Ikaria July 1970

                                                                        Ikaria July 1970

There exist an island eight to eighteen hours from Athens, but in my mind no distance exist between us. We approach her cautiously, huddled tightly together on a wet deck of a slow churning ship. She rises majestically in the distant cerulean pelagos, delicately shrouded by the dawn’s early mist. Her ghostly presence stills my thoughts and races my heart. The morning fog, the temptress wind, the asperity of the mountains make a grand entrance fit for the noblest and virtuous of kings.

 

Shaped by the hands of nature a collage of air, land and water, she plays, she teases, she torments the inhabitants of her body and calls out to them. “Come play with my body and I will play with your souls”. She will not forsake them but in the end, survival is justified only for the living.

                                                          On the left there’s the sea

                                                          On the right there’s the land

                                                           And in between can be found man

Her winds whistle through the pines and race down her lonely rocky roads. Yes, I will not forsake you she whispers but in the end. Man will struggle and he shall survive with his plot of earth all within the face of time.

The village, nestled warm and snug, half way up the mountain side, revealed as a pattern of white specks, specks you could brush off your shoulder with a swipe of your hand. Your feet sing along on the winding road and in the night it becomes your captor. “Follow me,” it says, “Your destiny lies in me.” You follow one step after another, one thought after another, wondering about the scenes  your captor has witnessed and knowing for the moment you are part of them.

 

The light shines, it shines low and dim in the old house with the fading whitewash. The ancient stones planted in the patio greet your weary body and lead you towards its’ haven. First, the kitchen, filled with countless aromas seemingly still drifting from the cooking pots  carefully arranged in the fireplace . Solid wooden benches along the walls seat visitors coming to narrate the news of the day. The three tiny bedrooms, all with icons, closely watching and protecting their human spirits, providing respite for the slumbering souls. The store room, dark and dusty, permeated forever by the scent of olive oil. On its’ wall dangle the implements of survival, massive amphoras for oil, wine and water, a handmade wooden loom, and the universal tools used by farmers eons ago.

 

Here on this mystic isle you find love, you find hate, as you search for the dreams of man. So, in the end you too can say, “I played among those gods of the heart.” The sun is always high, the moon is always bright, and the stars parade before you every night. This island my friend is your world and you shall be all right.

Swallows

Swallows don’t just return to Capistrano, they also return to our little seaside eatery in Xilosirti, Ikaria. Earlier in the summer, a pair of swallows found themselves flying through the wide open windows and doors of our local restaurant.

 As they flew nonchalantly in and out of the dining room, to their feathery amazement they discovered the ideal perch on which to build their snug little nest. This perch just happened to be located on top of a light fixture that was hanging precariously in the middle of the restaurant. Oblivious to the noise and crowds of the restaurant, the unconventional birds arduously built their tiny mud nest, and quickly produced three bird eggs. Within weeks three diminutive chick heads were seen bobbing up and down in the nest with their beaks perpetually wide open.  The parent swallows continued to make frequent forays in and out of the restaurant gathering sustenance for their young stock.

The owners of the restaurant, as well as the customers became quite accustomed to the new tenants and their low flying aerial antics.  Tourists and locals from all over the island came to eat at the restaurant just so they could witness and take pictures of the frolicking birds. Many of us became bird watching addicts, popping in every day to get the latest report as to the health and well being of the chicks. Quite often we noticed one of the bird parents stoically perched on top of the huge flat screen TV that was fastened to the wall at the far end of the restaurant. The bird casually observing the hustle and bustle of the busy eatery as patrons filtered in and out till the early morning hours. To protect customers from the bird droppings, tables were re-arranged and a large piece of cardboard placed on the floor under the light fixture that supported the celebrated bird nest. Customers and wait staff avoided that part of the restaurant, but during one exciting Euro Cup match, a patron celebrating the winning goal in his enthusiasm, stood up, jumped around, stepped on the bird poop laden cardboard and slid half way across the restaurant. Customers witnessing this amazing gymnastic feat applauded his dexterity and keen sense of balance thunderously; all the while the birds seemed unimpressed by the wild gyrations of the soccer fan.

