It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It Page 9

  I learned all this history when the surviving brother and the surviving wife came to Seattle to consult with me. They had looked upon one another with abiding but secret love for years. After the two deaths, the toad brother had started coming over to his sister-in-law’s house to keep a little company, and they would have supper together and would do the dishes together in the kitchen, singing old hymns while they worked. They sometimes worked in her garden together, pulling weeds, talking for hours about life in general.

  Neither one would say anything about feelings—in a small town there was something not quite right about a couple of widowed in-laws being in love or doing anything about it. But one night he was drying plates and started singing “I Love You Truly.” She chimed in and he looked her in the eye and she looked back and they knew.

  So. They began that long conversation that is the real wedding. Their first concern was, “What will our children think?” Their combined kids would be both sons and daughters and nieces and nephews; cousins and half-brothers and half-sisters. And some of the children were married and not doing too well at it. A family shake-up might tip some boats already tossing around in heavy seas.

  But their love was long and wise, their lives short and lonely, and they had already married in the deepest sense—they had made the covenant of companionship.

  They decided to elope. Imagine. To run away and get married. Through friends of friends they found me in Seattle and asked for confidential help in getting married.

  What they didn’t know was that their kids knew everything all along. About the marriages that were unhappy, about the silent endurance, about the love that had bloomed and the wedding that was happening there in the kitchen. Their kids had known and watched and learned a great deal about love and marriage in the process. Their kids had moved from dismay at what might happen to fervent hope that it would happen.

  I knew the kids knew because I got a call from a daughter the same evening I talked with her mom and uncle. She had tracked them down and wanted to know if I was going to marry them and when, because the whole family was coming to the wedding somehow.

  This was the fairy-tale part of the wedding. The blessing placed on it by the children of the bride and groom who came in a ten-car caravan all the way from Fargo, North Dakota. When the bride and groom walked through the front door of my house that Sunday afternoon for what they thought was going to be a simple, quiet ceremony, their children and grandchildren were hiding in my kitchen and back hall. As the bride and groom stood before me, their families came quietly into the room, faces wreathed in smiles, tears streaming down their faces. Such a moment. Such a moment.

  A grandchild pulled the plug out of the emotional dam by shrieking “SURPRISE, SURPRISE!” and the whole gathering turned into a joyful hugging-and-kissing contest.

  When some order and quiet were restored, the bride and groom and their children and grandchildren turned to me for the ceremony. And I said that what had just happened was about as fine a ceremony as I could think of, and I pronounced them husband and wife and aunt and uncle. Which started the hugging and kissing and yelling all over again. Acts, not words, are the ties that bind.

  For years now I have told this story to couples who are making a second marriage. The point of the story is not that it had a happy ending. The point is that getting married for lust or money or social status or even love is usually trouble. The point is that marriage is a maze into which we wander—a maze that is best got through with a great companion—like a toad that sings while he washes dishes, for example. Or a beautiful woman who makes a toad feel like a prince when she holds his hand. That’s the kind of fairy tale you can believe in.

  “LIMMINAID 5 SINTS.” Large, red-lettered ambitious sign of summer. Just down the block is the classic setup. Couple of sunburned kids, card table, kitchen chair, pitcher, paper cups, and the sign taped to a picket fence. It was their grandmother’s idea at first. Get the kids out from underfoot and sitting in one place for a while. (You can see her face in the kitchen window, keeping tabs on them.)

  The kids balked at first—they smelled a rat. But when they found out there was money to be made, basic capitalistic greed took over, and they’ve been out there every day for a week now. They’ve even started watering down their product to increase profits.

  I know. Because for five days now I have been their best customer. I also know because I was in the lemonade racket myself as a child.

  So I keep them in business by taking unnecessary trips around the block to pass by their stand. It’s a good deal for them. And me. For five cents, I get a cup of lemon-flavored water and a dash of nostalgia, and they improve their cash position. I am a favored customer. They gave me the last dregs of a pitcher at the end of the working day for free. Now I know where the sugar was all this time.

  And they are better businessmen than I was at their age. It is the job of the youngest kid to follow customers and take back the cup before it is thrown away. I thought they were preventing littering. But it turns out they were reusing the cups. “Isn’t that a bit unsanitary?” “Why? You got some disease?” What could I say?

  I offered to provide them with cookies to expand their range of merchandise. I would sell them the cookies for a nickel and they could sell them for a dime. They are at the age when if an adult offers to do you a favor, you look upon it with great suspicion. But the next day there were cookies on the card table. Fifteen cents a cookie, too. “Grandmother made them. She GAVE them to us.” (Grandmother smiles and waves at me from the kitchen window.) I am up against economic forces I cannot defeat, and brains wiser than mine. My job is to be the customer. No middlemen need apply.

  This is not the first time I have been the pigeon in a game run by two generations of blood kin.

  On a lumpy road in the highlands of the island of Corsica one summer, an urchin flagged down my car, waving and pointing at something in a basket. I stopped. Behind him was an elderly man sitting at a table. Tall green bottles on the table.

