The Museum at the Greek Agora /Athens

There is a baby’s skull in an earthen jar and a little girl laid out flat in a tomb of rock.  After so many centuries the girl’s bones and the stones that hold her are bride and bridegroom, melded into one.  Who delivered her there with her bracelets and rings, her child-sized painted dishes and pitchers?  Who slipped the baby into the narrow mouth of the jar and guided it into the full-bellied chamber, a backwards birth into the nether world? Who bore these losses?

After so many centuries, loss still inhabits the room.  In this museum at the Greek Agora in Athens, a woman speaks in a voice too loud for the narrow space.  “It looks like a real person,” the woman says. She is staring at the little girl’s bones.  Is this how we protect ourselves from grief? Imagine the real into the unreal?

Does my husband imagine our daughters as beings who have crossed over into some other world?  Their living flesh and bone—do they only exist for him in a life he’s sealed himself away from?  Or does he startle himself in the night when he walks into M.’s room to lift a fussing baby boy from his crib?  Does he expect her blond ponytail on the pillow for a fleeting instant before he caresses his son’s dark curls? Does the silence from C.’s room frighten him? No pages turning, no pen scratching across paper as the dark house slips past midnight? Does he ever pace the halls as his new wife sleeps and think of the house when it was ours and visit the memories of our life together there entombed?

I stand in a room across an ocean in my new life starring at the bones of children.  The jar, the stone encased in glass pull me backwards. “It is a little girl,” I want to say to the woman.  “See the bracelet that circled the softest skin? See her ring? She was real flesh and blood once. These are her bones, and they are real, too.

I'll Teach You Greek All Night Long

Restaurant owners stand in the street to lure you into dinner in Athens. As you walk by, they guess your nationality and say, Bonsoir, or Good Evening or whatever. I like to answer back, Kalispera. They sometimes assume I speak Greek then, which I don't. So things usually get funny and complicated  as they press their business card into my hand. I told the guy giving my friend Meredith and me the hard sell tonight I was sorry but I couldn't understand what he was saying. "I don't speak Greek," I said.
"I teach you Greek all night long," he said, out and out flirting with me." And if you have dinner at our restaurant tonight--free wine!" Then he presented me to his father, and his father lifted my hand and kissed it. One helluva economic recovery program. But Meredith and I demurred and said we needed to walk--which we did.
Then we went back. The father himself waited on us. He brought us not just two glasses of wine, but an entire pitcher. Come to Greece everyone! The wine is freeeeeee! After our Greek salad, and briam (vegetable stew), and tsatziki we had no room for dessert. But the father brought us a plate of fruit anyway. Come to Greece! The fruit is freeeeeeee!
I'm having fun already. The day has been nicely padded with flirtatious men--really this could be the key to turning the economy around.
I have another theory about the flirting--it's intensified since I've gone gray, and I think it makes me seem safe. Go ahead and flatter the nice grandma. She wouldn't actually take you up on it. The man I love laughed when I told him this theory. I'm hot, he says. Which makes me laugh.  I'm old.  Maybe that restaurant owner tonight was looking for a girlfriend for his father.