By the end of the summer two of the three birdies survived and fledged, hopefully to return the next summer and roost in the same nest, still attached to the dangling light fixture, and once again to entertain and delight customers with their aerial acrobatics.

I couldn’t help but wonder how quickly the swallows, their chicks, and their nest would be forcibly evicted if this aviary incident took place in the States. No sooner would you utter the words, “Big Bird”, than the health department would materialize with hazard suites, oxygen tanks, and gallons of disinfectant to rid the Aves intruders. Ikarians for the most part take a more amicable St. Francis approach towards birds, sympathetic and compassionate, that’s why I hope to see swallows flying around my neighborhood for a long, long time.

Where's The Money From?

International money conspiracies, real or imaginary, seem to pop up on a regular basis like wild fires in the mountains of Ikaria. A recently uncovered banking ploy involves the rise of the new affluent Russians and their attempts to money launder their Rubles, Euros and U.S. dollars primarily in Cyprus and in Greece. Getting money out of Russia seems to be an ongoing and lucrative activity since the time of the Russian Czars. Wealthy Russians noting the somewhat lax banking laws and regulations in Greece and in Cyprus have established both real and bogus accounts in both countries. It has been rumored, and there is some credence to this rumor from the U.S. Treasury department, that there are more U.S. counterfeit one hundred dollar bills circulating in Russia than anywhere else in the world. This rumor certainly hasn’t escaped notice with our provincial banking institutions on Ikaria.

 

 

Arriving in Ikaria from the States during the summer of 2012, with a handful of one hundred dollar bills fresh from Chase bank, I was anxious to exchange them for Euros before the inevitable summer swoon of the dollar against the Euro occurred. Clutching dearly on to my American passport I entered the diminutive, but highly air-conditioned Alpha bank at Agios Kirikos, capital of Ikaria. I looked around somewhat warily and noticed there was little customer traffic in the bank, so I confidently figured this was going to be an easy in easy out banking transaction. Then I quickly recalled past banking experiences and remembered, not too fondly, there is no such thing as easy in easy out in Ikaria.

Immediately, as I handed the teller my freshly minted hundred dollar bills, she looked up at me with a suspicious glare undoubtedly trying to figure out what ruse I was trying to perpetrate. To ease the situation I promptly produced my American passport which she grabbed with both hands and proceeded to closely examine the outside cover. Once satisfied, she opened it to the identification page glancing at my prison mug shot type photo, then at me during what seemed to be several uneasy moments. Finally, she picked up the hundred dollar bills, rubbed each one gently between her thumb and forefinger, then she held each one up to the light examining them all for any tell tale sign that they might be counterfeit. Suddenly, with one harried scoop she picked up the bills along with my passport, stood up, turned and walked to a copy machine situated at the back of the bank. In no time she zeroxed the main pages of my passport along with both sides of the one hundred dollar bills. Returning nonchalantly to her desk she proceeded to copy down by hand all the serial numbers of the bills onto the official exchange form. Giving me a copy of the form, she then stapled all the zeroxed pages to the exchange document and filed them away, along with the hundred dollar bills in a large coffee stained manila folder. Seeing the muddled expression on my face she calmly reassured me, “We have to do this because of all the fake hundred dollar bills coming out of Russia.” Nodding my head with approval I understood the ramifications to a small bank on Ikaria if it was to get stuck with a manila folder full of counterfeit one hundred dollar bills.

So, thanks to this new crop of Russian counterfeiters , next time I try to exchange my American dollars who knows what the bank might require for such a transaction, fingerprints, eye scans, signed affidavits, oaths of perpetual truthfulness, my computer passwords? The answer seems to be ditch the U.S. hundred dollar bills and enter the 21 st. century by just carrying an ATM card, but this being Ikaria I am left wondering what are the chances that any one of the four ATM machines on Ikaria might be working on the day I need one?