  The kid flashes me a ten-dollar gap-toothed grin.

  “Mister, you speak English?”

  I nod. And the mini-merchant comes close and speaks in conspiratorial tones: “My poor old grandfather is selling almonds and wine. The almonds are from his trees, and he makes the wine himself. The almonds are okay, but the wine is very terrible. But it is cheap. Please buy some and make my poor grandfather happy, okay?”

  Another lemonade dealer. And the League of Lemonade Dealers has to stick together, right? So. For about a dollar I got a small sack of almonds and two bottles of wine. The kid smiles and the old man smiles and I smile. The conspiracy holds.

  And the kid was right. No false advertising here. The almonds were pretty tasty. The wine, ghastly.

  Several miles later on is another kid and another old man and the same story. Coincidence. And for another buck I have another sack of almonds and two more bottles of premier rotgut.

  But several more miles and there was another kid and another old man, and a few more miles down the road still another. In twenty miles I counted eleven sets of friendly holdup artists.

  I found out that night in the village that the old men hire the young boys, who have learned English in school, to flag down the tourists and tell the story, and it always works. I also learned that the old men do not understand the intricacies of the foreign exchange, but the little boys do. What the urchins collect from the tourists and what they give to the old men is not the same.

  I suspect that the old men are not that confused about what is going on, either, but considering that they are selling watered vinegar as wine, they can’t complain about being stung a little by the larceny of the younger generation.

  Everybody is in on the scam.

  Even me. I gave two bottles of the wine to a taxi driver as a tip. He overcharged me when he took me from my hotel to the ferry, but I didn’t speak enough French to argue with him. He was pleased to get the wine, though. Maybe when he finds out about the wine,
he will give it to the old man by the road with the little boy and it will go round again.

  A year later, on a back street in the city of Heraklion on the island of Crete. Two kids, a rickety table, some glasses, a pitcher, a sign—the usual equipment.

  “Hey, mister, you speak English?”

  Here we go again.

  “Sure, what are you selling?”

  “Super Cola—my grandfather made it.”

  As I recall, Super Cola is just a Greek soft drink.

  “How much?”

  “One American dollar.”

  “A dollar for a bottle of Super Cola? That’s crazy.”

  “Wait till you taste it.”

  You just can’t let a fellow limminaid dealer down, so I paid my dollar, picked up a bottle, and took a big drink.

  In the bottle is raki—the local version of white lightning—raw hooch. Some people have been known to levitate after drinking it, I am told. Others have not been able to describe the experience. Because they can’t talk anymore.

  I walked away in a warm glow, my lips a little numb, but feeling pretty loose and fine. Now THAT’S what I call LEMONADE!

  If you are ever in my neighborhood in the summertime, and you see a middle-aged man in a floppy hat, sitting by a card table under a sign that says EXTRA SPECIAL LEMONADE, $1, stop by and have a drink in the name of the international brotherhood of limminaid sellers.

  1969. A SIGN: ANYWHERE BUT HERE. Held by three waifish flower children standing at a freeway entrance looking for a ride on the great river of adventure. Common sign of that time—saw it more than once, and felt it in people many times. Wanderlust mixed with discontent.

  Recently saw another sign by the freeway entrance. SOMEWHERE ELSE AND BACK. Liked the spirit of the sign, so I pulled over and the travelers piled gratefully into my truck. Young university students, male and female—one of each. Tired of “here”—taking a semester off to go see it all, wherever IT is.

  “But your sign says ‘and back.’”

  “Well, this is home, you know, and we like it here. We just want to be somewhere else for a while. You ever feel that way?”

  “About once a week, actually.”

  When people are polled on what they would do if they won the lottery, first they’d pay their bills and then they would travel—go see the world, go somewhere else and back. Nomads we are, at heart. And it always amuses me when anthropologists find the ruins of civilizations that seem to have been suddenly abandoned. What caused this? Where did they go? What was the problem? No problem, really, they just woke up one morning in a collective mood to be somewhere else. They went. And just didn’t quite make it back.

  Count up the number of places you have lived so far in your life. Thirty-seven places in fifty-one years—that’s my record—and my wife and I are talking where-to-and-what-next again. Restlessness is our way, and we scratch the itch when we can. Having traveled “somewhere else and back” quite a few times now, here are two elemental truths I know:

  First: The grass is not, in fact, always greener on the other side of the fence. No, not at all. Fences have nothing to do with it. The grass is greenest where it is watered. When crossing over fences, carry water with you and tend the grass wherever you may be.

  Second: The River-Runner’s Maxim, taught to me when I was learning white-water canoeing from friend Baz, a maximum pro: “Sitting still is essential to the journey.” When heading off downriver, pull over to the bank from time to time and sit quietly and look at the river and think about where you’ve been and where you’re going and why and how.

