CHAPTER 8:  Mykonos, Delos

The sea is full of white caps and foam, and the boat bucks and pitches from side to side. A shudder travels from the front of the boat to the back as we lunge into a large wave. 

After Zeus whipped his father, Kronos, and gained power over the world, the three brothers, Zeus, Hades and Poseidon divided the world among them. Zeus took the sky, Hades the Underworld and Poseidon became god of sea and land. Poseidon was known as “Lord of the Brine” and “Earthshaker,” god of earthquakes. He was a grudge-holder, volatile and violent, the god who churned the sea to foam, and perpetually irritable. He kept Odysseus from finding his way home. Poseidon was a bearded, gigantic god with tangled, seaweed-like hair and hurled a trident. He was the god who made the islands of the Aegean:

... at the very first the mighty god [Poseidon] smote the mountains with the three-forked sword which the Telchines [mythical artificers] fashioned for him, and wrought the islands in the sea, and from their lowest foundations lifted them all as with a lever and rolled them into the sea ... And them in the depths he rooted from their foundations that they might forget the mainland.[1]

More recently Poseidon has come to represent the deep sea of the collective unconscious, that hidden knowledge shared by all human beings and which is the storehouse of mythology.

Poseidon was the father of Theseus, and when Theseus left Athens for Crete with Minos as a part of the nine year tribute, the two argued and fell to telling tall tails of their parentage. To test Theseus’ claim of being the sun of Poseidon, Minos threw his signet ring into the sea and told Theseus to ask Poseidon to help him retrieve it if he was the god's son. Theseus dived into the sea without hesitation and with the help of dolphins and sea nymphs returned not only with the ring but also with a jeweled crown given him by the sea goddess Thetis. Today, Poseidon is showing to be his old irritable self, the ferry loping through a rough sea. After reading the International Herald Tribune, my stomach doesn’t feel as well as it could. The heat in the ferry is stifling. 

We make a quick stop at Syros, and I step out on deck, shoot a couple of pictures of the island. Wind still blows but it’s warmed some. The rain has stopped. The buildings in Syros are tan and climb the slopes of mountains. It looks sun-baked, desolate.

I feel different now that I’m among the islands. Land felt warm and mothering but being in the Aegean feels unfriendly, threatening. No matter which direction I look, I see the pale-purple outlines of naked islands protruding above the rough sea. I feel unbalanced, as if I’m stone-stepping, but yet, wild, excited. The ferry is homey with the Greeks' chitchat.

Of the 2000 Greek islands, only 166 are inhabited.[2] We are in the Cyclades, so named from the Greek kukloV, (kyklos) meaning circle or cycle, which the islands form about the ancient religious center at the small island of Delos. Delos, the birthplace of Apollo and his twin sister Artemis, is the most important religious center in the Aegean. Delos is uninhabited and to get there I must stay in Mykonos and take a day trip. But mostly I’m looking past these two islands to that of Santorini at the southern extreme of the Cyclades. Santorini is still an active volcano. South of Santorini is the large island of Crete where I’ll stay perhaps a week. Letizia said Crete was wonderful.

The direction of my journey after Crete is a question mark. The travel agent in Athens told me I could not get to the Dodecanesse in the eastern Aegean from Crete and must return to Athens to catch the ferry to Rhodes off the western coast of Turkey. The word Dodecanesse comes from the Greek word for twelve, dwdeka (dodeka) meaning twelve islands. If possible, I’ll go from Crete to Rhodes, the southern most of the Dodecanesse. From there, I’ll go to Patmos the northern most island in that group. I’m still in a hurry to get to Patmos to visit the cave where St. John wrote Revelations. After visiting Patmos, my three part journey among the Aegean islands will be complete, and I’ll try to enter mainland Turkey to visit Troy, site of the Trojan War.

We make another quick stop, this time at Tinos. More beautiful buildings, white with orange roofs and at dockside, a row of Greek flags, the blue and white stripes flapping frantically in the brisk breeze. I go back inside and sit next to Anna, talk to her about DC and her work as a paralegal, try to get my mind off my father. She seems distant, formal, hints she’s not interested in talking to another American.

