The Christmas season is here once again and I look forward to hearing from you about your year — and sharing with you some of the highlights & low-lights – of my year. Of course the real highlight of my year was my trip to Greece in August. Some of the details of that marvelous adventure will come at the end of this letter for those of you interested in the “long version.”
Last January, besides deciding to go to Greece, I embarked on a new car shopping venture. The result was a special order Blue Chevrolet Celebrity Eurosport station wagon. Though no larger than my Buick hatchback, it is much more spacious. I drove 8 people to a speech tournament in it last weekend; and I love the front wheel drive.
My work at school intensifies each fall as the speech classes and speech team traveling
to contests on Saturdays grows. Both the classes and team have doubled in size and number over last year. It’s exciting to have a growing program, but the work load is almost more than I can handle,–50 students working up individual 10 minute pro grams, each needing coaching and directing, 12 to 20 attending each contest, not to mention responsibilities for getting judges, transportation, fund raising, etc. etc. All this is in addition to the 4 classes I teach. I have been very candid about the need for assistants if they want a large class and contest program, but so far I feel my statements are falling on deaf ears. Well, if they do nothing, it will be their problem and the students’ loss — though it seems a shame to spend 4 or 5 years building a successful speech program only to have it “go down the tubes” when I retire.
Retire? Ah, yes, more good news. I had a conference with our retirement system counselor and discovered I can buy 5 years of my college teaching time into the Ohio Retirement System for half what I thought it was going to cost me! I had resigned my self to being able to afford only 3 years and then teach 5 more years to June, 1989. I will definitely not teach beyond that time, but it is nice to know I have the option to “hang it all up” any time after June of 1987! Then I will have time to indulge in all the things I love to do but can hardly even think about as speech and its contests consume me from September to March 1st.
The one and only real low-light of this letter and the year is that my dear English Bulldog Brownie died, lying at my feet on the Monday before Thanksgiving. She is – and will be – deeply missed. — And then the standard question already posed so often:
Will you replace her?” Brownie can’t be replaced. I can’t imagine another dog as dear and as intelligent as she; but will I get another Bulldog? Probably, though at this point there are many aspects to the if and when question. Only time will tell.
My 93 year old daddy is doing fine. In Nov. he not only raked all his leaves, but also raked the leaves for the neighbor across the street. He also did a Masonic installation in Nov.–45 minutes of speaking and memorization! And even though his eyesight is very bad, he – by guess and by gosh – carved the Thanksgiving Turkey.
GREECE– ADVENTURES AND HIGHLIGHTS
My traveling companion through Greece was Barbara Sorensen, a close, long time friend in my Drama Workshop Theater work. Bill Giles, who takes a yearly vacation trek to New York City each summer for 2 or 3 weeks, drove Barbara and me to the Big Apple in his Subaru on Sat July 28. We began our adventure with a marvelous dinner at the Swiftwater Inn. This quaint, charming Inn, situated in the Poconos of eastern Penn., is over 200 years old (1767). On Sunday in NYC we all three visited Marion Holt, my friend from Converse College days, and talked of the Spanish plays he is translating and getting produced off Broadway & in regional theater; then we “took in” the “Early Bones of Man” special anthropological exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. Back at the motel late Sun. afternoon, I re-wrote my will. (This will have relevance, believe me!) That night Bill and I went to Il Cantino, a little Italian delicatessen and wine shop where opera singers – mostly aspiring, sometimes present, and a few past – congregate to listen, sing, share, and even sing along with 2 hours of planned and spontaneous opera singing. It was great fun. Franco Corelli – a famous tenor of the 50’s and 60’s – sat at the table next to ours and I got his autograph!
Our next adventure was just getting TO Greece! On Mon, July 30 we stood in line for our 10 A.M. check in at Kennedy Airport for 2 hours before the baggage machinery started moving. Our 2:30 flight did not leave until 8:30 P.M., so more waiting. We were fed an airline dinner and had just settled down for the night when the Captain came on the P.A. about 11 P.M. In a 10 min. explanation he said: “We had an oil leak in an engine and are flying back to Kennedy on 3 engines.” — 500+ people on a Boeing 707! Later he told us for your safety” (a nice euphemism for “Don’t panic, But–“)”the runway will be lined with firetrucks, ambulances, and other emergency vehicles when we land.” It sure was! Red, white, and blue flashing lights all over the place. (Remember my strange compulsion to re-write my will?? HMMM) Anyway, it was the smoothest landing I ever experienced. They put us in a barren holding area – only chairs and restrooms – no food. One of the first off the plane at 2 A.M., I spotted 4 flat cushions in a corner on the floor and made a bee-line for them, curled up and went sound asleep! When Barbara woke me up at 5, I found I had missed a near riot by angry passengers. We boarded our “new” 707 (which we got by “bumping” 150 Paris bound tourists back into a hotel and a 12 hour delay of their own,) and took off at 5:30A.M. By the way, this incident did make the New York Times, July 31st edition.
