GOODBYE
Today we packed up, Tom and Caroline helped me take my things to Efi’s Rooms where I will stay for a month, we had lunch at a seaside cafe and then the ride arrived to take Caroline and Tom the 45 minute ride to the Paros Airport where they boarded a two propeller plane and flew to Athens airport, where Tom will fly out to Asheville at 6 in the morning and Caroline at noon.
So our good time in a modern and comfortable Airbnb with wonderful meals in one great restaurant after another with long afternoons on the beach is over. I just had cold leftover yellow fin tuna and warmed in a skillet linguine for supper in my small room with a hot plate and a little refrigerator at Efi’s place. Tomorrow I will have muesli and milk for breakfast and some more leftover linguine for lunch and will have to find carry out from somewhere for supper. I don’t live the high life in Asheville where there are many wonderful restaurants that I only visit on special occasions and I can’t afford to live the high life here, as much fun as it has been. At home it is Aldi and Trader Joe where I get my meals, which are delicious by the way. And here it will be a carry out home cooked place a mile away and the big grocery store up by the highway.
But the transition that I am making is a transition of much more than food. On November 1 the season is over. The workers in many stores and restaurants will head to Athens to work during the winter. Tourists, even though the weather today in the low 70’s without a cloud in the sky and and pleasant wind, as nice a vacation day as you could have with only 6 degrees difference between noon and midnight, are going to stop coming. Already there are very few tourists and I noticed that in the back of the seaside restaurant where we had lunch today there were old men sitting at tables, passing the day, nursing a drink. The transition that matters is that for the next month I will be living in a beautiful boarded up town with the people who live here year around and whose families have always lived here, the people whose children marched in the parade a few days ago. In a way Naousa will be returning to the days when it wa a fishing town, remote from the world, and there were almost no visitors at all and people earned a living with hard work.
When I moved my things into Efi’s apartment her sister was there and they were having a great time talking. Efi’s family has always lived in Naousa. Besides her sister she has a brother who owns a fishing boat and one who owns a small grocery store.
These are the kinds of people who will be in Naousa for the next month that I am here, old ladies shopping for bread, old men sitting in cafes talking. Or at least this is what I imagine.
And, like them, I will slow down and live in the ordinary way that I live at home. And after a month in extravagant tourist towns: Milan, Taormina, Lettojani, Athens and Naousa I will return to ordinary life in the way I eat and how I quietly spend the day. I look forward to it.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 