Sales Slips and Taxes

         Taxes (φ ό ρ ο υ ς ) is probably the most feared word in the Greek language. Greeks historically have had an aversion to paying any kind of tax, for what ever purpose, and have gone to great lengths in avoiding them. With the economic depression still going on (as this is 2012), the current Greek government in it’s ongoing efforts to raise revenues, not only tightened  tax laws, but also introduced a plethora of new taxes to be imposed on the population. This has led the Greeks to believe that the last several elected governments have been nothing more than a kleptocracy rather than a democracy, each one more corrupt than the last, bolstered by years of cronyism.

With the introduction of the new income tax came new challenges for the Greek taxpayer in trying to circumvent this hated legislation. According to the new tax a deduction would be given based on the kinds and amount of sales receipts one has accumulated during the year. Consequently, taxes are reduced correspondingly based on the tax bracket one finds himself in. So, throughout the year everyone is squirreling away sales receipts from a few Euro cents to mega Euro purchases. This has led to intriguing phenomena in which people are trading sales slips, as I remember trading baseball cards as a kid. “I’ll give you two of my apparel receipts for one of your gas receipts.” Or if a relative hasn't reached his or her maximum deductions, other family members may pitch in and donate some of their sales slips. What you can find in every household is a large shoe box brimming full of sales receipts that have to be kept for a year. If one has an accountant, then he has to safely store these receipts for all his clients.

During the summer of 2012, as we started a huge kitchen renovation project, I too started to accumulate large quantities of sales slips that I consciously hoarded in a size 44 shoe box. Then it

occurred to me, since sales receipts were such a valuable commodity and in high demand, maybe I could make some extra money and auction them to the highest bidder. It was a fleeting thought, because I knew deep inside I would just give them away. Sure enough, by the end of the summer my niece wound up with my size 44 shoe box packed full of sales receipts, everything from a bag of pistachios to a new kitchen sink. So, maybe this just proves what the arch conservative, Barry Goldwater once said about income taxes, “The income tax created more criminals than any other single act of government.”

OTE

                                      

OTE are the three letters that represented the omnipresent Greek telephone company even on our little island of Ikaria. A neighbor of ours happened to be walking past our house cradling a phone in his arms one early morning looking rather confused and in a state of mild agitation. Noting his disposition, as a neighbor who normally is a happy go lucky kind of a guy, I immediately asked, “Why such a sullen face on such a beautiful morning?”

 “Well,” he said, “You know I have had my name on the list to get a land line from OTE for years. Finally, about a year ago they notified me that I was next on the list, and within a month they came and installed  my  phone. Since then I have had nothing but trouble and annoyance with OTE. Everything from poor phone reception, to no reception, to billing problems, but what took the cake was my ordeal with them yesterday. Once again I called OTE to complain about the spotty phone service I was receiving. I told them I would be on the phone talking, and without warning my call would be cut off. Sometimes if I stayed on the line for two or three minutes service would resume, only to be disconnected again a few minutes later. ‘Apparently’, said the OTE technician while checking my line, ‘your phone seems to be working fine now, what I suggest you do in the future is to call us back when your phone is not working’. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, so I just hung up on him. That’s why I’m on my way to Agios to dump this junky OTE phone and get myself into the 21^st century with a reliable cell phone.”

         This fleeting incident reminded me of the T.V. comedy “Laugh-In,” back in the 60’s, you might recall Lily Tomlin’s character, Ernestine, as a dismissive and condescending phone operator. Her celebrated parting words at the end of each sketches was, “We don’t care, we don’t have to, we’re the phone company.”

What Garbage??

