A Bit of Banter

After the jump: fragmentary conversations from Lesvos, and a reminder that social bravery is worth faking prior to, as the fellow says, making.

I don't generally photograph people (unless they are PALS or have expressly suggested it) so pretend these cats are various Lesvian folk and visiting Brits for the sake of this post. (Pretend also that I took it with my camera and not my dang PHONE already.)

Jill and her husband Peter, both hale-and-hearty septuagenarians, struck up a polite conversation with me at the balcony at Molly’s Bar, overlooking Molyvos Harbor. A fairly simple spot overseen by George (a native Lesvian) and Martin (an Irish-British expat who relocated to the island twenty years back).  “Everybody comes back,” they told me confidentially, recounting their own twenty years’ history of returning to the island. We did the usual Brit-American chat (mourning Brexit, muttering oaths about stupid political developments on both sides of the Atlantic, discussing who knew who in which country) and came to realize that they were retired teachers (he in drama, she in economics). Soon enough, we were chatting with a Dutch woman one table over who wanted in on the chat, herself a sixteen-year veteran visitor. Everybody comes back.

George, his mischievous baby face ringed by a ridiculously voluminous beard of gray, was explaining the trajectory of the Lesvos-brewed beer I’d ordered. “There are seventy microbreweries across Greece,” he said excitedly, “and these are local to us, that’s the point.” “Have you got any local wines?” a patron asked, curious. He paused. “Yes, local wines. From Crete.” A burst of laughter, and then he turned serious, explaining that while he quite likes the wines made on the island (“They are… sophisticated wines”) he thought they went better with food than as aperitivo,  so he didn’t stock them. George would pop in and out of the balcony to kibbutz and rib the regulars, flirting with the wives, bantering with the husbands, occasionally relying on patrons to let him know that somebody had wandered in and was awaiting him at the bar.

Can recommend both these items and the humans who gather around or near them.

Martin showed up in short order, quietly goofy. After a bit of banter around my age (guesses ranged from 27 to 34, and I took rounds of compliments for having aged well) he turned to the important business of razzing Jill about her having grown up going to school in Mayfair. “Oh, ain’t YOU posh, I never KNEW.” Well, she’d gone with the children of chauffeurs and housekeepers, of course, the families who lived there all sent their children off to boarding school, you know, and then she followed her friend to school near Paddington and lost her Mayfair accent, to her mother’s chagrin.

One table over, a couple was discussing their sailing trip across the Greek islands. Also a bit of an annual thing, apparently. Must be nice. Ain’t THEY posh.

The conversation turns to the refugee situation, with universal disgust at the inhumanity shown to the refugees and the pointed cruelty of the policies meant to deter them. “Once they landed here, they had to walk to the camps, you weren’t allowed to help them. If the busses stopped to pick them up, technically that was illegal. If you phoned a cab to give them a lift, technically that was illegal.”  It had become something of a dividing line in the community, with one couple that had run a café in the area moving down to Mytilini, to better serve the migrant communities. My hotel’s owner, it seems, had said some nasty things to refugee children, which was the last of our Dutch friend’s patronage of his establishment. “How you can speak to children that way, so horrible, I could not go back there.” Whereas the family at The Captain’s Table, the family-run restaurant I’d tried and loved the night before, had organized food and support for the refugees, with the chef reported to have literally pulled children out of the ocean to land. Your allegiances quickly coalesce as the stories land.

This extremely friendly fellow didn't so much want to converse as maybe go for a ride, like immediately like hey what say we head off into the mountains for no reason whatsoever. When his owner arrived, correctly deducing I'd pulled into the wrong driveway for my lodgings (this being a neighboring farm) she let me know that she'd been preparing a bath for him, and he was desperately hiding. I love him and will miss him forever.

A few days later, arriving in Skala Eresou, I found my way to my just-a-short-walk-outside-town lodgings, a countryside collection of small apartments in a grove of trees growing figs, pomegranates, quince, and… other fruits that I can’t begin to recognize, and alas, I had come between the early spring harvests and the later-summer ripenings, with cherries JUST on the edible side of tart, but not quite where you want ‘em yet. As I wandered the grounds, I came across a big fluffy pup (technical breed term) on the other side of the fence and its owner emerged from a shed. In stumbling English (to match my highly fumbled Greek greetings and “how are you”) he told me that he was the brother-in-law of the neighboring farmer, and that he used this shed as his carving studio. Bringing out small examples of his work (a polar bear, an intricate 19th-century-styled wagon) he shared that he’d been doing the work for twenty-two years. “But nobody teach me; I learn myself.” As always, when he asked where I had come from and I shared the name of Chicago, his eyes widened and he offered the inevitable “You come a long way!” A few pleasantries later, he insisted “tomorrow, we meet here for to have coffee. Greek coffee – no espresso, cappuccino.” Well, how could I refuse?

The fabled big fluffy pup, bein a big dang dingus in response to his well-earned skritches.

I am, weirdly for those who have gotten to know me, a bit shy, particularly at first meetings. (And beyond – I was slightly mortified to find allusions in my college admissions essays to the concern that once I shared too much of myself people wouldn’t want to be around me. Cool! So that neurosis has been camped out for a while then, eh? Cool!)

When I travel, I have to actively resist my impulse to stay out of the way and avoid “bothering” people – a totally reasonable instinct borne of the desire not to be an imposing tourist (don’t ask a bistro waiter to help you with your French on a weekend in July), but one that ignores that a lot of people really do want to share their stories, want to know a bit about you, want to get to fill you in on the secrets to which they’re privy. This week has been a good start on remembering that, and I’m hoping that as I continue the Greek chapter of this trek (and then make the hop over to Italy, which feels far more alien to this culture than I had always stupidly assumed) that I remember to ask a few questions, to open the door, to see what folk wanna share. Usually it’s something good!

Some people are just rude, however. This idiot was just hanging out in the road but refused to reply to my friendly greetings in English, German, French, Italian, OR Greek. Hey, buddy! Try being social once in a while, maybe you'll learn something!