Left My Knees In Greece

"En Taxi! Disinestra, Efharisto!" Yes, Left... No, "Then Meelo Hellenika!" I don't speak Greek, obviously. You get to Greece and you expect to arrive in a Hollywood set, filled with those impressive columns and paved, marble streets, and people in throngs dressed in ancient garb. I have had the best memories of Athens, and my only regret was not making the time for a real private pilgrimage to the Aegean island of Skyros, to visit the gravesite of Rupert Chawner Brooke, not that anyone today would know who this World War I poet was. He considered himself a Georgian, but his contemporaries would be better remembered as the Bloomsbury group. In Athens, I was fortunate to have Nancy as my erstwhile companion. On my own wanderings from the Olympios Zeus (ruins of the ancient temple to the king of gods) to the site of the first modern Olympics, the stadion, and then to the famed Areopagos hill (St. Paul preached here) and the Acropolis (where the Parthenon stood for an eon until the Turks blew it up accidentally when a stray shell struck the munitions they kept INSIDE of the great temple!)... I even located the house of Lord Byron, at the very end of the plaka and further down. Oddly, my memories of traversing the whole circuit of the old city, back past the parliament, orthodox cathedral and central post office until I reached the Hilton, are familiar and clear as yesterday. I always felt very at home in Athens, perhaps because I have long time been familiar with its culture, and history, myths and Christianity, and in particular, at least found the conversational Greek enthralling to use. For immediately you can work out which words were to form the root for the English, and which were borrowed themselves. The Hebrew letters aleph and beth, I wonder, were Persian in origin, or semitic and Canannite? Afterall, these and other letters are very similar in the Greek. This makes me wonder which influenced which... But as far as these many footprints I left behind in Athens are concerned, I retrace them often, and they are fresh, like the early Spring morning chill and dew, but similarly, these too evaporate with the sharp heat of reality that stalks my every day. To the ancient Greeks, efharisto para poli! Parakalo!