worshipped since first being introduced to it by Rachel in 2007. The rain paused just long enough to accommodate our plans, and I all but skipped from our hotel to her neighborhood, about which she writes vividly here. Thrilled to be in Athens, to be dry and able to walk, to have a local to meet and to have this local be a great poet. My cup ranneth over. I will close this expression with my favorite of Alicia’s poems, which I have committed to memory. I hope to recite it for you one day. Topophila, love of place. Four visits, infinite memories. Greece is the origin of my name, my education, my family. It is my heart’s home.
On Mornings I Walk Past the First Cemetery of Athens
Like a widow, every day the grey Dawn comes
To the Proto Nekrotapheío, and sweeps the crumbs
Of Night from tombstones, and the marble busts.
The stone cutter in his workshop contemplates,
Chisel in hand, the blank face of clean slates.
The waitress at the café mops and dusts.
A priest sits at his newspaper and tarries
Over the headlines and obituaries.
Soon, the mourners gather there to drain
The thick black liquid to the bitter grain.
At the Office of Endings, a hunched man taps his thumbs.
Four diggers play a hand of cards to kill
A little time; two withered florists fill
The old foam wreaths with new chrysanthemums.
Outside the Acropolis museum