Finally we were off to Greece without further incident – except one – FOOD. Remember the meager airline dinner at 9 P.M. Mon? — No food in the holding area? Well, we got an airline continental breakfast (juice, coffee, 2 rolls) at 8 A.M. Tues. — and that was ALL!! We landed in Athens at 4 P.M. Tues. NYC time and finally got food in Glifada at 6:30 P.M. (That’s 1:30 A.M. Greece time). –Wed. Are you confused? Have you lost track of time, hours, Days!? We sure did – Our bodies surely did! And for 500 angry passengers by now the password was KILL!!! Surely nothing else could happen, could it? Just board a bus and collapse in bed in an Athens hotel, right? — Wrong!! 100 people in 2 of the 10 buses (one of them OURS, of course) were told “You are beginning your 7 day land tour of Greece — NOW!!” ONE A.M. in the morning!! (the redundancy is intentional). Our wonderful Greek guide, Helen, and fantastic bus driver, Demi, – these poor innocent employees of International Weekends — had to endure our well deserved though misdirected wrath. They quickly and wisely whisked us off to Glifada (a suburb of Athens) for food which appeased the raving mob down to a state of sleepy grumbling and we were off on a 100 mile journey to our hotel in Napflion on the Peloponnesos. We crossed and I “saw” the Corinth Canal at 3:00 A.M. in the dead of night. I have a nice black picture with a few white light dots in a row to prove it.
We began our first day in Greece after only 4 hours sleep. We quickly were shown — (Oh, far too quickly) Epidaurus and its theater. I had waited and yearned 30 years to experience this moment, and a moment is about all we got there – less than 45 min. Then on to Mycenae (Remember Agamemnon, Electra, Orestes, the Trojan War, etc, etc)– Gold! Stones fit together without mortar lasting 3500 years; lintel stones weighing 120 tons–it’s hard to believe what a fantastic civilization they had that long ago. And on to walk the streets of Ancient Corinth (Remember Paul and his letter to the Corinthians). The evening was capped with a walk along the harbor in Napflion and our first contact with Greek people independent of tour control. The Greeks are really wonderful people. What about getting around in a land with the Greek alphabet and the incomprehensible Greek Language? Don’t worry – most signs are in Greek and English; and I could hardly believe how many Greeks everywhere could speak English.
Sparta, too, was an adventure. The main attraction there, surprisingly, is Mistras, a Byzantine town of 40,000 on a high foothill to Mt. Taygatos. Started about 500 A.D., the town was finally abandoned in 1850 to rebuild the modern town of Sparta down on the plain again on top of the site of Ancient Sparta. Our guide told us how to dress for the churches – and failed to mention we would need mountain climbing gear (at least shoes) to get to them. The result was that I, and several others, fell. A badly skinned knee and dress sandals on those impossible mountain rocky paths — and Barbara with acrophobia made us quite a pair as we clung to each other stumbling down the mountainside in the mid-afternoon heat.
The next day it took us 2 hours to take a very scary bus ride over Mt. Taygatos. old hairpin, switchback roads built up almost sheer cliffs with drops of thousands of feet into deep canyons made our Rocky Mountains almost look like foothills. And yet the same day we whizzed along flat coastal roads stopping to cool off with a dip in the Mediterranean Sea. On Saturday, we walked the grounds and ruins of Ancient Olympia, site of the Grecian Olympic Games for 1300 years at the same time the Olympics were being held in Los Angeles. That ironic coincidence gave me a funny feeling. When the games were finally ended in Greece, wars, pillaging and earthquakes had laid waste the area. Then Mother Nature really took over and the site was underneath the river bed! They had to re-route the river and remove 10 to 15 feet of silt and sand to uncover the ruins.