Never before have I wondered what went through my father’s head during the fifteen seconds it took him to walk the hall and open the closet, grab the deer rifle. At some point between the time we argued and him opening the closet door, he made a decision. Did it really take no more time than that to decide to kill me? No long hours of anguish contemplating what I’d done, thinking of his feelings for me before he decided? His action was spontaneous. Was this the first time he’d contemplated killing me, or had it been a touch-and-go issue for some time? Was our argument simply the last straw? Had my father been actively planning my murder for days, months, years? Since he already knew Fred was homosexual, did he believe I was too? Was that what made his decision easy? Or had he hated me my entire life?

In Carl Jung’s essay On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry, he speaks of the collective unconscious, this Poseidon thing, as an image within the individual handed down from primordial times:

The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure ... that constantly recurs in the course of history ... therefore, it is a mythological figure. ... When we examine these images more closely, we find that they give form to countless typical experiences of our ancestors. They are, so to speak, the psychic residua of innumerable experiences of the same type. They present a picture of psychic life in the average, divided up and projected into the manifold figures of the mythological pantheon. ... In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history, and on the average follow ever the same course. It is like a deeply graven river-bed in the psyche, in which the waters of life, instead of flowing along as before in a broad but shallow stream, suddenly swell into a mighty river. This happens whenever that particular set of circumstances is encountered which over long periods of time has helped to lay down the primordial image.

The moment when this mythological situation reappears is always characterized by a peculiar emotional intensity; it is as though chords in us were struck that had never resounded before, or as though forces whose existence we never suspected were unloosed... At such moments we are no longer individuals, but the race; the voice of all mankind resounds in us.[3]

No doubt my father and I experienced a “mythological situation.” Perhaps my father had not been actively plotting my murder but had been swept up in the “peculiar emotional intensity” of the moment. My discovery of my own hostility toward him when I was in Mykinai is not something I’ve consciously noticed either, but now I’m aware it has always been there. It was active during our argument in front of my mother and while dueling with the tractor tires. I felt nothing when he was loading the deer rifle but a little later when we dueled with the tires, I filled with emotion, a curious blend of pleasure that he had finally taken me seriously, and pain at seeing him so disturbed. And condescension, outright arrogance.

Searching out Jung's "deeply graven river-beds" of emotional content in my life has produced results. I've found parallels to the ancient myths. Our lives seems a sort of artwork. In the same way a novelist pieces together a story, we piece together our personal myth. In this way I'm beginning to see the underlying meaning inherent in my own life.

My family has a secret history. Skeletons hang back in the shadows of our closets dancing the delicate dance of family inheritance. Our failure to air these troubling stories is reminiscent of Thebes’ failure to hunt down the murder of Laios. My own problems are like the plague that eventually forced Oedipus to delve into his own past. When the shepherd, who witnessed Oedipus murder of Laios,  returned to Thebes, he found Oedipus ruling the city and married to the queen. Instead of exposing Oedipus, he asked to be sent to the far fields to herd sheep. He suppressed the truth. Even the officials of Thebes, including Jocasta’s brother Creon who was ruling Thebes as regent, made no attempt to bring the murderer to justice.

My family is marked by hardworking, socially-responsible, self-sufficient citizenship (with a certain notable exception). We get along well at family get-togethers, anniversaries, weddings, Thanksgiving, Christmas. But an explosiveness lies beneath the surface that erupts from time to time and redirects our lives. No one wants those events exposed to public scrutiny. We talk around events like those surrounding my paternal grandfather's move from Magazine, Arkansas to Tishomingo, Oklahoma. I had heard about his relocation all my life, heard my father and grandfather talk about it many times, but what they never said was that my great grandfather forced him to leave. He got my grandfather out of Magazine because he was planning to kill a man.

