Dear reader,
It feels like literal years have passed since I last wrote?? Maybe the biweekly dose isn’t right. Anyway, hi, I’m writing from Greece where I’m feeling hot and nostalgic. I may take a little summer vacation from this newsletter in the next couple of months, we’ll see. As always, thank you for reading, xoxo.
We took a taxi to the village. It was a silver Mercedes from 2002, like most Greek taxis, with no AC. We drove in midday, and the driver told us about the crashes he’s had and the concussions he’s suffered because he refused to wear a seatbelt until last year. Inside the car smelled like diesel, and it felt like a quiet poisoning as we took the highway back to the town my father is from.
The highways in Greece are lined with pink and white and sand-coloured stone. You’ll see bougainvillea, sparse purple blooms, and spidery white wildflowers with faces like tilted plates. Everywhere there is oleander, which blooms pink and white along the roads from May to September. Every part of the plant is poisonous, and eating a single leaf can kill a child. Even handling the plant with bare hands can cause trouble. Oleander grows along the Eastern Mediterranean coasts, across the Arabian Peninsula, and into South Asia. It’s a common method for self-harm in Sri Lanka, where 10% of cases result in death. The toxin, oleandrin, belongs to the class of compounds called cardiac glycosides; it causes nausea, vomiting, and a dangerous slowing and destabilizing of the heartbeat. As we drove to our town I remembered the stories of teenagers from where I’m from who’d eat jimson weed from the side of the road to get high. The purple trumpeted flowers along the highway brought them close to dying too. It’s strange that one of the treatments for oleander poisoning is atropine, which is the same compound that makes jimson weed so deadly. So many countries line their highways with fatal plants. The highways lush with oleander are like a painting; it would take away so much not to see them on the drive. And so these places keep them, they plant them on purpose, to beautify the roads.
As we drove I watched other people in their cars, people with noses like mine, and other noses that looked more ancient, where the bridge is continuous with the forehead. I listened to Greek radio, I took bad pictures of mountains and shrubs and olive trees. The driver and my father discussed the price of olive oil, which is higher now, and which is good for the region. Both men come from the towns around Kalamata, where they grow the most famous olives in the world. The landscape changes as you cross the country from Athens in the east to the western edge of Peloponnesus on the Ionian Sea. The trees are fuller and more dense, and the mountains are higher. There’s drama in the shift to so much green, which happens somewhere after Corinth or Nemea, where Hercules’s lion was from.
In a way we’re back in greenness, back to the very first chapter. I think all of life is returning to something, I don’t think there’s such thing as not going back. We’re always going up and down the spiral, looking for the same views, slightly altered, over and over. From the back of the taxi I listened to the lilt of Greek conversation, the plucked bouzoukia on the radio. I almost fell asleep, like I used to in the back of my father’s car when I was small. I spent three hours like that, thinking quietly and imagining.
We arrived in my father’s town, which is on the Ionian Sea, with a population of five thousand. It’s also fifteen minutes’ drive from the village where he grew up, which is inland, in the mountains. In the mornings, the central square was filled with men and women in their seventies and eighties. We’d sit with them, and they’d tell us about the years before I was born. They were born here, in this town or in the villages around it. Years ago they left this place to live in bigger cities, sometimes other countries, and then all of them returned. In the square they reunited with the boys and girls they knew in school. I listened to the story of a 22-day boat trip to Australia in 1963: there were ten young people on the boat, and five girls named Maria. The man I spoke to had married one of the Marias, stayed in Australia, and had two children before moving back to the town alone.
In this town, during the day, the people outside were either very young or very old. Old and young men on scooters honked at me. It seemed nearly automatic, in the sense that they’d barely look at me before declaring that they’d hit it. On the beach there were Greeks and Germans and Americans. The Greeks stripped their children naked to change them; the Germans remained silent and perfectly bronzed; the Americans found other Americans and invited them to parties on the beach.
After years of coming here, I’ve finally driven a car in Greece. It’s something people say is terrible, and in the end it was okay. Everything was cypress and olive and oleander. It was so beautiful I didn’t mind the other drivers speeding to pass me along the sharp mountain turns, a brief terror each time. There were yellow flowers that are supposed to only bloom in spring, but the country got more rain than usual last winter, so the greenness was bigger than it’s been in years.
On the weekend we went to the village inland. On Sundays there is the bazar, or “pazari”, which draws people from all over the region. The pazari has happened since 1900, and my uncle told me this was written into the local laws by a king — even now they can never change the date. When we went it was bursting with produce, clothes, housewares, and ceramics. I remembered it from childhood, where my grandmother would buy white ducks for us to play with, and then to eat. You’d see people holding plastic bags stretched with fruit, where the bag was like a single layer of skin peeled off in the sun. I couldn’t believe how many nectarines, how many apricots, how many lemons were packed into these bags, like soft membranes filled with sweet, heavy flesh. Along the streets were papery pink flowers, flowers I’ve never seen anywhere else. I saw two priests buying fruits at the pazari after Sunday mass. I heard an old man at his market stall, clearing his throat to tell us: “GOOD KNIVES.” And across, a young man replying: “GOOD GARLIC”.
There was an abandoned railroad in the town, which we crossed to get to my uncle’s house. There were big, muscular cats shining in the streets. There was illness and death, theft and starvation. When my grandparents died it was the recession, and half the village attended their funerals because it meant there was a meal. A few months ago my analyst told me I rely too much on lyricism to distract myself from pain. It makes me stay too long in places and with people that hurt me, when I could have just left. I’m sure this is true. I wonder how much of me I’ve left in this village and in this town, and in my grandparents’ house where no one lives anymore. The yard I remember is overgrown. The bed where I used to sleep when I was six, where I rolled off and fell onto the hard terrazzo floor in the middle of the night, is not so far from the ground anymore. I wonder when I’ll return.
Love,
E
I hope you don't stop. If anything, i love the greek content and the dispatches from your work content. x