Visiting Tennessee

I recently flew to Chattanooga, stopping in Atlanta to change planes and wander about Concourse B for forty minutes. The first thing you notice when you change planes in Atlanta--aside from the constant stream of families, as there are no families flying out of LaGuardia on a Monday morning--is the number of men and women in military uniform. It's easy to forget that we are still at war. Either because of this, or in spite of this, I ate ice cream for lunch.

My father picked me up from the airport and we drove directly to the Waffle House, where I ate cheese-n-eggs, with hash browns scattered well and raisin toast. The raisin toast at Waffle House always comes with apple butter, and I'm glad to know that some things never change.

As we ate, I thought about the time my dad was in NYC for some kind of work, and I met him for dinner after my drawing class at SVA. This was maybe eleven years ago. We sat at the Lyric Diner on Third Avenue and I ate two grilled ham and cheese sandwiches. He didn't eat anything, for whatever reason. I felt at the time that I was starting to be a different person. At the Waffle House two weeks ago, I felt that I had returned to the person I was before that changing--the kind of tossed-at-sea uncertainty that the 20s can bring. So, maybe it's not a changing, just a day-trip. My dad paid the check and I felt full of greasy food and I was glad to see that some things never change.

We ate through the week, my mom's cooking, my own cooking, the cooking at a downtown restaurant, where my mother was introduced to the St. Germain cocktail, and later tried to order it at a comedy club bar where they didn't know what that was.

We drove out to see my friend Mary Beth's new house, which she basically built herself, on about 7 acres of land she purchased from her alpaca/llama-farming neighbors/employers. Her directions included the line "Turn left at the antique mall and go about 10 miles." It seemed to take forever to get there. But her house is a beautiful monument to self-sufficiency and a healthy reminder that sometimes the old way of doing things is the best way.

Her pantry was filled with canned goods--tomatoes, jams, pickles, corn--which sparked in me the desire to can everything this summer. And put up a big shelf of jars in the kitchen. Mostly that desire has faded. I tried to buy a book about how to do it well at the Strand, but they didn't have what I wanted. Friends with extra books about canning, and some with canning equipment, have promised to give them to me: "Really, you can have them." Their lack of faith doesn't bode well for my own future in canning. Look for an update long about August.

My friend June met me at The Castello Plan for dinner a few days after I got back. There were pea shoots on the special, and she and I shot looks at each other when the waiter mentioned this. It's still too cold for pea shoots, we said. When will spring come? Morels and ramps and green garlic and asparagus and tristar strawberries. I need all of you.

Yield at Your Local Library

You can find Yield at the following local libraries. God bless them, every one.

-Birmingham-Jefferson Public Library, AL

-Mill Valley Public Library, CA
-Santa Monica Public Library, CA
-Torrance Public Library, CA

-Denver Public Library, CO
-Douglas County Library, CO
-Pikes Peak Library District, CO

-Ferguson Library, CT
-New Haven Free Public Library, CT
-Pequot Library, CT

-Alachua County Library District, FL
-Orange County Library System, FL
-Sarasota County Library System, FL

-Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System, GA

-Ames Public Library, IA
-West Des Moines Public Library, IA

-Bloomington Public Library, IL
-Champaign Public Library and Information Center, IL
-Highland Park Public Library, IL
-Shaumburg Township District Library, IL

-Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library, IN
-Monroe County Public Library, IN
-St. Joseph County Public Library, IN
-Tippecanoe County Public Library, IN

-Johnson County Library, KS
-Wichita Public Library, KS

-Lexingon Public Library, KY
-Louisville Free Public Library, KY

-Merrimack Valley Library Consortium, MA

-Anne Arundel County Public Library, MD
-Caroline County Public Library, MD
-Cecil County Public Library, MD
-Prince George's County Memorial Library System, MD

-The Library Network, MI
-Superiorland Library Coop, MI

-Ramsey County Public Library, MN

-Mid-Continent Public Library, MO

-Cumberland County Public Library, NC
-Durham County Library, NC
-Greensboro Public Library, NC

-Bismark Veteran's Memorial Public Library, ND
-Fargo Public Library, ND

-Ocean County Library, NJ

-Brooklyn Public Library, NY
-Finger Lakes Library System, NY
-Onondaga County Public Library, NY
-Suffolk Cooperative Library System, NY
-Westchester Library System, NY

-Cleveland Public Library, OH
-Columbus Metropolitan Library, OH
-Cuyahoga County Public Library, OH
-Dayton Metropolitan Library, OH
-Marion Public Library, OH
-Public Library of Cincinnati / Hamilton County, OH
-Worthington Public Library, OH

-Tulsa City-County Library, OK

-Washington County Cooperative Library, OR

-Reading Public Library, PA

-Ocean State Libraries, RI

-Salt Lake City Public Library, UT

-Norfolk Public Library, VA
-Virginia Beach Public Library System, VA
-Williamsburg Library, VA

-King County Library System, WA
-Seattle Public Library, WA

-Beloit Public Library, WI
-Northeast Wisconsin Public Library, WI
-Lakeshores Library System, WI
-South Center Library System, WI
-Milwaukee County Federated Library System, WI

-Eastern Panhandle Library Network, WV

Oh, and in the U.K.: The British Library.

From Eileen Myles

Most likely, we travel to exist in an analogue to our life's dilemmas. It's like a spaceship. The work for the traveler is making the effort to understand that the place you are moving through is real and the solution to your increasingly absent problems is forgetting. To see them in a burst as you are vanishing into the world. Travel is not transcendence. It's immancence. It's trying to be here.

--From the essay, "Iceland" by Eileen Myles

Hitched

Cory & Sean got married in Asbury Park over the weekend, an occasion so momentous that even the New York Times marked it. It seemed that we, the guests of all sorts, filled up the town, with people you know and love appearing everywhere you look--the boardwalk, the hotel lobby, the restaurants, the big bed & breakfast where the boys stayed with their family.

