Greek Vacation
By Amanda M. Halkiotis
I spent ten days in a country I always wanted to visit
grew up memorizing villages from maps on wine bottles
framing cut-out photographs from calendars
reciting phrases through phonetics.
I crossed the Atlantic and felt no connection, no instant infatuation.
I tried to love the country my grandparents came from.
I have no attachment to this place people told me I will love without question.
I have questions.
Why does the calamari taste chewy if they just caught it?
Why the hell does Crete need a Coast Guard?
Why, after coming here, can I sleep through the night and wake up calm?
No, I wouldn’t call my voyage romantic or cathartic or magnetic, but I would say it meant something
to see my grandmother’s village.
To stand in the basement they all moved into the day Mussolini’s troops took over the rest of the house.
They say you could smell ‘em before you could see ‘em.
They polished their boots with pig fat.
Yes, the main drag full of tourist boutiques felt a little bit like Margaritaville on Prozac,
and once the bars opened they all played the same tired ten-year-old hits from a teenage Shakira.
But to walk down that road my grandmother drove away from at seventeen to go to college in America,
to meet my grandfather, to raise my mother, that meant more to me than any mixed drink
I could have asked for from a cute British bartender who slid his pack of Benson and Hedges
down the bar and then offered me a light.
People will ask me about the food, the weather, the beaches,
and I will nod and gush and embellish with what they want to hear.
But everyone has already seen all those postcards of white stucco against blue seas
as crystalline as an endless array of backlit Bombay Sapphire bottles.
In all honesty I missed the sound of the Jersey shore, of ocean waves crashing;
the light lapping of a rippling sea after an hour or two sounds much too much like a running toilet.
I thought I left behind the gritty realism of my Brooklyn apartment.
I want them instead to ask me what it felt like to slip on a linen dress
that had been soaking in the kitchen sink and then dried outside overnight in the balmy island air.
Or the itch, the nagging need I felt to memorize a streetmap in a matter of days,
leaving my stuff at the beach under the rented umbrella just to learn the alleys they connect to
before I have to hop on the bus to ride back down the one road to the airport city.
I forgot how much I missed traveling in Europe,
walking around the gated area waiting for departures announced in military time,
sipping weak filter coffee and snapping pictures of exaggerated green and white informational signs:
fire exit, water fountain, toilet.
Or the abrupt realization of how misleading topless sunbathing can be;
it just leaves everything blotchy to be honest and my nipples looked pink enough already.
Drinking beer on the beach evoked similar disappointment, and stale, hours-old pizza
somehow lost its quaint flavor over here that I remember it having
when left unsupervised in an open box on the tile floor of my living room.
I couldn’t wait to come back and pour myself cold water from the refrigerated Brita
and take a nap on my own mattress, one considerably thicker than a bulletin board.
Ask me what the olive trees smelled like at dusk
when the breeze wafted their branches over to our table and permeated the swordfish.
Ask me what the rows of cypress groves looked like from the view at the monastery.
They say when the Turks invaded they could see the blood dripping down the mountain from the village below.
Smoke, too.
I poured the last of my thyme-infused honey into my morning Earl Grey the other day.
It felt like the end of summer.
——
Amanda M. Halkiotis is a New York City-based writer who has been published in The Evergreen Review, Spindle Zine, The Write Place at the Write Time, and The Pittsburgh Quarterly.
This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 2:05 am and is filed under Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
