Everything on the Menu

Homeric Truthers and the perfect hotel.

Siri and I have built a relationship of sorts. It hasn’t been easy.

I’ve been using it as my GPS here in Greece as I have a quaint residual superstition that Apple collects less data than google and so I’m less observed, followed, or something. I have it set to the male American voice #3. I don’t like using the female voice because it’s made to sound young and, real or not, it’s creepy to be bossing young women around. I don’t care about American Male Voice #3, however, he’s got it coming; pugnacious and sure of himself, he has a hilarious way with Greek street names. He’s also obsessed with back alleys and finding absolutely the most ludicrous way to get from A to B; sometimes with surprising results, like yesterday, when he brought me down the Peloponnese to Olympia across what seemed like the top of the world, a landscape of vistas, rolling hills, orchards, and small roads hushed by the afternoon heat. The day I was leaving from Prevesa, a port/resort city on the western coast handy for the Ionian islands, where I’d only been for a couple of days to catch my breath before my first ferry to my first island and first beach, he first insisted on taking me on a tour of the old town.

I’d had an unlucky arrival at the Prevesa hotel; the lobby was full of retired sunburned Brits, drunk and determined to have a good time, bawling Sweet Caroline at each other and anyone else standing close by. I tried to find another hotel but couldn’t face moving my cases, plus the parking situation had been particularly Greek—I’m learning to relax and doing better—and it was just not good. Next day, after the manager fixed me delicious coffee and gave me a route to explore I had a wonderful day and was sorry in fact to go. Then there was the old town. What Siri wanted to check out the morning I left. Coming to impossible corners he’d bark, Turn Left! when I couldn’t, didn’t want to, was sick of his shit, and needed to get going. After going in circles watching it get later as I wished I had left that half hour earlier I hadn’t been sure about, I cut the cord and headed for the first main road I saw on the screen. And we were off.

And in an hour or so, there was the ferry. I had my ticket to show the guy on the dock. He put me in line to load early as we were coming off last, and then the car was loaded and I was free to go up on deck to watch us leave, to watch us sail out, to look at the smaller islands passing, to wait for Ithaca, to chart our course on my phone’s GPS (fun to do and it stops you from wondering Do I Get Off Here as land approaches when you can see this isn’t your port and there’s a way still to go), and see Ithaca up ahead, be sure that’s the island, watch as we make the final approach, get back into the car, drive out in turn, and be there on the dock in the bright sunlight to follow a short line of cars heading up a steep road to the corniche that winds around the island for Vathy, where I would be staying.

It’s said say that hotel doesn’t exist any more. You know, the one you dream about finding on Expedia but never do. You sometimes see it in quirky British dramedies with Maggie Smith and Judi Dench. They’re sisters or something, half-sisters, same father/mother different species. It usually begins with them getting off something, a bus, or train, or ferry, perhaps Ms Dench slightly frazzled in rumpled white (costumes by Jane Greenwood) but Ms Smith, in a change of pace, elegant in linen. As they look around, hoping for perhaps a reception of some sort, Ms Smith notices Bill Nighy perhaps striding off the dock toward a waiting taxi. To attract his attention, she drops her library book (I have no idea why she would have a library book but this is a quirky detail) hoping he’ll pick it up and maybe offer a lift, but he grumpily pretends he hasn’t seen and is driven away. At this point, a handsome young Greek man grinning with the radiance of a thousand suns drives up in a ramshackle taxi. When they tell him the name of their hotel he gives them a pitying glance, they get in, and drive off. There will now be a sequence of island sights with music under and a couple of close-ups on the ladies. Coming in to Vathy, they notice good-looking young people on motorbikes, spinning around the harbor. ‘Noisy, smelly things,’ Ms Smith remarks causing Ms Dench to smile ruefully. The taxi will turn up the hill and there it is: the little hotel that doesn’t exist any more, pink and cream, with marble steps and a gate set in a wall of pale stone. The ladies stand to one side as Stavros—the handsome taxi driver whose part will expand to no one’s surprise—unloads their luggage as the proprietor, perhaps Jim Broadbent as a courtly Greek, comes down the steps to greet them.