I had forgotten how people's families look. Do you know what I mean? Gay people have always separated themselves from their biological families--in various profound and not-so-profound ways--and at occasions like this, weddings, funerals, graduations, the whole myriad of people who inhabit the electron shells of the central atoms are pulled from all corners of the country to celebrate a moment. Frankly, I would die--having to juggle all of that. But maybe, perhaps, if you're getting married, you've gotten past all that stuff that I haven't. Just a thought.

We all gathered on the boardwalk, in our fancy shoes and ties, some of the gals in fancy dresses, Mike Z's dog bounding around our feet--and then trekked down to the beach, where the ceremony was held, just south of the Paramount Theater. There were some people there still on their towels, dusting themselves off, looking over at our wedding party, looking off into the distance. As Cory & Sean were walking down the aisle--which was just an area that the crowd created by standing on two sides of the same sand--I could see a few tears, the kind that burst out of you when you feel overwhelmed.

In that moment--the small choir of friends singing, the indifferent fishermen out on the wharf behind, the ocean pouring itself against the beach in quiet waves--I was thinking about the concentration of energy, what it feels like when everyone is focused on you, actually beaming all their love and hope and memories and happiness into you. I'm not sure what marriage is--if it has something to do with this kind of concentration, or if something as focused, as bright and hot like that, would fizzle it out. I wonder if marriage is something slower, a little bit of faith and a lot of work. Or the other way around.

Whatever it is, nobody deserves all the good promises marriage holds more than these two. Actually, thousands of people deserve those good promises equally as much as they do, if you hear what I'm saying.

Sean & Cory, I adore you. Congratulations. I hope I can keep this ivy alive.

Letter from Greece, Part 10 of 10

Day Eight: Departure

We take the bus to the airport—only three Euros, compared to what would have been a fifty Euro taxi ride. There are empty rows here and there on the plane, and everyone spreads out. The flight passes pleasantly: more Woody Allen, more delicious wine “from the Olympic Airlines cellars,” whatever that means.

A few days later, I’m talking to someone who asks where I’ve been. “I was in Greece,” I tell her. “With my boyfriend.”

“That’s amazing,” she says, “What role did you play?”

For a moment, I am wondering why this person, who I don’t know that well, wants to know the specifics of my sexual proclivities. “Oh, no,” I realize, “Greece, the country. Not Grease, the musical.”

“Sorry,” she says, turning red. “But wouldn’t that have been something?”

Letter from Greece, Part 9 of 10

Day Seven: Santorini/Athens
The morning is insanity. The airport in Santorini is small and crowded, as you would expect, with lines of passengers spilling out onto the sidewalk. Inside there are a dozen Chinese women buying refrigerated sandwiches from the small kiosk, and on the roof are tables where everyone is smoking. Although we all have assigned seats on the flight back to Athens, people crowd against the doors to the tarmac, then cram onto a lumbering bus, which rides us out to the plane itself. People rush, again, to board.

After about thirty minutes, we’ve landed in Athens, dumped into a choked mess of traffic and angry drivers—it takes almost two hours to get to our hotel. Kip and I are rattled by the speed of Athens, after having been downgraded to the lull of Santorini. We throw down our bags and walk quickly to the Archaeological Museum, only a few blocks away, and after discovering that they are open later than we previously thought, we step into a coffee bar across the street to eat bad sandwiches next to two loud smokers.

Athens needs a better museum. The artifacts here are some of the oldest, most extraordinary objects in the history of known history, they are the tiny beginnings of what we know about culture and art and democracy—at least in the West. But the building is old and badly ventilated, and at the most basic, very unpretty to look at. I think they should build a room for the Elgin Marbles, which were stolen off the Parthenon and now reside in the British Museum in London. (Here, they are called the “Parthenon Marbles,” naturally.) The Greeks should make themselves ready for their return, I think, and maybe in the new Acropolis Museum, they have.
Kip implores that we choose a contemporary restaurant for dinner, enough of these “taverna” type traditional places with all the same food over and over. I agree. We look to our guidebook for a new restaurant, something younger. Dare we hope for something gay?

Cook Coo Food is buried in a neighborhood that feels like the East Village—with rock show posters for bands called “Gods of Blood,” “Drunk Motherfuckers,” and “DeathWram”—I realize now that the neighborhood we stayed in before was more Upper East Side. The walls of the restaurant are decorated in blown-up photos of sign language letters, a hundred hands and fingers all along the walls. From the ceiling hang chandeliers that look like silver crowns spotted with fake roses—very gay. We order the tomato fritters, which the witty menu has listed as “Santorini’s favorite!!!” They are fantastic, the freshness of the tomato covered up, briefly, by the hot crunch, and then the cool touch of mint. Kip orders a roasted pork thing with feta and potatoes, and I have a vegetable coconut curry. On the walk home, we find a pastry shop with a freezer full of tiny ice cream pops—pale green, as big as your thumb, for only pennies.

That night, I have a dream about someone I went to high school with—Pearl Hwang, of all people. She and I are driving my car around some nameless town, and in the back are all these electrical cords that I know connect to some matching set of vacuum cleaners, somewhere. Then—the way things happen in dreams—they are stolen. Then the police come. And, turns out, Pearl is undercover, and she takes down some details about where I’ve been, even though she was with me in the car the whole time. In the morning, I tell Kip about the dream as he brushes his teeth.

Letter from Greece, Part 8 of 10

Day Six: Santorini

“We have one,” the woman says, when we inquire as to whether the rental car agency has a vehicle with automatic transmission, “and we will bring it to the hotel.” We pack bottles of water, sunscreen, sunglasses, reading materials, and bananas—which have never looked more out of place than they do in the Greek Islands. Minutes later, we’re off, headed down to the southern end of the island, to see the ruins at Akrotiri. They are closed for the year, some kind of archeological work that is too sensitive for roving tourists. So, we sit under an umbrella and stare out at the ocean. I commit a grave sin, and strike up a brief, lively friendship with one of the street dogs—everyone stares. The local bus arrives, and people pour out of it, carrying beach towels, bags, chairs. We watch them walk over the rocks, along the shore, and over the hill in the distance, to the beach.

