The Ghost of an Adrogynous Cat

The problem was that we didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl. The cat had already thoroughly adopted us, and there was no going back from that.

We christened the cat “Minnie” after my mom’s childhood pet and also after a mouse I have a feeling Miss Minnie-the-Cat would not have gotten along with. Or, occasionally, he became “Mimi,” the Greek diminutive of “Dimitri” because it sounded close enough to “Minnie” that we didn’t think he’d mind. She. It.

An old photo I’m so glad I took the summer I got my first camera. It sits in my office, the profile of the big red cat.

Minnie the androgynous cat was either an enormously overweight male or a perpetually pregnant female. We couldn’t decide which. But what we did decide, about a week after she adopted us, is that we had met this cat before.

Do you know what they say about cats never forgetting? Well, they might be onto something.

Years and years ago, my dad spotted a kitten dying in the middle of the street under the sweltering August sun. We don’t know why it was there or how it got to be there, but I do remember how incredibly orange the poor creature was, a squirming rag doll of fiery fur, and how incredibly small. It’s no wonder the mother lost track of that kitten–if there ever was a runt, then this was it.

But my dad carried the poor little thing into the shade of a large olive tree, where the neighborhood cat lady would leave out bowls of water and scraps. Sure enough, the moment we turned our backs, the mother came padding along behind us, straight to the little baby cat. There is another reason we called her Minnie, and it was not for the mouse but for her size before she grew up into a vibrant creature we did not recognize.

The androgynous orange cat stuck around our home in Athens ever since. Minnie was ever-vigilant, guarding the apartment while we were off spending the rest of the year in New York. But when we would return during the summer, there would inevitably be a dead bird or some other offering at our doorstep, and she would purr at us as we hung the laundry in the garden, and rub her head against our legs with such an intensity, I had to be careful not to trip and fall. She even tried to make it into the house once. More than once. All right, it was a fairly regular occurrence.

This summer there was no trace of Minnie the big red cat. A rat from the seaside had left her much worse for the wear, and she was much too ferocious, much too wild to let the veterinarian handle her when the neighborhood pitched in to see if they could have her treated. An infection ate away at her face. But before that she simply vanished.

This year there was a white cat waiting on our doorstep–and she is most definitely a she and had no reservations about letting us know it. She has a beautiful long-haired coat and incredible green eyes, but is much too shy and much too proud to hang around peasants like us, a true cat to the core.

I call her “Snow” because there is not a patch of non-white fur on her, but I think, in truth, she is more of a “Ghost.” The ghost of a kitten that was more dog than cat, more human than anything else.

–Marie-Irene

I know and the politics of tourism

There they are. The two most dangerous words in the English language: I know.

The topic came up in conversation the other day. I was talking to my friend about all of these travel blogs I was reading, living vicariously through the worldly experiences of others. Now that I’m back home from overseas, one of my favorite things to do is to search online for photos and descriptions of other people’s experiences in Greece.

I want to see one more time, even if only from behind a computer screen, the white sandy beaches, the mountains that twist and turn infinitely upwards into a brilliantly blue Mediterranean sky. Every fiber of my being aches–home, a part of me thinks, believes desperately, even though I have never lived there, not once in my life. Greece is like a phantom presence in my childhood memories–some summers it is there, and others it is not.

There and gone in an infinitesimally small period of time. In a matter of weeks, even. And then the memories begin to fade.

The corner of Athens that I love best.

As much as I love to read about other people’s travel experiences in the country I like to daydream about, some recurring off-handed comments began to jump out at me over time. Somebody wondering about how difficult stereotypical Greek meat-y foods (gyro, souvlaki, you get the gist) were to find on island villages that are renown for their seafood cuisine. Another person marveling at how hummus and pizza were not readily available to them, as if all southern European peoples shared the same cultural and culinary heritage exactly. You can find pizza in Italy, so you should be able to find it in this small Greek village, too, right? And, of course, the inevitable comment about the Greek work ethic. Something along the lines of: the pace of life is so much slower; or, everyone takes siestas when they could be working; or, at it’s worst, jokes about how the midday nap is solely responsible for the current economic crisis.

The comments about the food don’t bother me so much. In my six weeks in Athens, I did not particularly crave pizza or hummus, and, besides, I know where the good Italian restaurants and multi-cultural chain grocery stores are in my corner of Athens. But I can see how these off-handed statements might be based on some problematic assumptions. What bothers me are the jokes about siestas and Greek laziness because I have friends and family in Greece. And let me tell you something. They work every day like dogs given the current economic climate. They work like dogs, and they don’t get paid. And it upsets me when travelers judge an entire culture from within their own cultural bubble while staying in tourist-y areas of Mykonos and Santorini or maybe even visit the occasional obligatory museum. Every night’s a party, they exclaim in surprise, as if it is the norm everywhere.

