part 1 of goddesses, grandmas and orange trees
My grandmother’s carry-on was quite large. She packed a pair of high-heeled boots, black slacks, jeans, white pants, five shirts, and long underwear and button-ups, pullovers and camisoles. She passed through security with a hundred ounces of liquids; well over today’s limit. Could this seventy-year old dame lift this bag up and over her soft grey bob? Could she slide it into the overhead bin? My mom and I speculated that the nice boy sitting a row behind had hoisted the luggage above her window seat.
Penny, Susan, and I buckled into row sixteen, seats A, B, and C. The three of us, three generations of Taylor women, waited on the Paris runway. We practiced Greek vocabulary words since we would land in Athens in three hours. I couldn’t concentrate because I had never traveled with Penny before. She seemed foreign to me as we soared above Bulgaria and the Aegean Sea. I pictured her at the end of dusty Snug Harbor Lane, patiently grinning with her hands folded behind her back. She was waiting for our mini-van after a stale car trip from the Midwest. I could also picture her in Milwaukee, walking my dog and baking an egg and sausage breakfast casserole. She has always been a grandmother, goddess of the family, but during this week I saw her as a queen of wisdom and adventure.
On the train into downtown Athens, I looked over. Penny sat in her beige packable raincoat and held her suitcase close. She was talking with a silver-haired man, his face protruded with Greek charm. She pointed out the window, her knuckles knobby from arthritis. In her southern drawl, she asked him, “So are these the famous olive trees?”
In fact, all we could see were olive trees. But Penny received a private lesson in Greek flora while Susan droned on about the surgeons in the Operating Room. Hoping to distract my mom, I asked her opinion of Penny’s new friend, “Handsome?”
His silvery hair glistened like the fluttering olive leaves along the train tracks. His skin was tan; his nose and chin a little hooked. His English was good—romantically infused with a Mediterranean accent. Penny chose her cultural teacher quite well, I thought.
“He’s better looking than his girlfriend,” my mom responded.
A younger girl sat next to the Grecian god, clutching half a dozen roses. She smiled politely at Penny and looked proudly at her companion. Perhaps she forgot all of her high school English. Perhaps she regretted that an American grandmother had stolen her man’s attention.
After leaving the flower girl and handsome man at the Acropolis metro stop, we entered Athens self-consciously, unsure of how to find our hotel. The grey skies matched the Parisian winter we had left behind. We walked down a narrow side street of Cold War era apartment buildings, bleak, blocky and anonymous, but lined with fruiting orange trees.
“We are so lucky,” said Susan. Wandering amongst orange trees seemed better than wandering amongst Stalinist architecture. In our Midwestern minds, we were parading through a Roman colonnade. In this contemporary version, the polished marble columns were replaced with colorful trees.
My mom was right. We were lucky. I trusted that the abundance of olives and oranges signaled a good weekend awaited us. I pictured the three of us lounging on park benches, squeezing orange juice into our mouths and creating a mountain of peels. To pay tribute to the bygone goddesses Artemis, Demeter and Athena, we’d eat honey-flavored ambrosia and teach the mortals a lesson. We’d clean up by five, to order Penny a class of Chardonnay.
Still lost, we stood on the corner of a busy street. Susan was busy rotating the map in a dizzying effort to orient herself and the hotel. She was magnetizing her own compass rose. My eyes kept darting from the street signs to the Lonely Planet. I couldn’t match the Greek alphabet with the Romanized spellings in the guidebook.
Nearby Penny was talking to another stranger, maybe this time asking about Athens’ orange trees. But she interrupted my mom and me and said, “Stick with me girls, anyone will help a nice old lady. The hotel is straight ahead.”
We left our bags at the hotel, and hiked up the deserted Acropolis. Crumbling walls and columns hugged the grassy hillside. Stones of ancient marble, shipped in from the Grecian islands thousands of years ago, led us towards theaters where actors and rhetoricians spread the stories of Socrates and theories of democracy.
The sun was setting over the sprawling, whitewashed city below. At the summit, the floodlights flicked on, illuminating the Parthenon, a temple to the goddess Athena. For years Athenians have slept peacefully, comforted that the city’s patron goddess would watch over them through the night. When I was six, I spent a week with Penny at Snug Harbor Lane. I slept on a cot, on the floor next to my grandparents’ bed. They were there when I closed my eyes, and they would be there in the morning. I was lucky to spend a weekend among goddesses, grandmas and orange trees.