Red Beach is so-called because of the volcanic mud that makes up the high cliffs. The beach is short, and not crowded, all tourists from around Europe. We stretch out on our towels. I plug my headphones into my ears, and crank up a Kaki King bootleg. A while later, it’s hot, and I get up go dip myself into the salty sea. The water is cold, but soon I’m comfortable, waving back to Kip on the beach. There is some kind of feathery, papery stuff in the water, maybe some kind of seaweed, and later I find my pockets filled with it. We lay there a while longer, baking, sweating, feeling good.

A pack of Australians, fifteen or so, perhaps two or three families, come walking down the beach, headed back to the parking area. Among them, is a shirtless young man, maybe twenty or twenty-one years old, barefoot, the hair on his arms and head bleached by the long hours in the sun. He finds something interesting in the cliffs above me, and standing only about six feet away, pulls his camera out of his pocket to take a picture. He lifts his arms up, stretching the full length of his body upward, the slope of his hipbone slips out of the top of his wet shorts, the patch of hair in his armpits darker, a tuft of fur dipping down from his navel, disappearing into his waistband. For a moment I’m dizzy, lost in the body of this gorgeous, splendid creature.

We drive through the winding roads of the island, never quite getting lost as much as re-thinking the route—you can basically see every in every direction at any time, so the map quickly becomes unnecessary. At Kamari, we eat lunch, peeking into more souvenir shops, watching couples cuddling each other on the beach. Then we drive the full length of the island, along a stretch of slightly treacherous-feeling road, to the northern tip, to the town of Oia. There, we park, take pictures, stroll down the walkways. I decide that my parents should take a vacation here, and pick out the hotel I think I’ll make them choose.

A few weeks prior, my friend Josh told me that we had to eat and stay at the Windmills in Oia. “It was one of the most romantic places I’ve ever been,” he said. He implored me, begged me to go, with a kind of serious desperation, holding onto me when he said it. I felt charged with whatever had happened to him there, whatever deep and meaningful things he encountered, as if my ability to re-create those same encounters was crucial to confirming that Josh’s experience had been real.

We didn’t find them, and I haven’t told him.

Letter from Greece, Part 7 of 10

Day Five: Santorini
After filling ourselves with the hotel’s breakfast, we walk up to the old capital city of Thira, through all the tiny alleyways and staircases. We look through every store, selling every kind of plastic, ceramic and glass crap they were selling back in Athens, plus millions of Euros in very nice jewelry—Gold Street is the main drag. Something about seeing the same trinkets over and over makes you want to buy them; you start to think you’re missing out. For hours we walk, sipping fizzy drinks with labels we can’t read, eating sticky bricks of baklava, and, as Kip says, “other shapes of baklava.”

We amble down the long, donkey shit-covered walkway to the base of the caldera, and the ocean’s edge. Donkeys are a popular, if sort of novel, way to get to the city from the base of the island, which is a very steep climb of about 220 meters—and their dry, stinky droppings are everywhere along the stairway. A Carnival Cruise boat is anchored in the distance, and there is a skirted table where two men are handing out hot towels and tiny cups of water to the fat ladies waiting to get back on the boat. This strikes me as such a fake way of traveling.

The cable car whizzes us back up to Thira, and we continue walking. The view is exactly what we imagined when we had planned this vacation weeks prior. We stop at a small café and order glasses of local wine, which is served, according to the menu, with “an assortment of Greek delicacies.” The delicacies are: two cherry tomatoes cut in half to make four pieces, four olives, and four slices of Persian cucumber—a feast! The wine is fabulous, and we order more, becoming rather drunk, and making confessions about our past—freed by distance, perhaps. The waiter has a question mark tattooed behind his ear, using a small brown mole as the dot.

Finally, we walk back to the hotel to bathe and change clothes. Then we end up somewhere in Thira at the Volcano Restaurant, where the waiter demands that we eat their signature dish “Lamb Volcano,” which is pungent with garlic, onions, and dill, served with some kind of shredded cheese in a clay pot—delicious. Then we eat more tomatoes stuffed with rice, raisins and pine nuts. Then I eat a huge plate of squid. Later, we walk back through town sucking down scoops of chocolate gelato.

Letter from Greece, Part 6 of 10

Day Four: Santorini

The “ferry” is actually a huge cruise-ship style boat, carrying about 1,800 people from Athens to Santorini, making interim stops at Paros, Naxos and Ios. Imagine that you’re in a small airport, and every flight has been cancelled due to weather. Everyone spreads out, taking up every corner, every aisle and walkway. They have planned to be immobile for the eight-hour trip, and so every table on every deck is full—card players, smokers, drinkers, elaborate board games and stacks of worn paperbacks. A few laptops drink from the scarce electrical outlets. Some passengers wander up and down the boat, holding their cords and plugs out in front of them, forlorn and wishful, like beggars.

But we have sprung for a first-class cabin—it is perhaps the best money I have ever spent. About an hour after we board—after coffee in the lounge, and the waiter’s light scoffing at me drinking Coca-Cola at 7am—we figure out how to get into room 702, which has two tiny beds, along with its own shower and toilet.

We lay down and I fall, miraculously, asleep.

Periodically, the ship’s crew makes strange, squawky announcements, which emerge from a tiny speaker on the nightstand. Out the window is ocean as far as you can see, then a dark line, then sky.