Then stuff happens, characters learn, grow, change, fall in love—there might be a surprising twist or two, it is 2025 after all—and new lives, new hopes will be formed. The final scene will feature Ms Dench and Mr Nighy, sitting in a café, both slightly deflated with the news that Mr Broadbent and Ms Smith will be getting married. That the little hotel must be sold—a touching scene as the characters bid it farewell—and though they have come to love Vathy and even to think of it as home—after all, what is there to keep them in England, grey, chilly England, after the splash and warmth of the mediterranean? They are eating yoghurt; she offers him a companionable pot of honey, he wrinkles his nose with distaste. “Oh no, do try it,’ she says. ‘It’s really very good.’ He expresses, again, a stated belief we’ve heard before that things should be kept simple, and that plain food is best like plain speaking. At which point Stavros joins them. When he sees what they’re eating he asks for the same from the surprisingly glamorous waitress with whom we expect him to end up adding to bring fruit as well. He joins the others; Mr Nighy looks uncomfortable, Ms Dench puzzled but pleased. As the bowl of fruit arrives, Stavros ladles it onto the others’ yoghurt then, lifting the pot of honey he offers a spoonful t Mr Nighy,. ‘Oh well’ he says, ‘Why not, after all all?’ Understanding what has been thumpingly obvious for the last hour, Ms Dench smiles with delight. ‘Yoghurt with honey!’ (The movie’s title), Mr Nighy exclaims as Stavros, laughing, serves them all. Credits roll as beautiful young Greeks pass on motorbikes. The film does reasonably well at BAFTA but, though there is some buzz about Mr Broadbent’s breakout performance, apart from a couple of minor technical credits, gets shut out of the Oscars. That film.

Intimate, elegant, for my time on Ithaca I stayed in that hotel. not expensive, with a wonderfully engaging proprietor, perfectly placed, in a room with a balcony overlooking tile roofs and the harbor. Instead of luxury it offers comfort, thoughtfulness and peace—plus a few quirks, though minus a film crew. My travel agent had been reluctant to commit to it, unconvinced it would meet his standards, but it set the scene perfectly for my few days on the island, let me rest, park on the street and not worry, and try to figure out why I was there.

When you tell someone that you’re heading for Ithaca and that you intend to pack the Fagles translation of the Odyssey to have with you—on paper in hardback, thank you very much—and they say, ‘You don’t want to drag that thing around taking up space. You can get it as an ebook. Much better,’ do not believe them. You can’t get it as an ebook and most of what you can is about Ulysses and Jupiter and similar abominations. No, you need the real thing because Odysseus will be all around you, like Rip Van Winkle in the town of Catskill where he once didn’t live because he was, of course, a made up character who didn’t exist. Just like Odysseus. But like Van Winkle (Bridge! Real Estate! Diner!) he’s been adopted as the island mascot, and beyond that into a stand-in for its culture and history, real, and in his case, imagined. 

There’s a handsome statue of him on the dock looking stalwart and determined, and souvenir shops bearing his name, rentable boats, and beach towels. Then when I was buying some paper clips from a nice lady in a pretty stationery shop I found a book on the hiking trails of Ithaca, something I thought I’d want to know about, also bearing the name of the island’s hero. Written by an architect, the author seems very intelligent, clearly serious about the island and her subject: how you can actually trace the footsteps of the (imaginary) Odysseus and visit his (non-existent) palace and see where Eummeus (who is also not real) slept with the boars and where Odysseus stashed the (imaginary) haul give him by the Phaeacians (who were not from modern Corfu) and then left him asleep on the beach to sail away when Athene (are we now going to go along with Athene helping Odysseus hide the crap the way she does in the poem? Are we? ARE WE?) and how you can go and look at where he actually hid the treasure! I mean OMG it’s all right there! You just have to connect the dots.

I have all kinds of patience with with the way we deceive ourselves; for the need sometimes to protect, expand horizons, or fill an empty space. I think I have a fairly healthy ability to fool myself when necessary, as much as will get me through the day, or night—though that can be more problematic. I even wrote a play about it once, about a woman who considered herself to be a great vocal artist, a coloratura soprano in the grand manner, but who had no voice and couldn’t sing two notes in tune. People laugh and say, how was that possible? But I see examples of Mrs Jenkins’—I don’t like to say ‘delusion’, let’s call it conviction—all around, expressed in other ways but showing the same fundamental disconnect with objective reality.