As so often happens among Aegean islands, small squabbles, usually concerning fishing,

politics or who has the best dancers, emerge, are highlighted for a while, and then dissipate over the Aegean Sea. Occasionally though, an unusual crises crops up and takes center stage as it did on Ikaria in 2012.With Ikaria entering the disposable material age years ago, one could no longer burn tidy little bags of garbage in ones back yard, and with the increase of tourist every summer, the amount of garbage exceeded the local capacity to handle the overflow. The Ikarian officials invested in new Mercedes Benz garbage trucks, put out a variety of bins to collect recyclables, and opened up a dump in the middle of the island to deal with the abundance of discarded rubbish. Slowly though, the dump filled up and could no longer handle the constant arrival and dumping of the garbage trucks, and was forced to close. This presented a dilemma for the local officials as the bins brimmed over, and the garbage started to pile up in the streets.

Sometime during the discussions of what to do with this aggregate of trash, a decision was reached by the local authorities to pile the garbage onto a barge and take it somewhere, but where? The approved suggestion was to secretly, in the dark of night, float this barge to the neighboring islands of Fourni. Since the islands are sparsely populated, there would be ample room to accommodate the ever increasing collection of trash from Ikaria. The garbage was quickly gathered and loaded onto an enormous barge and deployed for its’ two hour trip to Fourni.

The secrecy of this mission unfortunately was compromised when the locals on Fourni, hearing from an inside source, of the covert Ikarian operation, mounted their own stealth counterattack. There to meet the phantom barge, in the dead of night, was a delegation of Fournotes, who adamantly forced the unwanted and malodorous barge to turn around and make a hasty retreat back to Ikaria.

Stuck with this smelly barge, authorities once again met to decide the outcome of this traveling garbage pile. In the meantime, Ikarians were becoming irritated with the

slow progress of the garbage issue, and public resentment resonated across the island. Finally, after weeks and much consternation, negotiations by the local authorities were completed for the acceptance of the barge by another neighboring island. This island, seeing the profitable silver lining in the Ikarian trash, demanded payment up front in order to take in the garbage for the rest of the year. So, if by chance you are island hopping around the Aegean Sea be sure to keep a lookout for the floating garbage pile, but then again you probably will smell it before you see it.

Travels with Dad Part III

Neighbors quickly recognized the quirkiness of my father’s behaviors and as village gossip spread like locust in August about the peculiar habits of my father, a clever prank was hatched by our amicable neighbor, Christos. He was a rather provocative catalyst, a speculator in a way, always looking for a semi-shady financial deal to make him rich. His personality was effervescent and disarming, just the right mix that attracted my dad to him. Christos and my father immediately became comrades in arms, and provided additional fodder for the villagers as the two companions seemed to terrorize half of Ikaria with their exuberant wisecracks and antics.

The closed ranks of the brick army were being diminished swiftly by the bricklayers, as the

bedroom progressed.  Eventually a pile numbering about two hundred remained intact for the final push and completion of the bedroom. By now, my father’s sleeping pattern had once again changed. Helping out the workers during the day by hauling bricks, mixing cement and running errands exhausted him physically and by 10:00 p.m. he was in his bed sound asleep.  

Throughout this tumultuous building process our inquisitive neighbor Christos made daily reconnaissance to observe and record the progress of the bricklayers, all the while quaffing a glass or two of ouzo with my dad and joking about his natural affinity with the bricks. The aggregate of these scouting visits was the formation of a deviously ingenious joke, at the expense of my father. It was a short time later during a hot and windy night that Christos stealthily made his way to the last remaining battalion of bricks, still precariously occupying a corner of our yard. Within two hours he had singlehandedly transported my dad’s precious stash to his side yard, a mere twenty meters from our house, and covered it with a large green tarp. Christos’ fiendish klepto plan was basically to enjoy my father’s baffled and confused look in finding his famously proprietary bricks had somehow mysteriously vanished in thin air. He moved his rickety table and chair to the edge of his porch so as to embrace the best view of my father’s emergence from the house and the bewilderment to follow. The morning sun had already cleared the horizon as my father stepped out of the house to inspect the previous day’s work, when he stopped in his tracks. Perplexed by the sight of the missing bricks, he promptly assumed the actions of a possessed man. Words flew out of his mouth like machine gun fire.