We arrive at Santorini’s new port, maybe two hundred of us, everyone looking for a taxi, a rental car, a scooter, some even hire donkeys. After a bit of confusion about which car we should get into, we end up squished against some gay guys from…Germany? The Netherlands?…who I decide must be deaf and on their first date—they are full of hand gestures and awkward pauses. Thankfully, we arrive at our hotel first, the El Greco. They put us in room 314, which looks out over the pool on one side, and over the caldera on the other. We open the windows and the breeze blows through the room. It’s so remarkable, and simple, that I use my little camera to take a movie of the billowing curtain—which I later post on Facebook, to the “like” of nine friends. (Logging in from Greece changes my preferred language to Greek, and I start getting emails that say things like: Stephanie Hughes σχολίασε την κατάσταση σας.) We lie on the bed and talk about food, about whether we should venture to the beach today or tomorrow, whether we should get in the pool before or after we walk into town, whether we should order in. We discuss options like we’ve won the lottery.

Santorini, aside from the views, is famous for a dish called Domatokeftethes, which is a tomato fritter seasoned with mint, and for the local fava beans. What makes the fava beans taste so great is the dry, volcanic soil, which—apparently—concentrates the flavor. The restaurant we choose for dinner doesn’t have the fava on the menu, and the tomato fritters arrive soggy and rather tasteless. The trouble with eating in tourist towns, of course, is that you have no idea whether any particular restaurant has any particular reputation. However, the rest of the meal is lovely, and, as it turns out, the soil makes for deliciously complicated white wine—bright, sunny and dry. The artichoke stew is homey and filling, but the grilled pita brushed with olive oil and dill, on that breezy evening on the rooftop restaurant, looking out over the caldera to the West, is the best thing we put in our mouths.

We eat dessert in bed, watching “Greece’s Got Talent,” which is a clone of the American show of similar name. For the most part, at least according to the contestants on this particular episode, the Greeks do not have talent. The act that gets the most applause is an old man who manages to stand on his head on top of a rickety chair. Then, an older gay man, like pudgy Paul Lynde, sings a traditional Greek song. The judges are a goateed man with no discernable sense of humor, a model/actress/princess (?) who changes outfits during every commercial break, and whose hair is an elaborate spray of stiff, shiny black, and the last, another singer/entertainer type, dressed in a light suit with a huge turquoise pocket square, who looks like a less-butch Elizabeth Ashley.

The first night in Santorini, I spend three hours awake, level 3 out of 10—not sleeping, but without anxiety. For a while, I watch the tiny green blinking light on the fixture in the ceiling. Insomniacs, like me, who just lay there—instead of getting up to do something, thus compounding layers of worry on top of a kind of eerie displacement of time—have the opportunity to be conscious with their unconscious bedmates for long periods, listening to their breathing, their murmurings and ramblings.

Jason was a serious sleeper, shutting the world out entirely, motionless, his body becoming heavy and immovable in the night—quite the opposite of his bright, energetic waking self. We slept in the loft bed of his 29th Street apartment, with books stuffed in between the mattress and the bed frame, as if one needed fifty choices at arms length.

Andrea was a sleep talker. She washed her hands at night, holding them above her in the air, rubbing her elbows, and waving conjured cobwebs away from her shoulders. “Did you find the bodies?” she once asked, to no one in particular. “Thank you, Mr. Peterson,” she said, “Add them to the list.”

Mario slept quietly, soundly. He had trouble getting out of bed in the morning. His alarm clock was the CD player, and every morning, for months, out of the speakers came first the Jill Scott record, then the Dixie Chicks record. I listened to those songs over and over, holding his hand in mine under the pillow, wondering if he had any plans to get up.

Meg never used a pillow, and took up little space in the bed. Not only was she a small person, but her movements were always was focused, contained, and she slept the same way. Resting her hands behind her head, or along her sides, always on her back. Even in sleep she was conserving energy.

Kip twitches. He snores. He has nightmares that he either rarely remembers, or rarely shares with me. His body is always relaxing one more muscle at a time, sinking into sleep. Sometimes I lay there imagining elaborate devices to hold open the throat, thinking that if I just had a curved piece of plastic or something, if only I had a tube of some kind, a way to sleep hanging face down, somehow—your mind does strange things in the small hours. He snores into the pillow corner, into the cats’ faces, into my ear as he holds me.

In the morning, I look up the side effects of insomnia: drowsiness, increase in stress or anxiety, headaches, problems with digestion, physical impairment, mental impairment, heart disease, memory loss, weight gain, depression, reduced self-esteem, premature death.

Letter from Greece, Part 5 of 10

Two Weeks Later: New York City

Convinced that I have missed something about the Parthenon, curious about the uncertainty that nicks at me from somewhere, I watch the episode of NOVA in which they explore the building’s restoration. I’m sure that if I just get it, something about my experience there will retroactively change. In the NOVA episode, the architects, artists, historians and scientists, they’re all talking about the building’s beauty, its perfection, the feats of mind-boggling skill, effort, and organization that it took to build something to majestic, so long ago, on such a remarkable scale. But it’s all cold, removed and distant. I’m sure the scholars who have devoted their entire lives to immersing themselves in the lives of the ancient culture, I’m sure they have some sense of life contained in the stone.

But where is it?

I spoke with a friend before I left. “Athens is a shithole,” he said, “You get up there on top of the Acropolis and there’s all this beautiful marble and its just brown and getting eaten up by the smog and acid rain, and you look out over the city and its just disgusting.”

I hate that the exhaust made by the machines of modern man are destroying the beautiful marble. I hate that history, and memory, and the glut of tourism has revised and rewritten everything to the point of the lowest common denominator. But most of all, I hate that I stood there, on the edge of the Propylaia, trying to feel the life-force, trying to cull the ghosts right out of the stone, holding my hand against the cool surface, and I came up with nothing.

Letter from Greece, Part 4 of 10

Day Two: Athens

By accident, we sleep until two o’clock in the afternoon. I wake up once or twice in the night, my usual amount of insomnia, currently stuck on level five out of ten. I don’t check the clock, for fear that it might be earlier than I can bear. Every time I turn over, fussing with the pillows, I worry that it might be three, four, five in the morning, and I will have to lay there, bored and anxious until a reasonable waking hour. It never occurs to me that it could be noon.