Take the Odyssey, as I did, reading what I could, the wretched google scan of the old Loeb edition that features a truly weird translation into a very high-fancy ye olde English. Since it was Ithaca I read his homecoming when, though Poseidon is in no way willing to look the other way and ignore his transgressions (gods never are: that’s why they’re gods), Athene, with a sort-of okay from Zeus gets her pet hero under way so he can at last end up on a beach at home. With swag. And lots of it; tripods (I do not understand the ancient obsession with tripods, people are always winning them, or giving them, or donating them to temples), robes, gold, cups, plates, bowls, all piled beside him as he sleeps. And since this is his arrival, how is it treated from the Truther perspective? I mean from the perspective of clearly reasonable people who have just gone a little bit bonkers on this particular subject, carried out of the shallows into the depths of derp by love for the subject, in their enthusiasm how do they frame this? 

The first example is this very swag: Odysseus needs to hide it while he, you know, goes off and kills half the island. Athene has a plan: Here is a cave (they’re on the beach), the Old Man of the Sea it’s called, hide the swag in the cave which is on the beach (or beach adjacent). Fine. They hide the swag and move on. But if you’re going to take this episode from a romance literally then let’s look. The cave must be an actual cave, and as luck would have it there is one nearby. You go along the coast road, climbing pretty sharply from sea level, and you keep going up, and there’s a smaller road and you follow that, and then you go along a bit and eventually you come to a cave. It has a name, the Cave of the Nymphs, where stuff was discovered, old stuff, tripods. And they’re being stored somewhere though there’s some controversy about how many—one seems to be missing—and anyhow the cave has been closed till it can be more carefully excavated so no, you can’t look inside. And that’s where Odysseus hid the swag. The question then must be: how? He’s by himself (we’ll get to Athene in a moment); no one must know he’s there, that is super important for the plan to work; and there’s a giant pile of heavy stuff on the beach that he’s got to move all the way up to that cave way up there. How? Alone? He does this alone? Or, since we’re going literalist, are we to now think that he was in fact helped by Athene? Goddess: literal not rock star. That Athene. That she was there, too? Perhaps for obvious reasons this question is not answered in the book on how to go hiking in the literal footsteps of Odysseus.

And this is just mean what I’m doing and I know that, but just one more thing because I do have a point to make. To myself if no one else; I love this poem, as do many people. It is one of the treasures of our way of thought, the assumptions made in the past, translated to story and then recorded because the stories were reckoned to be important enough to hold on to. It’s a multiple poem, not so relentlessly focused as the Iliad, but a poem of great wonder and expansiveness. But there is the issue of Odysseus’ homecoming and the whole deal with the suitors who’’ve been pestering his wife, demanding for some time that she get off the fence, do her duty by herself and her son—he’s a grown boy now—and choose one of them to marry. Meanwhile, they park themselves in the family room and eat her out of hearth and home. Odysseus’ essential first job is to kill them all, about a hundred and twenty, plus twelve slave girls who have been collaborating. And it’s hard. That section is hard to read and hard to figure out. And very hard to get past to the great scenes of recognition and reconciliation that follow. I think I finally have understood what’s going on, which doesn’t make it better but more comprehensible—the killing of the women is particularly tough—and I understand now why it was used as a tutorial, a warning, plus a slam-bang action scene. 

The Truthers have a plan of a Mycenaean ‘palace’, as they’re calling it, real remains of a real one-time building. With real dimensions. That have been measured. Great. But there is a cast of characters mentioned in the poem that tops two hundred and fifty, and for the slaughter of Penelope’s suitors to take place you need room enough for strapping men to throw spears at each other, shoot arrows (a lot of arrows), and swing a sword. The principal room, great hall, megaron, of the real remains are given as about thirty-five feet by, say twenty-five. You see the problem. Not that the remains can’t be what they are and be important for what they are, or that they shouldn’t be further explored and categorized, it’s the jump from there to ‘My God, we found Odysseus!’ that makes the mischief. Because why can’t that be left to be what it is too? I think it’s enough. Why must claiming that it’s real make it better? Homer was a kind of Hollywood, his imaginings of Troy and Ithaca have about as much reality as C.B. deMille’s Egypt. They were entertainments, with serious moral foundations, it’s true, important religious truths, but the Iliad thrills, the Odyssey enchants. And isn’t enchantment enough?