 “My bricks, my bricks, someone stole my bricks, they’re gone the bricks, the bricks!” He ran from the yard to the church below desperately seeking some kind of divine intervention on his behalf, while filling the sky with stinging blasphemies.  His agonizing pursuit continued onto the main street, still in a frenzy yelling “my bricks, my bricks, my bricks,” dashing wildly throughout the neighborhood and once again waking up the confused and groggy villagers.

All the while our rascally neighbor was watching him from his porch chuckling at the amusing antics of my father’s painful search for his bricks. Finally, when Christos could no longer contain himself with all this merriment, he called to my father to check out the suspiciously tarp covered pile. My father swiftly raced the twenty meters to Christos’ side yard, pulled back the green tarp to expose his precious collection of sienna colored bricks. A combination of relief, anger and amusement enveloped my father, luckily the amused part won out, as he shook his head slowly and a smile crossed his face, he realized the joke was on him. As morning coffee was shared by the two companiable neighbors the account of the missing bricks escapade was repeated numerous times, and laughter filled the quiet morning air.  

Eventually the additional bedroom was completed, but that did not end the saga of my father and the neighborhood jokester. The summer passed quickly for me and I had to return to the States, but my father remained an additional three weeks to tie up loose ends with the workers and the bureaucratic Greek building codes. It was on the last day of my dad’s extended stay on Ikaria that Christos came by to say good-bye and to wish my hurried father a safe journey back to Chicago. He presented my dad a package the size of a carton of cigarettes, nicely wrapped with a colorful ribbon and bow.

The package was meant for a mutual friend, Anna, who was going to meet my father at O’Hare airport. The contents of the package Christos declared were prescription drugs for this friend, drugs that were much cheaper in Greece, thanks to socialized medicine, than in the States. Not to be derelict towards a friend in need, my father unabashedly agreered to transport this needed medication. Since my father had already packed his antiquated suitcase to the gills, he was forced to re-pack leaving several small gifts behind, to accommodate this hefty medical parcel.

The return trip for my father was a slow and gruesome one, most appropriate for travelers to and from Greece at that time. The ferry from Ikaria to Piraeus was six hours late, his stay in Athens had to be extended by two days, and his Sabena flight back to Chicago arrived hours behind schedule. Throughout all these delays and constrains he carefully and meticulously guarded his luggage with the medicine safely secured, tucked in the inside compartment of his suitcase.

Finally, arriving at O’Hare and uncommonly breezing through customs, he was met by the anxious Anna. Immediately my father opened his venerable suitcase and judiciously pulled out her brightly wrapped gift.

 Perplexed by this magnanimous gesture on the part of my father, she asked “What is it?”

 “It’s the medicine you asked Christos to send you from Greece” he replied. 

“I never asked him to send me any meds’ she countered, somewhat confused ‘but let’s see what it is.” Deftly she removed the bright ribbon and tore into the wrapping paper. Their world, in the middle of O’Hare airport, seemed to stand still as they tried to focus their eyes on the heavy object gently resting in Anna’s trembling hand. What my father had so painstakingly and vigilantly escorted for days, across two continents and over five thousand miles, was one of his brick soldiers, regulation size sienna colored brick, compliments of good neighbor Christos.            

The trip was put in proper perspective a few years later after my father passed away, the excursion we took together was the last one he took to his beloved Ikaria. It was only then that I was able to appreciate those periods of daily mayhem that included arguments and squabbles with the locals, as with the cantankerous old priest, overdue or inebriated workers, and annoying but amusing neighbors. In the end we both survived, returned home with various bumps and bruises and plenty of emotional scars that are the transitional outcomes of such father and son expeditions. Chronicling this story I’m left with the visionary words of the poet Anne Sexton, ‘It doesn’t matter who my father was, it matters who I remember he was.”