Day Off

Day Off—We All Need One

I spent the early morning girding myself for a final day of loving and  overly indulgent family—by running, swimming, and hydrating. Invited to lunch at yet another uncle’s house, it was essential to prepare myself for copious quantities of good food and conversation.

Mission accomplished...

---

Even after 40+ years of regular visits to Greece, I am still surprised—or, more accurately, astonished—by the clarity of the Aegean Sea, some places even more so than others. At a depth of 40 feet, a silver dime on the ocean floor is clearly visible. What appears to be a shoal no more than a few feet below the surface is, in fact, more than 30 feet down.

I lay on the hot pebbles of a isolated cove—me and two yiayiades dressed in black swimsuits, a kind of mourning wear for swimmers.

My Spetsioti grandmother would recount the stories of her youth on Spetses. The eldest of ten children, she recalled being at the beach with her family, c. 1910, dressed in a full-body swimsuit that included black socks pulled up above her knees. In a moment of reckless abandon, she removed her stockings before swimming and in short order became the recipient of her father’s wrath for her display of immodesty. Her hand was stuck several times with a stick (a lesson to her younger siblings), which permanently blackened her thumb nail. “I was wrong,” she said, sixty-five years later, “and I asked for his forgiveness.”

-----

By 1:00 p.m. the pebbles on the beach are so scorching hot that the transition from beach towel to water is an excruciating five-second event. From a dermatological persective, the result is “medium well.”

----

For a country in the thick of financial collapse, this nation continues to display elements of fantastic wealth and priviledge, perhaps here on Spetses more than elsewhere. Just as I left the beach, a private helicopter was landing on a concrete base located across the channel on the islet of Spetsapoula—an island owned by the Niarchos Family, multi-billionaires who have been Spetses’s generous benefactors for a generation. This private, pine-clad paradise is strictly off limits, but the residents often visit Spetses’s stoney beaches—flying in for a quick dip and then leaving again.