When I’d been eating at Thessaloniki, I noticed a note on menus when fish was frozen. That didn’t seem to be the case on Ithaca; I didn’t see it when I was checking out some menus on the more prominent restaurants whose tables lined the harbor wall. A waiter from one began to talk to me, as if challenging me to give him a good reason not to eat there. Looking at the menu I saw things I like, plus some things I didn’t know but found interesting and so, without much more thought than why not? I sat down and ate some of the best food of my life. Elegantly presented, expertly prepared, delicious, abundant (Greek food really is to be shared, it seems almost a waste to do it alone: I persevere), and original. I ate there for three of my four dinners—for the other I went, reluctantly, to a restaurant recommended by my perfect hotel’s engaging proprietor, not thinking him a fool I took his advice and ate wonderful food there, too, though without the imagination of Mill’s, my crush). Almost as a challenge, the waiter offered me a dessert—I am one of those people who Don’t Eat Dessert, I have no idea why—a traditional, granny recipe, but made from the chef’s own point of view. He brought an enormous brick of what looked like tarmac, a chocolate cake too big for me alone. Turns out it wasn’t, it was ground nuts, juicy with a delicious syrup, along with hints of I don’t know what, covered in chocolate that was a perfect texture, ideal consistency. Of course I ate it all.

My last evening I told the waiter, Aristotle—we talked about Plato: no really, we did—to bring me what I needed to eat before I left, what I mustn’t miss. So he brought a remarkable salad of quinoa and freshly-caught red mullet, small, battered and deep fried whole, that were all crunch and savor. And then a dessert. Which was good, don’t get me wrong, but more to be admired than as something I’d want to eat again. Unlike granny’s chocolate nut masterpiece.

Last November, because of changes, movements in my extended family, I held Thanksgiving at my place for the first time where I, a vegetarian, cooked turkey and ham for twenty-six. I told Aristotle about this, told him that if I do it again this year, that I’d like to try to replicate that cake for the family (not really a cake, it has no flour or butter, which is why it’s so light for all its substance, just ten egg yolks, lol). Unlike much of the food there on Ithaca, though not all, this was something I could make with good local ingredients and come up with something that, if it wasn’t identical, could be good in its own way. 

From the first evening, from my first mouthful almost, I’d been vocal about my enthusiasm for the food, for the service, for the chef. He promised me that I’d get a recipe so I could try. Before I left he’d make sure that was done. Looking over the sea, I was already regretting I’d be gone in the morning to catch a ferry to the mainland to drive down the Peloponnese to Olympia, which is where I am now. And then the chef came himself to see me, emotional that I’d been praising his work, grateful in the way of someone who knows they do a thing well when their work is valued. He had almost no English and I’d prefer not to talk about my Greek, thanks, but we were getting on, he was giving me his method—‘Gently, gently, don’t rush!’ as he made whisking motions to show me how to treat the yolks. The place was chaotic, he was busy, there were customers, his kitchen was in the official restaurant, the little shop-front across the street, he had to get back. But I’d got enough. I thought I could make it. At least some version of it if not with his succulent, light, tender, deliciousness it would be good enough to fool those who hadn’t tasted his.

And then he was back, urgently, holding his phone, wanting me to read what he had there. This was how he’d shown me the recipe so of course I read as he grabbed my arm, then my shoulder to pull me closer banging his free hand on his heart then banging it on mine. His wife, I read, his wife had cancer, she’d been saved from cancer, he loved his wife and she’d been saved form cancer by God and he wanted me to know this, not in a proselytizing way but because it was good, he wanted me to know because he wanted me to have a good life. And I’d liked his food and he figured I knew what was good so he wanted to be sure I knew about this. About love, and how love saved his wife.

I’m going back. My plan is for September. To that that same little hotel. The bed is so hard it almost makes your teeth ache. Mills will still be there. The hot season is week two through four of August. But they’ll be there closing up. There’s a lot on the menu I haven’t tasted. The island will be cool. As I lay on a kind of beach planning this—there are others that are better but I didn’t want to drive—there are maybe bigger islands, islands with more to offer, islands in the Aegean; shouldn’t I try them, too? This was a very ordinary kind of paradise, like the pebbly scrap of sand, with obsessions, and fantasy, plus a real history, a real sense of place—Byron loved it, too! Did he see himself as Odysseus a little bit? 

But it’s because it's an ordinary sort of paradise that I fell in love. So I’m going back. I want to try everything on the menu.