Elsewhere

Elsewhere, after all, could be her new ‘here’; ‘some day’ her new ‘now’.  He liked to say, “If every place is any place, there’s no place left worth going.”  This was not any place.  It was to the people that lived here; to the ones that had never been away.  She was not on a mission to convince them, however.  If anything, she hoped to learn from them; to not disturb their peace.
It’s funny when you happen upon someone being excellent.
It’s funny when you happen upon someone being excellent.  You don’t want to distract them from what they do.  But they are excellent; and part of excellence is ease.
So, when you come upon someone who is excellent at relaxing, let them have their effect on you.  It can be easy to want to ask them their methods.  This is permissible.  But it is usually enough in the short term to just let it rub off.
Old people.  Everywhere.  Greece was like the rest of Europe; only in the sense that the people here were getting old.  To be sure, plenty were already old, and not going anywhere, but they were getting old and older.
Now, we like to talk about “digital natives” and to use other terms that are at times self-important and at times self-pitying.  Greece didn’t have digital natives.  Not in this village anyway.  What it did have were old ladies on their porches, watering flowers or sitting, who were happy to talk to you when they were not talking to each other, or even when they were.
Tou Ilia eisai?
“Tou Ilia eisai (Are you Ilias’s boy)?”  “Eimai (I am).”  What hospitality would have abounded now easily multiplied.  He was beckoned onto the porch, along with her, and she was to get her first taste of Greek hospitality…
Later that night, they lay in bed.  They were exhausted.  They were thinking.
She remembered the bus rides.  What did it mean to get angry without holding a grudge?  There seemed to be two options for regular folks: (regular folks because, increasingly, virtue escaped the common man) either get angry and hold the grudge or immediately voice your frustration, thereby getting it out of your system.  A third, more excellent way existed to be sure, and this was to hold one’s tongue in a dispassionate way.  Greeks seemed to vie for option two.  And while the third choice was firmly cemented in both their minds as the ideal, the second choice for her finally took on new meaning…”Before offering your sacrifice, if you have a quarrel with your brother, leave your sacrifice and go and make peace with him.”  This, it could said, was instantaneous in the Greek world.  Instantaneous more so for Greeks in Greece who have kept their culture alive, surrounded and reinforced by what we would call “gumption” or “assertiveness” and what they would call basic honesty, but also for those around the world who, to greater or lesser degrees remembered where they came from and understand “boundaries” in a very different way than most Westerners.  Instantaneous also because the quarrel was had and had fully.  Therefore, forgiveness could be reached sooner and more completely.  It is the mark of a holy person to forgive even when wronged, it is the mark of a normal person to at least forgive after feeling heard.  She did not know what these various people were arguing about—in the streets, in lines at the bank or for buses or trains, but she knew generally.  Someone felt wronged.  Both felt justified.  Neither felt limited or restrained.  It was the last part that made all the difference.  People certainly weren’t policed by their neighbors nor were they policed by an overbearing sense of “propriety” and having not these barriers, they dealt with business.  Not that Greece was friendly for business in the common sense—there were problems—of corruption and other “inefficiencies” plaguing any democracy or any system or place at all in our fallen world, but they were good at conducting the business of being persons—living their lives. His cousin, when asked what she wanted to do for a living, said, “I would like to be a therapist, but here, people just talk to their friends.”  It was true—people did just talk to their friends—in a way that was cathartic enough and unbounded enough that they genuinely didn’t need the counseling or even the healthcare—that most Western people now take for granted.