This story slipped out one afternoon just a few years ago when we were sitting at the kitchen table in my aunt’s home. We had all gathered there for my uncle’s funeral. My father said it quietly, almost in a whisper. My grandfather was going to kill a man who, along with some other men, had disgraced his father, my great grandfather, by tying him up and pulling out all his pubic hair. This group of men humiliated my great grandfather because they'd heard he was illegitimate. Like the mothers of both Theseus and Perseus, his mother was unsure of the father although she did give him the surname of the man she thought might be the father. I could well imagine if she had lived in the time of the ancient Greeks, she would have stated quite emphatically, “Zeus did it. He took the form of liquid gold and flowed through my womb.” But with no such explanation readily available, my great grandfather almost went crazy with uncertainty. The word “bastard” has floated down through the generations with a particularly weighty meaning. My family seems to still be cursed by these events. The ancient Greeks knew about inherited curses. Sophocles wrote of them and the impact on Oedipus’ family in his play Antigone:

Blest are they whose days have not tasted of evil. For when a house hath once been shaken from heaven, there the curse fails nevermore, passing from life to life of the race; even as, when the surge is driven over the darkness of the deep by the fierce breath of Thracian sea-winds, it rolls up the black sand from the depths, and there is a sullen roar from wind-vexed headlands that front the blows of the storm.

I see that from olden time the sorrows in the house of the Labdacidae [Oedipus’ grandfather] are heaped upon the sorrows of the dead; and generation is not freed by generation, but some god strikes them down, and the race hath no deliverance.[4]

Since learning this family secret, I’ve wondered if it is the reason my paternal grandfather was an alcoholic and abused his family. He once held my grandmother to the floor with a butcher knife to her throat shouting he was going to kill her. Their kids (my aunts, uncles and father) cowered in the corners of their home. this may explain in some twisted fashion why Uncle Jud used to chase my grandmother around the house threatening her with a butcher knife.

This tendency toward emotional explosions is part of my entire family’s emotional backdrop. It’s a contagion, a disease passed from generation to generation. Perhaps this a part of the “remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history.” It’s like the inherited curse which Laios left to Oedipus, and Atreus left to Agamemnon and the succeeding generations of their families.

I also know some interesting stories from my mother’s side of the family. My maternal great grandmother was borne of a surrogate mother. My great great grandmother could not have children, so they talked their neighbor’s wife into having a baby by my great great grandfather and giving it to them. When my mother told me, she said that her mother had told her, and only one child in each generation was to know.

What was not passed along by my mother, and I don’t imagine was told at the time, was how my great great grandfather felt the night he crawled in bed with this widow and slipped between her legs. They don’t tell how many times he had to go bed with her before she conceived, her husband’s voluntary celibacy, possibly months, to ensure he wouldn’t be the father. These were religious people living righteous lives. The stories are antiseptic, sterile, but the actual events were messy, full of erections, vaginas, body fluids and heavy breathing. They don’t tell about the mother’s anguish when she gave the baby up to my great great grandmother.

But now, to illustrate the really mythic quality of these stories, I'll slip in a little variation. My mother recently told me that my great great grandfather on my father's side was not a bastard but definitely legitimate, so that now I've even started questioning the details of my grandfather's reasons leaving Arkansas. And later she told me that the surrogate mother who gave birth to my great grandmother was a widow. So much of the intrigue, the husband's anguish, of that situation vanishes. Myth is like that. Memory is like that. It drifts. Many ancient Greeks accused Homer of lying in his epic poetry. Some of the details are changed, some events covered up, others added to increase the emotional impact or provide a more compelling storyline or increase its emotional intensity. All of it is affected by the magnetism of Jung's "mythical situation." I'm no longer even so sure that the emotional abuse is what causes the emotional inheritance to be passed from generation to generation. We may be pulling the mythic material out of our subconscious and into the story of our lives so that we contaminate our memories. Human beings are really complex creatures.

Arriving at Mykonos is like a homecoming, a crowd at the dock anxiously awaiting our arrival. I stand at the railing as we enter the quiet seaport, the ferry towering over the dock, seemingly dwarfing the entire island. 

The afternoon sun is bright, the air warm; and the small crowd waits patiently while the ferry rotates 180 degrees to dock aft end first. I take a deep breath and head for the gangway.

The place seems so delightful, I can't wait to see what kind of room I can commandeer.