At the same corner coffee shop we buy “Greek salad sandwiches” from the same blonde woman. Is she the owner? The waiter? The fill-in? She seems not to recognize us, and I wonder if perhaps we look like every other set of American tourists that stroll through to buy a cup of coffee, or drink a beer and smoke a cigarette. Something about her seems so shy, and she seems to understand so little, despite all the hand-written signs in English, that even my rudimentary (or just rude?) pointing is met with a stare. But she takes our money, wraps the sandwiches in wax paper, and smiles. “Enjoy,” she says, and then I wonder if I’ve misunderstood the entire interaction. The sandwich is a floury baguette with olives, feta and tomato. It makes a perfect breakfast.

Clearly, the architects and designers involved in building the Parthenon wanted the reveal to be a spectacular event. You hike through the scrubby trees and brush along the pathways up the west side of the Acropolis, emerge from the narrow width of the dramatic Propylaia, to find the Parthenon set back in three-quarter view. Imagine the structure untarnished, elaborately colored, incredibly rich—most importantly, complete. Stories of wars and celebrations were depicted in sculptures along the roofline, some life-size, in stunning detail. For the Greek people, the visit must have been a deeply satisfying, transformative experience.

All around the Parthenon there are huge chunks of marble, as if the entire structure had exploded—at one point it did, under the Ottomans, who were using it as a gunpowder magazine. The area looks like my five year-old nephew’s playroom, building blocks in every configuration of stacked, toppled, and forgotten. There is new marble waiting to be matched and assembled as part of the current restoration efforts, and there is ancient marble—all of it from the famous quarry at Mount Pentelikos—cracked and worn by 2,500 years of wind, rain, pollution, fire, earthquakes, canons, restless infantry, the Christians, the Muslims, the Turks, the Venetians, and the British. Finally, the 20th Century American and Italian tourists wearing high heels are carving divots into the walkways.

On the southern slope of the Acropolis, there is the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, which is still in modern use, seating about 5,000. “Memorable performances,” according to some on-site literature, include the return of Nana Mouskouri after a two-decade absence, and Yanni’s “landmark” 1993 performance. During our visit, the stage is being prepped for a production of Aida, with huge Egyptian obelisks being moved through a deep red proscenium.

Everywhere there are structures, and the remains of structures. There is the Theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus, the Sanctuary of Asclepius, the Odeum of Pericles, the Temple of Athena Nike, the Stoa of Eumene—all bearing the enormous crushing weight of layers and layers of history, revised and repaired, rethought and repurposed. We hear this story over and over again in Greece—the Romans replacing the marble or stealing the marble, the Christians dedicating the Parthenon to the Virgin Mary, the Greeks themselves moving statues and buildings, the frescoes buried underground during the war, more fakes on display. I keep wondering what remains of a culture that has re-imagined itself for more than 2,000 years.

On the northern side of the Acropolis, there is the Erechtheum, with its striking Porch of the Caryatids: six women, draped in fabric, holding up the roof with their heads. Some of the original statues are displayed in—so I’m told—helium-filled glass cases, in the not-yet-open-to-the-public Acropolis Museum; the ones on the actual Acropolis are replicas. Lord Elgin, perhaps the most famous looter of Greek artwork, had one of the original Caryatids removed and later displayed at his sprawling estate. At night, they say you can hear the statues crying out, wailing for their missing sister.

But we don’t hear any crying.

Do the replicas cry out? Or the originals, now drowning in helium? I try to get a sense of how the ancient mythology might interact with daily life today—but no one wants to talk about that. They only want to talk about how polytheism is crazy, about what the ancients did and didn’t do on the most basic behavioral level, nothing about what it meant to them, how it felt to be them. Tourism, or maybe plain old capitalism, has co-opted the culture, dimmed it, and arguably destroyed it. Contemporary Greece seems to say, about the past, only: “Here, buy this plastic toy Parthenon for two Euros.” When I visit the Lincoln Memorial—a structure that owes so much to the Parthenon in look and feel and use—I get a small sense of a living idea at work, a striving. In Athens, I can’t figure out why everything around me feels dead.

For dinner, we end up at Estia, a lively modern café in the heart of the Plaka, the oldest neighborhood in Athens, full of restaurants and souvenir shops. I try to order the local sheep cheese, which, as the menu states, comes with honey and sesame seeds. The waiter promises that we won’t like it, and bullies us into the saganaki: fried cheese, not a horrible choice. We eat more grilled lamb, a delicious mousaka, various dips and garlicky things, and finally end with a warm chunk of walnut pie, and shots of cinnamon schnapps.

Across from our table is the entrance to an open-air movie theater, on the roof of what appears to be an art gallery. There is one 11:15pm showing of the Ron Howard-directed “Angels & Demons,” which, in Greece, has been renamed “Something something something Illuminati.” The movie is horrendously bad, a grotesque insult to the intelligence of the audience. (Or maybe I am mistaking the film’s audience.) At one point, Ewan McGregor flies a helicopter straight up into the night, above the Vatican, so that when the anti-matter explodes it doesn’t kill everyone—no, really. It was a marvelous experience: a rooftop in Athens, the glowing Parthenon set back on the hill, the cooling night air, street cats slinking through the holes in the fence, cold beer.

Back at the hotel, we watch an episode of “America’s Next Top Model,” with sections dubbed into Greek, and CNN, with Anderson Cooper interviewing Ani Difranco about her visit to Myanmar. There are advertisements for cream-filled croissants in various flavors, which are made, it seems, by cartoon bumble bees with giant eyes. There is “Scandal” brand ice cream in square boxes that old ladies eat with wooden spoons. There are 6:00am morning shows with goofy hosts, dressed ready for a nightclub. There are cheap exercise machines sold along side cellulite creams, with manicured hands massaging thick, pasty thighs. Then there is Jessica Alba selling some kind of watch, or was it just a piece of jewelry? This, I think—advertising—is the language that I will never understand.

