OCTOBER 25, MONDAY

NHT/EHT

NOTHING HAPPENED TODAY. I got up early in the dark with the wind banging the door to the roof. I looked at my email, removing shrill pleas from Democrats to throw myself into battle (I don‘t hear from the Republicans, who, I‘m sure are shriller still). I had a bowl of cereal and heated a cup of Nescafé and wrote a response to the day before about white buildings and short grass. Efi brought me up some very sweet cake dripping with honey.

Done with my daily entry I wrote an email letter and then went to Regoussis Cafe for breakfast/lunch. It was a blustery, cool, cloudy day so I retreated to my warm room for the afternoon. I wrote a little in my journal, read a little of a couple of novels, had Facetime calls with Elke, Kathe‘s childhood friend in Germany, and Susie and Todd at Liberty House and Cafe in Asheville, read some more and wrote some more, heated up the leftover Kebabs from the night before and soon, tired out from doing nothing, I went to bed early at 9:30 a time when Greeks are just starting to have fun. Now I am up in the dark writing today‘s report on my trip and then I will find something to do.

EVERYTHING HAPPENED TODAY. Today was the fullest day of the trip so far and so much happened, so much is still swirling in my head, that it would take me pages and pages as I sit here to sort it out.

As happens everyday I am amazed that I am here in Naousa among the white houses with the blue Aegean all around me. All I did was use some of the saved up pandemic money to buy a ticket to Athens on a whim, step in and out of two airplanes and onto the Blue Star Ferry for five hours and I was suddenly here in a magic world. It was so easy, something anyone can do with no effort. Miraculous.

The day before yesterday was my son Tom‘s birthday, yesterday was Kathe‘s 82nd birthday. We always celebrate them together. Yesterday we didn‘t. Instead, I went to Ragoussis cafe and had a celebratory, sumptuous breakfast by myself, drinking an ouzo toast to Kathe, ouzo which Susie had left for this day from a tiny glass that Susie had found when she spent a week at Penland just before we left and knew Kathe would love. I was an invisible old man drinking ouzo from a tiny glass in a corner of the cafe, no one knowing why or caring.

When we married I promised Kathe I would take her to Greece, to the Greece of my dreams because I had never been here. But she wanted to go other places and we never made it here. Now I am here by myself. The biggest thing that has happened on this trip, overshadowing everything, is Kathe‘s death and absence.

I bought the ticket within hours of her dying, a death that I couldn‘t believe then and still don‘t believe. Immediately after she died, was suddenly absent leaving a huge hole, she became alive in a different way. On the website kathemosher.com and at her church celebration in July she was no longer an old woman sliding into delusions whose body suddenly gave out to cancer. Her presence, that was so palpable, was of her as she came around the corner of her father‘s car when I first saw her and fell in love with her, whatever love is since it is so many things. She is the young woman energetically spinning the wheel as she made clay pots at Minnie Singh‘s pottery in Delhi the year we spent in India when the kids were 4 and 6. She is a loving grandmother holding both of her granddaughters in her arms. She is the old lady who danced for everyone at her 70th, then her 80th birthday parties. She is so alive as a presence in so many ways.

All of that was present yesterday when nothing was happening.

When Elke facetimed she showed me a little shrine in her house with photographs of Kathe and a candle burning on her birthday. And I could feel whatever it is in me that impels me along slowly turning to Winsen, Germany, Kathe‘s childhood home, where I and Susie will be in ten days or so. I have shifted from domestic life in Swannanoa to floating free in Naousa and now the shift is on again and I am half in Naousa and half in Winsen. And being suddenly in Winsen will seem as amazing as suddenly being in Naousa. Am I anywhere?

But more than that happened yesterday when nothing was happening. Besides, through Facetime, being in Winsen and at Liberty House and Cafe where we escaped with Kathe often last year when it was safe to do so, I was in other places and other times. I was in the presence of so many people in so many places and always am. I was in Brevard and Black Mountain through email and New York and Asheville and even in mainland Greece with Christos Zois, an old student, over Facebook chat for four minutes between English lessons he was giving. I was with Tom as he celebrated his birthday at Seabrook with Kathy. It was a day when I didn‘t know where I was.

And to make it more complicated in my reading of stories I was under the spell of Sally Rooney and the characters of her imagination in Beautiful World, Where Are You?, young women in Dublin wrestling with the tension between home and a world falling apart, who were as real as the actual people in my life although I am not sure if the actual people are themselves as they feel themselves to be or are projections of presences that I have made them to be. At the end of the day in three stories I was in the sad, intense world of Elizabeth Strout and her alter self Olive Kitteridge and while in her presence, which shut out everything else, I was in bleak New England. I was everywhere yesterday and in every place and in every time. In my iPad and the Cloud I have 1000 novels with me and all the music of the world and connections to people who touch me everywhere. In one way I am an old man with two shirts and two pants, invisible in a small room in Naoussa, and in another I am alive and wondering everywhere and everytime. We all are.

So many people that I care about are gone, good male friends, family members, and most of all, Kathe. That is the price of getting old. I don‘t know if I am among the living or among the dead, I don‘t know which is more real. I feel as if I am either the living dead or the dead living. And I felt this especially yesterday, a day when nothing happened.

At the end of the day Eva, Kathe’s brother Hinnerk’s daughter, in Hamburg played birthday music for Kathe, a Bach Cello Suite, Kathe’s favorite composer in this video.

https://share.icloud.com/photos/0crlKzSpUFPYBPur22bFnLjZA#Paros

So that is just a little bit of what happened yesterday, a day that was so full that I don‘t know how to process it, so I will just let it go and move on to the next day and maybe write about cats.