My breakfast every morning this summer: mini chocolate croissant with a mini tiropita and a large Greek frappe. Having a bakery and cafe right across the street definitely had its perks.

Behind every exclamation there is the assertion again and again, hidden underneath the pretty words and well-edited photos: I know, I know, I know. I know this place. I have been there. I have judged it. I know all there is to know about its landscape, its heritage, its culture, its people. I paint the picture that is this place to you for your consumption.

I love reading travel blogs. It is not all of them that do this. In fact, it is a very few of them that do. And I’m almost glad that those very few do. Because if I had not become aware of it in the words of others, then I would not have become aware of it in my own words. When I think of Greece I want desperately for it to be mine, as if it were possible to possess a country or for it to possess me. Greece is a place that I visit sometimes, but it belongs to the people who live there already. Mine is a very limited picture of a very beautiful place–a place that might be troubled, a place that might have an ugly underbelly, but a place whose people I refuse to call lazy. A place whose public landscape is being diced and divided among private hands for continued tourist consumption. This summer I watched the harvest moon from a lookout point on a mountain that next year will be overrun with resorts. It is a spectacular view that next year I will not be able to afford.

Let me be clear here when I say that I support the tourism industry. It brings a lot of money into a country. Plus, there is the undeniable fact that I enjoy being a tourist. At its best, tourism brings down cultural barriers and fosters open-mindedness. But at its worst it is all about the two words–I know–words that have toppled civilizations and started wars. Two words whose power can only be broken with the addition of a most difficult third, making up the foundation of western philosophy.

I don’t know.

And travel, in the end, is all about not knowing. Most of the best adventures are.

–Marie-Irene

The World According to Grandma

My grandmother is eighty-four years-old, exactly, and this is a fact that she hangs over all of our heads. Eighty-four years-old means a heck of a lot more years than however old you are, so you better listen to what she has to say. So this is the world according to my grandmother, a world that I never want to forget.

Every morning from the months of May through September she goes for a swim in the sea. She swims one hundred meters out, sixty meters to the right, and then thirty meters diagonally back in towards the shore so that she swims in the shape of a large right triangle. When my dad pointed out the obvious fact that her numbers might be slightly off, according to the Pythagorean Theorem, my grandmother disagreed. Pythagoras, old as he was, is not today, in fact, eighty-four years-old.

In either case, this morning in the middle of her one hundred meter swim out into the ocean depths, she met one of her friends from her circle of fellow retirees. She used to sing with them every night at the gazebo on the beach before her arthritis got so bad it hurt for her to walk. But, you see, my grandmother has a very beautiful voice and loves to sing, and her friend said so. My grandmother took this as her cue.

In the middle of the ocean, a little less than one hundred meters out, she belted her heart out, all the old songs that came to her memory. The other swimmers were totally unfazed. In fact, according to my grandmother herself, they all started to clap.

“Wait a minute,” my father interrupts my grandmother’s story. “How is that even possible? How can they clap and swim at the same time? Wouldn’t they drown?”

“They clapped,” my grandmother insists. They clapped because she sang.

It’s already the beginning of August, and she does not have a lot of time left. She has to get one hundred total swims in for the summer season in order to ensure a light winter with minimal sickness. So you guys heard it here first–if she has not, in fact, completed all 100 swims by winter, we’ll all know it. Probably not because the winter is rough and we’ve all come down with colds, but because she’ll let us know it. She’ll sing us a song about it. And let me be perfectly clear here: I love my grandmother’s songs, whether sung in the middle of the ocean or in the middle of dinner, I don’t care.

So next time you’re on a ship passing through the Mediterranean and you see an eighty-four year-old woman swimming exactly one hundred meters out and who occasionally but nevertheless loudly starts to sing in the middle of the sea, wave hello. But whatever you do, if you’re swimming along beside her, please don’t start to applaud. She’ll single-handedly drown half the populace of Greece if she keeps this up.

–Marie-Irene

That One Time at the Museum

I was reading an article the other day about the science of dread, about the human urge to feel anxious about any event set aside on the calendar as it slowly approaches, regardless of whether it marks a positive or a negative occasion. That was my really long-winded way of lamenting that my four weeks in Athens are coming to a close much too quickly. Three days. That’s all that I have left, really. Four weeks had seemed like an impossibly long stretch of summer. But time marches on.