When I’m awake at 4:40am—insomnia on 6 out of 10—I wonder if maybe it’s the jetlag, just my confused internal clock. William Gibson wrote that jetlag was the slow-moving soul trying to catch up to the body, which had crossed the globe at higher speeds. This sounds about right. I entertain myself by trying to remember each item in the minibar from left to right: milk chocolate Toblerone, that purple-wrapped candy bar with the white goop inside, two cans of Coca-Cola, one can of Coke Light, one box of orange juice, one bottle white wine, one bottle champagne. The door is filled with tiny bottles of liquor, amber and clear and one that looks like pale blue antifreeze. There seemed to be one more thing. What was it?

What Do You Want from Air Travel, or Miracles Do Happen

"It's raining, can you believe it?" my mother asked at about 5:45am this morning, when I had staggered out of my bedroom. Everything was still dark and quiet. The weather meant that my plane was about an hour late getting out of Chattanooga--the worst kind of late, the kind where you're all sitting on the plane, buckled and stowed, and yet the weather has you grounded--so no getting up, no moving around, no getting off and rethinking the whole idea. "Maybe we could just drive there," says the guy in the other row--ha ha, never heard that one before!!! Eventually, they re-routed us over Nashville (who would have known?) and we made it to Memphis, where I had missed my connecting flight to LaGuardia. (None of this part of the story is that interesting or original. I know.) However, there was a flight to JFK that was to depart about 25 minutes after I found myself at gate B1, and the nicest of the nice, "Ms. Anna B.," as her name tag said, was kind enough to put me on it. Hence, I'm on en-route as I write this long rambling post. A miracle!

The woman sitting in the seat next to me on the ground in Chattanooga was quite impatient, making huffing noises and glaring at the flight attendant, as if she had something to do with the rain, or something to do with NOT making it go away. I'm always amazed at these people. Because the pilot--whom you just have to trust, like surgeons or cab drivers or, you know, literary agents--is trying to make the best decisions possible. Because the alternative is, you know, death.

The 4th of July holiday has "become my Christmas," my mother also said. These days, it's the only time our whole family gathers together. With my brother and his family in Orlando, making their own Christmas traditions and rituals, and me having 11 years of being stranded in Birmingham, Cincinnati, Charlotte, Atlanta, Memphis, and even Philadelphia, I try to avoid flying in the snowy months as much as possible. But I like to come down and see everyone, eat bad food that gives everybody strange bowel movements, and watch my dad run in fear from a canon.

The older you get, the stranger your family becomes. Rather, the more you get to know them, and hence, their eccentricities float--dramatically, quietly, hilariously--to the surface. They were weird to being with, most likely. I began thinking a lot about this over the weekend in Tennessee, where the whole American suburbia thing started to make more sense to me--actually, not "make sense" as much as "reveal.". When I say "the whole American suburbia thing" I mean whatever Sam Mendes is always trying to work out in his movies. (See American Beauty or Revolutionary Road, or even, god help you, Away from You, or was it Away We Go, or something.)

Your neighbors grow up and become frail old people. They introduce themselves to you, forgetting that you are the tiny child that they once invited to eat popcorn and watch a movie. They forget that you are the tiny child that was disappointed to find out that the movie was "Around the World in 80 Days," and not something that had been released in the last two weeks--like maybe about Ninja Turtles--let alone his lifetime. It was not as fun as he had hoped, and perhaps as you had hoped, but he remembers it fondly--and I suppose that's the most important thing.

Also, things that happened to you when you were smaller, and that you will never ever forget even if you live to be 200 years old--like the handle bar of your brother's bike jamming up into the side of his mouth and taking off a layer of his gum, followed by your mother rushing out of the house with a bottle of cold water and making him drink and spit, drink and spit, the water rushing red out of his mouth, then pink, then red again and again, screaming--you may learn that your mother, for example, doesn't even remember it happening. "There were so many," she said, meaning injuries, meaning tiny, urgent emergencies.

My nephews are glorious little specimens of humanity. It's good that I do not have children. Children to me are simultaneously the most fascinating subject one could turn his attention to, and the most boring, repetitive robotic weirdos you could meet. Why do they do what they do? I guess, why do any of us? They are lovable little terrors and joyful little bunches of personality.

Miracles do happen! In the Memphis airport, and in your very own family. Okay, miracle may be the wrong word to use--particularly when all "Ms. Anna B" did was her job. But this plane is being battered around quite a bit by the wind outside it--and if you are reading this, then it means that I survived, and made it to my boyfriend's house in Brooklyn, which is pretty miraculous. The nephews, too, are pretty miraculous. If you want proof, here it is:

Letter from Greece, Part 3 of 10

Day One: Arrival in Athens

Airplanes always look like fish to me, swimming themselves up to the gates, vomiting out beleaguered passengers, hundreds of Jonahs with rolling suitcases. There should be a better way to arrive in a new place—one airport gate looks like the next, no matter where you are in the world, the same refrigerated air, the same shiny bottles of liquor for sale at duty-free shops, the same gaudy perfume, boxes and boxes of cigarettes. There should be a way to shrink the distance between the traveling self and the experience. Couldn’t we arrive on the beach directly, without customs and baggage and bureaucracy? Couldn’t we reform—magically, molecularly—at a pre-determined rooftop happy hour? Outside the airport, through the layers of tinted glass, is the bright, empty sky.

