LUNCH WITH EFI
On Sunday Efi announced that she was taking me out to eat. Or, rather, she told her niece two doors down that she was taking me out to eat at 1:30 and the niece, who speaks English, told me. Most of the communication between Efi and me has been through interpreters since I speak no Greek and, unlike many Greeks, Efi speaks very little English.
So at 1:30 we got in her car for the drive down to the harbor. But it wasn’t to the Naousa harbor, as I thought it would be, but across a ridge to another harbor town, Ampelas. On the way she pointed out the house of one brother, then another, then a cousin. We arrived at a beautiful harbor seaside restaurant that was filling with people and was full by the time we left. And Efi knew someone at almost every table. Everyone spoke Greek, there wasn’t a tourist in sight. Paros might close up to tourists on November 1, but thousands of people live here year around and many go to a restaurant on Sunday afternoon.
Efi has been feeding me unceasingly, and enough at each meal for two meals. I can hardly keep up and right now have a backlog of three meals in the refrigerator. So I insisted on paying, but not on ordering, since I didn’t know what anything was. So Efi ordered five appetizers. All of them were delicious: soft fish balls, fried calamari, spiced garbanzo beans, Greek salad and Greek French Fries. We split two beers with Efi drinking most of the beer.
It was a beautiful sunny afternoon. The water was bright blue and across from us we could see the bright whitewashed houses on Naxos Island. The food was delicious. We had only one problem. We couldn’t say a word to each other. I tried to start a conversation by asking Efi how many children she had. She picked up her phone and called a translator. I asked her another simple question and she called a translator from the next table. Once in a while a friend from a nearby table would sit with us and talk to Efi in Greek. I wanted to talk, she wanted to talk, we couldn’t talk. But we could eat, which we did, and stared into space and enjoyed each other’s company.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 