By now most of the different tourist adventures had happened to us and the tour basically wound down into normal expected events — and so to highlights of the second week: an evening in Patras, as we drove along the mainland Greece southern coast where sheer mountain sides plunge into the sea, we passed the runner carrying the Olympic Torch for the upcoming games. We had just missed the lighting ceremony at Olympia.
From there, we went north through the mountains, past a forest fire, to the plains of Thessaly and the dramatic confrontation with 1500+ foot high sheer rocks of Meteora rising out of the plain. On the top of these rocks (seeming to grow right out of them) are monasteries built from 1200 to 1500 and once accessible only by a basket on the end of a rope pulled up the sheer cliff. Some monasteries are still inhabited. (See Nat’l. Geographic, July, 1984) On Mon. we saw Thermopolae and part of the giant complex known as the Oracle of Delphi built on the side of massive Mt. Parnassus.
Then on to Athens for all too short a time – 23 days. We experienced the Acropolis, its museum and, of course, the Parthenon; the Plaka, the “tiny village” of Athens at the base of the Acropolis before Athens became capital of Greece and grew to over ten million in population; the Agora, “downtown Athens” in the days of the Romans; and the National Museum with its rich treasure of statues and gold. In compensation for our brief glimpse of the huge theater complex at Epidaurus, Barbara and I spent almost 2 hours experiencing the Dionysian Theater – also at the base of the Acropolis. We each own an authentic Greek costume from plays we were in – and carried them all the way to Greece for just this moment. In front of all the other tourists we took our costumes out of our carry-all bags, put them on and–Voila!–There we were in authentic 500 B.C. costumes (with 20th cent. sneakers!) on the same stage where Aeschuylus, Sophocles and Euripides had their plays performed and judged in competition in the Dionysian Festival. We were able, in Athens, to experience a unique and interesting Greek custom. In small family restaurants you do not order your meal from a waitress. They give you a menu to review the prices, then you are invited back into the kitchen where you look at what is cooking on the stove and point out to the cook what you want. He says “Fine, go sit” and in a few minutes you are served your meal. We stayed at an exclusive hotel – The Chandris – but never ate there. We discovered one of these marvelous little restaurants, called a taverna, behind our hotel and did all of our eating there. By the time we left, we had become friends with the cook and his family that ran the restaurant.
Friday, Saturday and Sunday we took a cruise to the islands of Mykonos, Rhodos, Crete, and Santorini. I can say I got to see the islands, and I enjoyed the cruise, but again there was never enough time to fully enjoy and experience each spot. I am determined to return and luxuriate for a week at Santorini (I LOVED Santorini); spend several days at Rhodos and Crete; and to see more of Mykonos and see Delos which I missed. Our last great day in Athens did allow us time and full enjoyment of what we saw. We had lunch at the restaurant on top of Mt. Lycabettus. We got up there by cable car and had a complete 360° panorama of this huge city. Best of all, the smog had cleared out and we got a beautiful clear view. Then with 2 tour friends and for only $15 each, we got a personally conducted taxi drive tour along the coastal road south from Athens to Sounion and the Greek temple to Posidon. We saw Christine Onassis’ home, crystal clear water with beautiful rocks underneath, and Byron (that is Lord Byron, the poet) carved in stone on the Posidon temple. Although painted graffiti is everywhere in Greece (about as bad as NYC) the Greeks revere and will not touch their ancient ruins and monuments. Sounion is an exception with names CARVED all over the temple rocks.
While our flight back on Tues was uneventful, our adventures were not over. Bill had discovered a marvelous little restaurant while we were gone which he described as “Cuban or something foreign like that.” He took us to breakfast there Wed. morning and —– perhaps you guessed it —- It was Greek! For an hour Barb and I talked with the owner and a friend who was flying back to Greece in a few days. It was almost like we really had not left Greece! From there we decided to go see the Trade Center in Lower Manhattan — and walked right into the parade for our Olympic Athletes. Bill, who lifts weights, piggy-backed me on his shoulders and I got a wonderful view and pictures of the parade and athletes. Tired of tourist crowds, we gave up on the World Trade Center and headed north to Lincoln Center, saw a vocal concert given by a friend of Bill’s, stopped at Il Cantino again, and then a late night night club. Three weary sets of bones collapsed into bed at 4 A.M. and drug out at 10 to pack up the car, have one last farewell breakfast at our Greek restaurant and head back home to REALITY!!!
But the memory lives on as I share in writing, in conversation, and in pictures the long held dream =- this fantasy come true.