Here’s how you hail a taxi in Athens: You stand on the street corner, and when a yellow cab pulls up slowly near you, not exactly stopping, you yell your destination out at them, as loud as possible, into their open window. Except that I don’t know this at the time. So, Kip and I are sitting in the back of the cab, dizzy on no sleep and warm air, and suddenly, Greek women in their work get-ups are screaming into our window. Larisis! Syntagma! It’s like that perfume commercial, with all the models bursting through the French doors to their balconies—Egoiste! I wonder: Are the citizens of Athens welcoming us? Are they hurling abuse? Why are the drivers pulling away so quickly, not even responding? If they can’t get a taxi to stop, how are we going to? I later learn that the taxis will generally pick up other riders, if you’re both going in the same direction. Thus the slowing down, the speeding away. This would never work in New York. Can you imagine if suddenly you were veering toward 1st Avenue because someone else got into the cab?

The Divani Palace Hotel is modern, clean and unhurried. The woman at the desk wears bright purple eye shadow, and lipstick in a darker shade of the same color. She installs us in a tidy, fifth floor room with a balcony that overlooks the pool, and has a splendid, unobstructed view of the Acropolis. Finally, despite what everyone says you should do to combat jetlag, after being awake for almost thirty hours, with all the lights on, I sleep.

A few hours later, we walk through the neighborhood. Everywhere are the trinkets and tchotchkes of tourism: tiny Parthenons, tiny statues of Athena, reproductions of vases and amphorae in every color, in terrible and wonderful colors, the white and blue trademark of the islands in shirts, hats, coffee mugs, ashtrays, toothpick holders, shot glasses, Zeus playing cards, Athena notepads, Apollo serving dishes. Postcards and postcards and postcards, aisles of them, like a library.

We land in a tiny corner coffee shop, eating flaky dandelion and feta pastries—rich, fatty and sharp. The street dogs lay wherever they can find shade, looking dead. A German woman sits at the table next to us. “I am café,” she says to the waitress, pantomiming a tiny cup of espresso.

We return to the hotel, and another nap follows. The air conditioning is turned up too high in the room, and after an hour, I slide open the doors to the balcony, to let in some warmth, some light. We get up, wander through the blocks again, and take the tiny elevator to the roof of an apartment building, for dinner at Attikus Restaurant. We eat tzatziki, tomatoes and peppers stuffed with rice and pine nuts, lamb meatballs in a spicy tomato sauce, saganaki, more lamb, this time stewed with lemon and potatoes. We order a bottle of Retsina, piney and green, and I get the feeling that the servers there wouldn’t dare drink it—but I like it. We talk and laugh, a bit drunk, overfed. The olives, dark spots on every plate, are spectacular. The Parthenon is perched on the rocky hilltop behind me, golden light shining out from the inside, white spotlights hitting the columns. We take a few pictures as the sky fades from blue to darker, until the waiter brings candles to our table.

Letter from Greece, Part 2 of 10

Day One: Departure, New York City

The outbound flight is overnight, just over eight hours—we will arrive at about nine o’clock in the morning. I take one Ambien before the dinner service. I’ve loaded my iPod with Woody Allen movies, and I stuff Vestal McIntyre’s new novel down into the seat pocket in front of me, plus three New Yorkers that I’ve let pile up. Kip gathers the small pillows and the blue and yellow blanket sealed in a plastic bag, and fixes himself against the window, soon asleep. The in-flight television has nine channels, each with a series of Greek television shows, or cheap copies of popular game shows, all of them seem to feature graying male singers, in tuxedos with slick-looking hair—Frank Sinatra meets Zorba the Greek crossed with Barry Manilow. The women in the TV audience are going wild. I can’t tell if the performances are from this year, or from thirty years ago. Old guys like this could never be pop stars in America.

Sleep never comes.

But I’m used to that.

I read, I watch the movies on the iPod, I stare into the blank screen. Hours pass. I drink a tiny, airplane food-sized bottle of red wine, remarkably good—I consider waking Kip so he can taste it. The man sitting in front of me has bad circulation, or restless leg syndrome, or unassailable boredom, and he takes to standing in the aisle for long periods of time, checking his pockets obsessively. For something he brought? For something he forgot? On the screen at the front of the cabin there’s a map of the world, shifting from far away to closer distances, following our tiny tin tube as it crosses the Atlantic, over the northern border of Spain, over the heel of Italy, and eventually to Athens.

Letter from Greece, Part 1 of 10

This travelogue from my trip to Greece is not structured chronologically. So this, Day Three, is actually the beginning. I'll post the rest of the parts in the coming weeks.


Day Three: Temple of Poseidon, Cape Sounion

The American woman stands near the southwest corner of the temple, waiting for her husband to steady the video camera. She is blonde—dyed and teased into a helmet—big shiny nails, maybe seventy, probably retired, probably used to taking these sorts of vacations, where you ride a big modern bus through old, crumbling towns in Europe. “This is the place where, uh, honey, what is it called?” She clears her throat. Her husband is wearing a loose Hawaiian-print shirt, and white socks pulled up to his knees. “The Temple of Poseidon,” he says, loudly. “Right, okay, I’m ready.” she says. He pans the camera behind her, over the gleaming white columns, across the base of the temple, and back.

She begins: “Here we are at the Temple of Poseidon. The ancient Greeks would come here to worship him, and to honor him, and to make sacrifices of lambs or other animals, maybe burn something and send the smoke into the air, whatever else they wanted to do.” “But never as tourists,” she continues, “the ancients only came for worship. Oh, and this, where we are, is the southernmost point of mainland Europe.” These are all things the tour guide told us.

The wide Aegean spreads out behind me, dark, turning in the distance to a thin grey haze which blurs the details of the islands, the waves, the horizon, cut by thin trails left from passing ships. I turn back, still listening, watching the Italian tourists take pictures in pairs and foursomes, changing groupings, trading cameras. “But there are no ghosts here anymore. You can feel the lack of energy, and the long history of the energy. They were here once, they were very many, but their business has finished.” A grouse standing on the corner of the temple begins its rough, guttural call. She smiles, glowing, as if candlelit from within. “Now,” she says, “they’re all gone.”