Mykonos was of scant importance to the ancient Greeks but is famous today for its beauty and nightlife. It looks so tiny, friendly. So many smiling faces. Some have come to meet relatives, but most have come for me and other travelers who need a place for the night. A woman with golden hair and a pretty face tries to commandeer me for an apartment she has available. After looking at her three-ring binder with snapshots of the luxurious interior, I’m suspicious because of the low price.

I walk away from her to the Tourist Information Office, but they quote prices I can’t afford. But they are uncommonly helpful, say I may do better working my own deal directly. So I go back to the blond woman. She throws my backpack in the trunk of her car, and we make the short drive to the center of town. She’s German and has lived on Mykonos for the past seven years. She says I’ve come to Mykonos during a tourist’s no-man’s-land, past the end of the off season, and accommodations are very cheap. I'm still wondering about the room. Can't be that nice, I think. She parks in a plateia at the edge of the sea, then leads me through a maze of whitewashed buildings and tiny streets. 

We enter the newly renovated apartment through the kitchen which has a white refrigerator to the right and cabinets and sink directly before me. Immediately I know I’m taking this apartment. The place is beyond her glowing photos and words. A large hot plate sits on the counter top. To the left is a sofa and at the end of it, just before I go into the hall, is a rectangular table with three chairs pushed against the wall. Through the hall, the bathroom is to the right with the bedroom straight ahead. It has two single beds separated by a night stand, a closet, a window and a ladder which ascends to a loft with another bed. The apartment is two toned, pure-white walls and varnished natural-pine doors, cabinets, and baseboards. Quite a change from the old dirty hotel in Corinth. The place is clean, positively antiseptic, and has no mosquitoes. Only one fly.

So why do I suddenly miss my hotel room in Corinth? I tell you, Greece has a way of working on the mind. In spite of all the offenses each place has perpetrated on my senses, they are all jewels. I'd hate the think I'd never get to visit them again.

The beautiful German woman scribbles her name and telephone number on a business card and is out the door quickly. “Call if you need anything,” she says.  

I go for a walk and run into the young lady from DC, Anna. She’s replaced her gray skirt and business jacket with Levis and a T-shirt and looks much younger, childlike; her manner, tentative, guarded. 

We walk the streets together for a while, the warm neon-glow of lights off the stunning white-stucco buildings with deep-blue shutters and a labyrinth of narrow streets and tourist shops, giving Mykonos a magic feel.  The town is almost deserted, no trucks, no motorbikes. Huge cartoon-like pelicans with long beaks stand outside the shops like pitiful people, wisdom emanating from their sad eyes. They stand to my shoulder, attract crowds like celebrities. The wind has picked up again and it’s cold.

Anna still has little to say, still guarded and defensively justifies her choice of a room when I tell her about my apartment. We go our separate ways.

---

I wake in the middle of the night with wind rattling the shutters. That is the only sound on this isolated island. For the first time I strain to hear a motorbike.

I lie awake thinking of my father and hoping this new insight into his motive for loading the deer rifle will not open the door to the madness I experienced that fall when I tried to resume college. I remember the extraordinary loneliness I felt that night when the grotesque faces came out of the darkness, like horrible Dionysus begging me into his world, and sent me running to my insane uncle. Again I question my decision to get into this emotional material while alone in a foreign country. But it all seems irresistible while visiting these ancient sites and mulling over the mythology.

The wind raking the shallow slopes of this island has stopped. Not even the rattle of the shutters do I hear. Mykonos seems such a desolate part of the world tonight, out here in the middle of the Aegean.

 

29 Oct, Friday

I go to the waterfront for breakfast, have an apple pie and a carton of Milko at the local bakery. Waves pound the shore, wind rakes the shops and streets. I hurry to the tourist office to see about a ferry to Delos. The man tells me no ferry will leave for Delos today. “Tomorrow?” I ask. He throws up both hands. “The only ferry from Mykonos is going to Santorini tomorrow morning.” I’m shocked and stand before him sorting through a mass of inappropriate responses trying to find one which is reasonable and not laden with the anger welling up within me. “What do you mean ‘the only ferry?’ When will there be another to Santorini?” He throws up his hands again. “A week, two weeks. Who knows? The weather, it is not good for the ferryboats.”