A few days ago we went to visit Monastiraki again one last time, one of my favorite spots in Athens. There comes a point at the market where you reach a large open square. There the Metro stops and a Byzantine church stands and a bunch of fruit sellers have set up shop. I think there might be some antiquities that have gotten dug up in the area along the way. There is an old joke around here that goes: you can’t dig a hole in Athens without finding ruins. I don’t know that you need to a dig a hole anymore. In this square, there is an old mosque that has been transformed into a museum of folk art, but mostly of ceramics. The tickets of admission are cheap, but I saw that they offer discounts for students.

The man behind the front desk asked my brother and I how old we were. “Seventeen,” Chris said. The kid is six-feet tall, wears a scraggly beard because he cannot be bothered to shave, and has a voice so deep that half of what he says can’t be heard by other humans. He is seventeen, though, even if he doesn’t look it. He was allowed free admission, no questions asked. The man behind the front desk then asked me my age, and I told him, “twenty,” before producing a student ID. He took the ID from my hands and asked me where I go to school. When I explained that my university is in New York, the man immediately began speaking to me in incredibly broken English. Let me just reiterate here that I am fluent in Greek.

So there I was, trying desperately to understand this guy’s terrible English as I go on responding to him in Greek. He comments that there is no date of expiration on my ID card and begins to insinuate that I am impersonating a college student. I think that this is a lot of trouble to go to in order to avoid the three-Euro cost to get into the museum. He tells me that all European student ID cards have dates of expiration. I then have to explain to him that New York is not, in fact, in Europe, so the student IDs work differently there. I begin to get nervous because he is not handing back the ID and I’ll need it in September to, you know, go to school. Finally, I insist on paying full-price for the ticket because the man is insane, but he lets me through. My brother and I were the only other people in the museum. There was not much to see.

I ended up leaving feeling vaguely insulted, not because of the insinuation of fraud, but because the guy was so convinced that I couldn’t actually be twenty years-old. I still get ID-ed at Rated-R movies. How old can I possibly look?

As much as I will miss this place, it’s nice to get little doses of reality every once in a while. I like to think it keeps me grounded.

–Marie-Irene

I Used to Play Mario-Kart

I think I might have missed the point: the first time I went go-karting I tried to obey traffic laws. The sun was setting over the water beside the track, and I watched it sink down, down, and further still, as it painted the water red and orange and finally the darkest blue as night set in. It was more like I was taking a leisurely drive by the sea than racing anybody, mostly because I did not know it was supposed to be a race until it was already over. If that’s the case, then my eight year-old niece beat me several times over. The good news is that I knew to keep the right lane so that the people who wanted to pass me could take the left. I told you I was cognizant of traffic laws, didn’t I?

It also took me too long to recognize the connection between real-life go-karting and Mario Kart. Oh, I thought, so that’s what I was supposed to be doing. I was more than just a little disappointed that there were no turtle shells included in the package. When it was all over my godmother drove her kids, my brother, and I to a park to let the little kids run around for a bit, and I was more than just a little bit tempted to join them. But at a week shy of twenty-one I am probably a bit too old to get on the swing set. Some of my happiest memories from when I was small was visiting seaside playgrounds after sunset and kicking my legs out into the darkness as the swing took me higher and more swiftly into the salty summer night.

What I’ve found is that every time we visit this place, thousands of miles away from home, so little has changed. Time, it seems, is standing still here. I slip back into the skin of myself at eighteen years-old, fourteen years-old, twelve years-old, and people seem genuinely unconcerned that my brother and I are not growing up. So, of course, we must not be. My aunt was telling me a story the other day about how my “little brother” used to climb up on the bunk bed some summers ago and hurl himself off it again and again as I hung out on the bottom bunk reading. The whole bed shook. When she had asked me if he was bothering me, I supposedly replied, “That’s okay. He’ll tire himself out eventually.” And after the story was done my aunt laughed, and I laughed, and I looked lovingly at my “little brother” before I realized that he’s averaging at around a foot taller than I am now. There’s nothing little about him. And a long crack appears along the glass face of this fantasy that nothing changes, ever, that we have all stayed the same.

Maybe it’s because my twenty-first birthday is just a couple of days away at this point, but I’ve been feeling uncharacteristically nostalgic lately. Twenty-one seems impossibly old to the twelve year-old inside of me. It seems incredibly final and inflexible and staunchly adult. The day after my birthday we will leave for home, board a plane and not see this place again for another year at the very least. It’s nice to have such a tangible window into the past, I guess, but it’s also very lonely. I wonder how long it will last.

–Marie-Irene