Back!

Returned from Greece! It was a marvelous trip. Granted, the jetlag hit me really hard this time--most likely, I was also suffering from a real lack of sleep the three weeks prior. (Not, "most likely," but "actually.") One day, we slept until nearly two in the afternoon, which, if any of you know me, you know is completely unheard of.

We did not, as Laura begged us, go to an olive plantation. We did, however, eat lots and lots of fried cheese, tzatziki, and various grilled meats and other lovely items. The sad part was that, well, the Greek food in my very own neighborhood--across the street--is better. But okay, the restaurant across the street from me is an expensive, upscale Greek place, and we found those restaurants, but couldn't really afford to eat in them every night. But--you can't beat the places we ate for the atmosphere, and the view. OMG, the views. I am not complaining. I was happy with everything--when you eat at the tourist restaurant, you get tourist food. I was just so glad to be doing something else for a while.

I'm going to write up the trip, of course. One thing about my brain that I find a little annoying is how I have to process everything via writing. So, while I'm laying in the bed at 3:00am having insomnia on Santorini and starting at the tiny blinking light on the wall, I have to think about what I might write about the tiny blinking light. I can't ever turn it off. Last night, at my grocery store, I walked past the Greek aisle and had a weirdo freak-out moment. Where am I? It was all again unfamiliar, and yet familiar. Having had that alphabet, those shapes, all around me for so long--and then here I was back in my real life, and there they were again. There's an image, I thought. (This reminds me of what I always tell people about writing, that having ideas is not the problem.)

Bless being on vacation. Bless being home.

Greece!

--Currently engaging myself in the anxiety of feeling unprepared for my vacation to Greece. We leave tomorrow. I found myself, perhaps foolishly, reading a little here and there on various travel sites about what to do and see, and, not surprisingly, became overwhelmed. Luckily, I am not one of those people who needs to do and see everything to feel satisfied. Whatever we do, fine, hooray, it's not work and it's not my regular life! Success!!

--I have been so out of it, so tired with show and syrup and work and such that I managed to get on the train tonight, headed to see my friend Jamie in her dance performance and whoops, I went to the wrong venue and thus missed it. Oh well. Sorry, Jamie.

--On my walk through the East Village, (on my way to the wrong venue) there were two places, two separate street corners, where huge dumpsters had been set out to accommodate all the NYU kids moving out of the dorms. Parents with cars were tossing stuff into them at one end, and people were fishing through them at the other. "Look, Brian," said one young woman, holding up a tacky fake chandelier, broken and dirty, "I totally won this in the lottery that is right now!"

--I haven't seen the new Star Trek movie yet. I am contemplating going to tonight's 11pm show. Okay, I've talked myself into it.

See you when I get back from Greece!!!!!

Briefly

--Seems that Prague has turned into Greece. A few nights in Athens, a few nights in Santorini. We're forgoing Mykonos, because we'd like to be in a single place for a bit longer. No, I don't really do beaches, but who knows? A person can change, right? (Not really.) Very excited. Mid-may.

--Yesterday I began reading the new novel, "Cutting for Stone," by Abraham Verghese.

--Every writer should read Lorrie Moore's story "How to Become a Writer." You don't even need to buy the book. Look, it's right here. Brilliant from the first line: "First, try to be something, anything, else." But, perhaps my favorite image: "Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real understanding of what they have written and therefore must half-believe anything and everything that is said of them."

--I decided to go back and read everything Lorrie Moore has ever written. After the Verghese novel.

--"Golden Girls" is the best show on TV. The writing is insanely good, and quick, and smart. Those four ladies make the rest just look like actors who work. The Golden Girls changed my life, I'm sure of it. My brother and I spent Saturday nites with my grandparents -- or was it Fridays? -- and we watched "Golden Girls," which came on before "Empty Nest." I LOVED it then, and also now. When I die, play episodes at the funeral.

--If you see me, ask me to tell you the joke about the doctor who farts. It's too long to type.

Hump Day Update

--Vermont was lovely, if brief. I guess I was there for about 18 hours, total. Still, I was able to spend some time walking through the woods, and feeling like myself. At some point while I was walking up through the part of the farm that they call "The Marriage Area," I picked up a huge branch that had fallen. It was not heavy, just large and twisted. I propped it on my shoulder and kept walking, a kind of Tom Bombadill moment. As I came to the higher part, I turned around and looked out over the hill and the snow and the land all around me. I felt such a huge swell of gratitude toward the trees. I wondered, for a moment, if I should say it out loud to them, or would they know it already? Would they care?

--My brain has been pleasantly distracted by the goings-on lately, and I feel simultaneously exhausted and charged, like I'm on speed, but drunk. As soon as things pan out and situate in some kind of finality, I'll be able to relax more. I think. I hope.

--After all the fuss, I joined Facebook. (And I have since updated my previous post on this blog about not joining it, so there.) People have been going on an on about it to be, as if it were the savior of mankind. It is not that. It is no more or less interesting and annoying than any of the previous social-networking websites, although this one has a certain reach, and therefore people who, I would gander to presume, were not a part of Friendster, for example, have signed up and send inane messages to my boyfriend about assinine right-wing causes. Hello? The interesting part to me--so far--at least, is how people talk about connecting on Facebook, but there really isn't any connecting going on that I can see. There's just confirmation and information. "Hi, it's been 15 years since I saw you!" the notes say. I am glad for them, but we are not really sharing anything other than some kind of intangible proof that we still exist. "Here I am," the thing says to the universe, and here is my data. It also makes me realize that I have no photos of myself. I stopped taking pictures with my own camera a while back, and so now my digital self lives inside other people's computers--the modern era is so fractured.

--I think the boyfriend and I are going to Prague sometime in May-ish.

Nephew #1 plus Photo Booth = "Baby Raccoon Farts on Camera"