I had my heart set on seeing Delos and spending all of today on Mykonos is really upsetting. To see Delos I’ll have to stay here a week afterward with nothing to do. Maybe coming to Greece in the off season was a mistake. With the kind of problem I now have, I can also imagine what I’ll be up against trying to get into Turkey.

I walk to the old pier where boats to Delos depart and find an American couple there trying to coerce a skipper into taking them across the short strait to Delos in his small boat. Realizing this is my battle also, I join their negotiations and offer to help make it worth the man’s while. Finally he relents, and shortly we’re being tossed about on the rough sea, and I’m wondering what I’ve gotten myself into. Sea spray drives me to look for cover against the side of the cabin. Instantly I’m seasick. I don’t quite make it to the rail for my first episode of vomiting and hear a tirade of unappreciative Greek when he sees what I’ve done to his deck. I could really give a shit with the way my stomach feels.

The half hour it takes to get to Delos is an eternity in sick-time, and I feel my stomach quiet as the water smoothes and we dock at the most desolate looking country in the world. Delos is a barren island, though it was known as “the far-seen star of the dark-blue earth”[5] by the ancient Greeks. Callimachus described the island in one of his hymns written in the 3rd century BC:

Wind-swept and stern is she set in the sea, and, wave-beaten as she is, is fitter haunt for gulls than course for horses. The sea, rolling greatly round her, casts off on her much spindrift of the Icarian water [the Icarian sea]. Wherefore also sea-roaming fishermen have made her their home.[6]

Though the setting is the same today, no one is allowed to live on Delos except archaeologists. Delos was the hub of the Cyclades, the birth place of Apollo and Artemis. Even Odysseus came to Delos to sacrifice to the two gods on his way to the Trojan war. He saw the tree Leto used as an aid in giving birth and described it:

          ... when I saw that palm, my wonder  
was piercing, lasting, for no trunk has ever
grown from the earth to match that tree ...[7]

Theseus also came to Delos as he returned from Crete after killing the Minotaur. Theseus had been assisted by Minos’ beautiful daughter Ariadne who was madly in love. She returned with him on his journey back to Athens but died in childbirth on the island of Naxos hear Delos. In his grief, Theseus:

... put in at Delos, and having sacrificed to the god of the island, dedicated to the temple the image of Venus [Aphrodite] which Ariadne had given him, and danced with the young Athenians a dance ... consisting in certain measured turnings and returnings, imitative of the windings and twisting of the labyrinth. And this dance ... is called among the Delians the Crane.[8]

Theseus was still in mourning for Ariadne when he returned to Athens and forgot to switch the color of his flag from black to white and his father, thinking Theseus was dead, threw himself from the Akropolis and died.

Zeus and Leto (not his wife Hera) were the father and mother of the twins Apollo and Artemis. Leto was one of the most liked goddess on Olympos. “She was swathed in dark raiment, but was always gracious, mild as honey and the most pleasant divinity on Olympus.”[9] According to Hesiod, the two kids were “comelier than all the other sky-dwelers.”[10]  Leto gave birth  

“... as she leaned against Mount Kynthos, on the rocky and sea-girt island of Delos, while on either side a dark wave swept landwards impelled by shrill winds...”[11]

Artemis was born first and assisted in delivering Apollo. Leto could not give birth to him for nine days and nights. Zeus was continuously unfaithful, and Hera took her jealousy out even on good-natured Leto, doing everything within her power to cause Leto trouble during delivery. The goddesses were all present except Eileithyia, goddess of labor pains, and Hera who restrained Eileithyia from going to Delos to assist Leto. The goddesses sent Iris to steal Eileithyia away from Hera:

And when Eileithyia ... set foot on Delos, the pains of labor seized Leto, and she yearned to give birth. She threw her two arms round the palm tree, and propped her knees on the soft meadow while the earth beneath her was all smiles. Apollon sprang forth to the light, and all the goddesses screamed.[12]