  So. Come sit by me on the bank and I will tell you where the grass is green and what I know about the river.…

  “GREEK PHILOSOPHY LIVES!” Scrawled in English on a doorway in the Plaka, the ancient marketplace tucked beneath the great stone walls of the Acropolis. The heart of Athens. It’s true. They are still at it, the Greeks. Philosophy is not entombed forever in 4 B.C. or buried in college textbooks to burden sophomores. It lives. As surely as the Greeks themselves live.

  The winning brand is pragmatism. From pragma—“deed.” This is the philosophical doctrine that the test of the truth of propositions is their practical result. Never mind what you say or think. What you do and how it works out—that’s what counts. You can read all about pragmatism in the philosophy books. Or you can just watch the Greeks go about their business. The stories that follow come from watching.

  At the airport in Chania, on the west end of the island of Crete, an Olympia Airlines 727 disgorges a hundred yelling passengers into the crowded terminal. Bedlam. Fists and voices raised, women weeping, children wailing. Two passengers leap over a counter to take a punch at the attendant. Police arrive, whistles shrieking, billy clubs in hand.

  Explanation: The passengers were all destined for Heraklion, at the other end of the island. Where, indeed, their luggage has gone by another plane. For reasons unknown, their plane has landed at the wrong city and left the passengers to a hard ride by bus 150 miles to their destination. The passengers want blood. The passengers declare they will commandeer a plane. What the passengers think of those responsible cannot be printed here, but it’s pretty harsh and involves the parenthood and birth of those who run Olympia Airlines and where they may spend eternity.

  One passenger, a stout, well-dressed German tourist who has been pacing in small circles on the edge of the chaos, suddenly begins to shout alternately in German and English: “WHY AM I HERE? WHERE AM I GOING? WHAT MUST I DO? WHAT WILL BECOME OF ME? GOTT IM HIMMEL, HELP ME!”

  His desperate cry is so forceful that the crowd quiets and turns to look at him with concern, as they would consider a mad dog in their midst.

  The airline station manager replies in English across the crowd: “Sir! Sir! These are very old questions. We Greeks have been working on them for two thousand years and they are not easy to answer—not then, not now. In the meantime we will do our best for you. The gods will not be of much help, but Olympia Airlines will see that you get to Heraklion. Please. Get on the bus.”

  The crowd applauds. The passengers file out into the bus, which roars off toward Heraklion. Leaving the German tourist limp, still muttering questions and demanding reasonable answers.

  That afternoon, in a sidewalk café on the seafront esplanade of Chania, I overheard two young Americans arguing over whether human beings were basically bad or basically good. Law students they were. First year. One pointed to his glass of wine and sagely insisted that this question was like whether his wineglass was half full or half empty—a matter of words and opinion. His companion disagreed. “Not so, not so—the precise amount of wine in a glass can be determined with scientific tools, and a definition of full and empty can be agreed upon. That old cliché can be laid to rest!”

  He motioned for the waiter and asked for two empty glasses and something to measure with. Science would provide an answer here, just as sound thinking would resolve the larger issue of human nature.

  The waiter, an old Greek man of solemn years, asked the purpose of the request, and all was explained to him. The waiter looked at the two young men. Then at the glass of wine to be tested for truth. He smiled. Picked up the glass of wine and held it to his nose to smell the aroma. Lifted it in a wordless toast to each of the young travelers and drank it down with relish. He smiled. And walked away.

  Pragmatism. A time to shout and a time to get on the bus. A time to debate and a time to drink the wine.

  FAR TO THE SOUTH AND WEST OF ATHENS, on the rocky coast of the Peloponnesian peninsula, is the village of Stupa/Lefktron. Though not on a standard travel map, it is important as the place where Nikos Kazantzakis wrote his novel Zorba, the greatest modern expression of Greek pragmatism.

  Stupa/Lefktron has had a divided name since the Turkish occupation (before 1883), and is divided today into about thirty-five different political parties—which means there are thirty-five men in the village who can vote. The village is united on two fronts, however.

&nbs
p; First is a burning desire to make as much money out of the tourists as possible in July and August. The other common bond is religion. Greek Orthodox.

  It would be easy, one might think, for economics and religion to come into conflict during tourist season, when who has time to spend Sunday morning in church when everybody is working the cafés and crafts shops and restaurants to get the last drachma out of the tour-bus travelers?

  No problem.

  In the early morning quiet, Father Michaelis has set up a tape deck and speakers in the church courtyard on the hill above the village. And he is broadcasting the service to the village as he sits in his chair taking coffee brought up to him from one of the cafés.

  The mass is three hours long and is always the same and everybody knows it by heart, so it is enough that they hear it and follow it in their hearts as they go about their business. From nine until noon, the village is the church. “Wherever they are, God is also there,” Father Michaelis explained to me, “and whatever they are doing, God is with them. It is no problem. To them, to me, or to God.”

  “And what if the bishop in Athens finds out about this?”

  “Who is going to tell him? And if someone should, who knows? The idea may catch on. It is true that the village should be in church. And so it shall be when September comes. But for now, it is enough that the church is everywhere in the village. Is it not the same, after all?”