Of all the things which have occurred in my life, the birth of my children, the sound of children’s voices around the house, has been my greatest joy. My son was born first and my daughter three years later. The morning my son was born, I fell asleep in the hospital waiting room. They didn’t allow father’s in the delivery room then, and I remember feeling left out as my wife walked away from me with the nurse. I saw my new born son in the incubation camber and that evening saw my wife during visiting hours. I never expected him to be so sourly disposed toward me when I tried to attract his attention while he was nursing. He grew up willful and creative with a definite fondness for beating things, loved to destroy what he'd created with his building blocks. My son and I didn’t repeat the confrontation I had with my father. Before my son became a young man, my wife left me.

I saw my daughter the first time as I walked down the hall toward the delivery room. The doctor was walking toward me with a bundle in his arms wrapped in a blanket. When I first held her she was still waxy, had a sunk-in forehead and blood on the side of her face. I had had a premonition our second child would be a girl, so I wasn't surprised at all. In the same way the islands of the Cyclades form a circle or wheel spinning around the small island of Delos, so does the second part of my life, spin around a single event, my daughter's disappearance.

I walk onto the island and through the largest site of ruins I’ve seen so far in Greece, still trying to shake some equilibrium into my swirling head. The island is an absolute desert, a lizard-infested, granite-covered piece of dirt plopped down in the middle of a nest of islands. It’s very small, only five square kilometers. In spite of its wind-blown, sea-pounded desert terrain, Delos has been inhabited since the 3rd millennium BC. I walk away from the dock, and instead of turning left to the Terrace of the Lions, I walk to the right to climb Mt. Kynthos. At the very top is where Artemis and Apollo were born. I ascend a flight of steps to the 113 meter summit. From here I can see Mykonos in the east, Rheneia just to the west, Paros and Noxos to the south and Tinos to the north. Quite a cluster of islands jutting up out of the raging sea. But I can't concentrate on these ruins knowing I have another trial ahead of me, on way back to Mykonos.

Sure enough, the boat ride back is just as sick-logged as that to the island. The other two Americans also throw up their socks. When we hit dock, I don’t waste any time disembarking, desperately seeking firm ground again. Our skipper doesn’t seem very impressed with our seafaring performance. As I shell out the extra money it's cost us to get him to take us, he mutters something about it being a lot of money for a little misery.

---

I have a late lunch with the American couple at an outdoor restaurant at the edge of the sea. They are from San Antonio, Texas and have been on the road for two weeks. They will leave for Crete tomorrow. I ask if they are going to see Santorini, the island volcano. They don’t have time, they say. They only have two days left and plan to fly back from Crete to Athens day after tomorrow.

Emptying my stomach on the boat has left me ravenous and after the kalamari I have a little piece of honey-dripping desert. The tables have two tablecloths again, one red, the other white. The wood chairs are baby blue. What is so appealing about this restaurant is its closeness to the sea, the bright sunlight reflecting off the choppy water. An occasional cloud of cold spray from the waves crashing on shore washes over me while I have a Greek coffee.  

After lunch, I walk further around the bay to where windmills sit at the edge of the sea looking out toward the vast openness pocked with white-capped waves and heavy clouds sitting over the pale cliffs of Delos.

The windmills are brilliant white, thick circular structures with dark thatched roofs. A short rock fence circles each with a gap for an entrance. I walk away from the sea to the far side of town where the whitewash-soaked streets and buildings gradually become ordinary asphalt and stucco and lose the magic as they climb the rocky hillside. This little town has been set up as a showpiece for tourists, the rest of the island where the Greeks evidentially go about their lives, is rather common. I wonder if I should take another day to explore what is undoubtedly the more interesting part of the island?

In the evening, I sit at a table in the plateia in the center of town listening to waves breaking and thinking about my predicament. It’s decision time. The ferry to Santorini comes bright and early tomorrow morning. The next may be another week. I fight the wind to keep the pages of my journal open as I write in the pale light of the plateia. From the beginning of my journey, I’ve been afraid I would have problems with ferry schedules this late in the year, and here I am in trouble on my first Aegean island. Finally, I make the decision. I would like to see more of Mykonos, but I’ll be on the ferry when it leaves tomorrow morning for Santorini.

Two rows of cars are parked end-to-end in the center of the dark plateia. They are pointed out to sea, and the wind rakes a fine sea mist across them. Several people stand around a pickup parked in the dark at the edge of the pier. I stick my journal in my daypack and walk into the small crowd where a man is selling fruit and vegetables out of the bed of the pickup. The rush of sea waves breaking on the retaining wall fogs my glasses. I shudder from the cold. The customers jostle for position and argue with the man about the selection of fruit which is disappearing fast, particularly the bananas. Everything is expensive. I shove my way in, point at the bananas and grapes saying, “kilo, kilo,” then try to discourage him from selecting rotten fruit. The condition of the grapes isn’t apparent in the dark. The sea spray is bitter cold. The wind whips at my hair, coat and pant legs.

I leave the plateia to get out of the wind and move to the white shoulder-width street in front of my apartment. All the buildings in Mykonos are whitewashed as are the seams between the large cement blocks paving the alleys. Everything not white is trimmed in white. The streets are lit only by porch lights. The light flickers just above me on the second story apartment. I have trouble seeing the steps that ascend to it. The glow from the lights against all the white surfaces is like snow, a whiteout. Even the shadows have a strange glow. The deep blue of the dark sky is visible in the stripe the street carves out between buildings. At the end of the street, puffs of clouds reflect the whiteness of Mykonos. I eat one of the bananas from the pickup truck vendor. It’s the sweetest banana I’ve ever tasted.

The quietness of last night has been shattered by a “local pump & hump shop,” a gymnasium where one woman and several dark men with huge arms lift weights. The disco music echoes down the alleyway. A television blares a Greek news broadcast.

I was never mad at the man who took my wife away from me. I was very civilized about the whole thing. He wouldn’t come into my home because he was afraid of me. When my ex-wife told me this, I thought it was funny. But something not so funny came of it. Seven years ago, I had a run-in with a business associate while on a business trip in Europe. There were four of us traveling together: my son, my boss, and Harry, who had been a good friend for several years. We were in Munich during Octoberfest and had each just drunk a liter of dunkel weissen at the English garden in the center of Munich, walked through a park littered with nude sunbathers and to a pub close to our hotel. We were having another beer when a girl came by selling flowers. Harry bought one and told her to give it to a blond woman at the bar. He told the flower-girl to tell her it was from me. When she found out where the flowers came from she asked the four of us joined her and her other female friend at the bar. A few minutes later, I became someone I had never been before.

All is quiet again. The music has stopped as has the metallic clang of weights and blare of the television. But the wind continues to whine through the streets and rattle shutters. Down the alleyway, I hear a dog bark.

30 Oct, Saturday

Up early but the ferry to Santorini leaves at eight-thirty, so I take my time packing. My backpack gets heavier at every departure. I now have quite a collection of guide books. I’m writing so much I bought another journal here in Mykonos, a blue one which has a hard cloth binding but is internally stapled instead of sewn, definitely not from the States. I lumber back to the dock along the street where the German woman drove me two days ago. The weather is clear but the wind gusts tug at me as I stand at the dock talking to a young American couple on their way to Crete. The ferry is late, but by nine o’clock we see it off in the distance, a thin sliver of white against blue sea.

We enter the ferry, up the gangway into the hold with the motor so loud we have to shout to be heard, and then off to the right through a metal door we climb metal stairs. This time, we’re not allowed inside the passenger compartment with the cushioned seats. Guards are posted at all the doors. I feel like a convict as they force us further up the stairs to the top deck where we sit outside in rows of cold plastic seats. I throw my pack across two of them and stand at the back of the boat by the rail alongside a group of tourists watching the long stripe of bubbles in our wake as we leave dock. The cool air in my hair feels refreshing, but the sea gets progressively choppy the further we are from the island. We’re headed south, and off to the right less than a kilometer away, I see the pale blue coast of Delos.