Amalía Fashionista, Chapter 2

Having challenged Suri Cruise to a fashion showdown for the title of style leader to the pre-school set, granddaughter Amalia, who’s now nearly six months old, knew she’d have to be on top of her game for several important occasions recently.  She paid close attention to the news out of New York’s Fashion Week.

When her Papou and I arrived in Miami, she rejected the ladybug hat we’d brought her, calling it “too Gaga”, but she thought better of the ladybug jammies that came with it. 

 She approved, however,  of the moose-themed onesie from Aunt Robin and Uncle Bob, who live in Jackson Hole, WY.  She said she’d use it while roughing it in Yellowstone Park.

 Valentine’s Day is a big challenge for a fashionista, and Amalía said nothing is “tutu much”  for such a romantic occasion. (Mommy is wearing Missoni from Target.)

 February 16 was a very important occasion, as well, because it was the launch of her Mommy’s new novel “Other Waters” with a reading and book signing at “Books & Books”, the renowned bookstore in Coral Gables (and several other locations.)  Amalía greeted everyone with her usual warmth and charm, but unfortunately fell asleep and slept through the entire presentation.  (But she’ll be at several more book parties, readings and signings in Manhattan, Massachusetts, and elsewhere.  For details check her Mommy’s web site: www.elenigage.com.)

 Yesterday, because her Grandma and Grandpa were staying at the famous Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, with its elegant pool, Amalâ knew she’d have to choose a swimming ensemble equal to the glamorous 1930’s ambiance of the place.  

She settled on a navy and yellow daisy-themed one piece bathing suit with a cloche swim cap and matching sandals.  It even came with its own terry robe.

Amalia spent the day by the pool, but the combination of sun and water proved exhausting, and she decided to take a power nap before dressing for dinner.

And today, like the jet-setter she is, Amalía had to choose her wardrobe for her flight to Manhattan, where her resort wear wouldn’t do at all, especially in winter’s cold.  The first thing she packed was her (faux) leopard coat.  She knows that it’s all about animal prints right now.

Musing on Apple Pie

I am not a good cook.  My mother Martha was not a good cook either. (If it was Thursday, you could be sure we were eating Tuna Casserole with crushed potato chips on top.) My first job, back in 1964, was as a writer in Ladies’ Home Journal’s food department.  “I can’t believe you’re telling seven million women how to cook!” my mother would often exclaim.  (Of course I wasn’t writing recipes—the ladies in the test kitchen were doing that.  It was my job to write the text that went with the recipes, with a heavy reliance on words like “crunchy” , “delectable”, “golden brown”, “rib-sticking”, “taste tempting”, etc.)

But my mother and (later) I always knocked ourselves out at Thanksgiving—it was part of our Scandinavian/American heritage. When I was a child, we would often drive the forty miles to Aunt Olive and Uncle Clarence’s house in Princeton, Minnesota, at Thanksgiving, where our grandmother and aunts would be laboring over a vat of boiling oil, making those three-dimensional cookies called “Rosettes”. (You need a decorative iron mold on a long metal rod, coat it with thin dough, then plunge it into the boiling oil.)  I remember we’d all eat until we were sick—cleansing the palate with sherbets between courses so we could eat more—and then the men would loosen their belts and fall asleep while watching football on television and the women would retreat to the kitchen to clean up and gossip.

Ever since I got married forty-one years ago, I’ve made a big production out of Thanksgiving – even in the years when we were living with our three children in Greece, where the traditional ingredients were never available. (Daughter Eleni, in her travel memoir “North of Ithaka” describes a particularly hilarious Thanksgiving when I cooked turkey in the very primitive conditions of my husband’s mountaintop childhood village while Dina, the acknowledged cooking queen of Lia, endeavored to out-cook me, ending up with a charred Turkey that everyone preferred to my golden-brown one.)

So for 41 years I’ve been doing Thanksgiving—streamlining the procedure drastically every year because I’m lazy, and my Greek relatives still don’t realize that my special cornbread stuffing comes out of a package (slightly doctored up.)  They spend days making their Greek stuffing, which includes chestnuts, hamburger and a lot of other things.  Of course everyone prefers the Greek stuffing, but I still make my cornbread stuffing, because it’s “tradition.”  

But because I like to bake, I generally make four pies or three pies and a cake.  This year I made three of the pies on Monday night—a “reduced calorie” pecan pie with maple syrup instead of corn syrup, and a “chocolate-kahlua” pie which somehow became a Thanksgiving tradition many years ago when I tried out the recipe.  Now I could leave out the turkey and no one would complain, but they sure would miss the Chocolate Kahlua pie.  The pumpkin pie I’m making today.

But to get to Apple Pie.  Some people (like author Joyce Maynard, who often writes about her famous apple pies) are born with a pie-making gene that’s usually inherited from their mother.  There was no apple-pie gene in my family.  So every Thanksgiving I try a different apple pie recipe, in the hopes of finding the prize winning Apple Pie that will bring tears (of joy, not sorrow)  to my family’s eyes.

I haven’t hit on the perfect recipe yet, but this year, on Monday night, I baked a pie based on a recipe I tore out of the New York Post.  The article seems to be about what wives of NY Jets football players cook at Thanksgiving.  Now, I know even less about football than I do about cooking, but I noticed the apple pie recipe with the title “Apple Pie Made Woody Marry Her!” Woody is Woody Johnson, owner of the Jets, it seems, and the recipe looked very simple, so I figured why not?  If it landed this lady a “mogul husband” I’d giving it a try—even though I landed my mogul husband forty some years ago by learning to make Greek Coffee.

Among other things, the recipe calls for “Five large peeled apples, chopped.”    When I went to my supermarket on Monday before my pie-making marathon, I reflected that I love Thanksgiving because (1.)  It’s non-denominational—everyone can enjoy it except maybe the Native Americans—and (2.)  Only at this time of year do you see the market jammed with crazed shoppers trying to find some exotic recipe ingredient (dried cherries, fresh ginger, craisins ) that they never buy at any other time of the year.  

I finally found the last package of chocolate wafers--needed for the crust of the Kahlua pie, but it was way at the back of the top shelf so I convinced a leggy blonde shopper pushing a baby nearby to climb up on the bottom shelf and reach it for me. 

(Food shopping at Thanksgiving can be hazardous to one’s health, as I reflected yesterday when, visiting the newly opened Wegman’s in Northboro to get some of their adorably frosted Turkey cookies to use as place cards, I passed by a woman who was being wheeled on a gurney out the door to a waiting ambulance, escorted by about a dozen EMTs and trailed by Wegman’s employees looking worried.  As I stood aside to let the gurney pass,  I heard the injured woman say “I didn’t even see her coming and then there she was, right in front of me!”)

During my pie-shopping market visit on Monday, I went to the produce department and asked an employee who was stacking fruit, a young man about 18 years old, “What’s the best kind of apple for making pie?”

“Uh, I don’t know,” he stammered, then asked another 18-year old near-by who also shrugged.  Then he yelled at an older man, who was spraying brightly colored  peppers, “Hey Tom!  What’s the best kind of apple….”

Tom didn’t even blink. “You need a combination,” he said.  “Pink Lady for the flavor, Comstock for the crunch and also Granny Smith.”  He chose for me one Pink Lady, two bright red Comstocks, and two green Granny Smith’s. 

That’s the kind of information and friendly interaction with one’s neighbors that is inspired by Thanksgiving.  People helping people.  As opposed to Christmas shopping, when it’s the law of the jungle to get the last Tickle-Me-Elmo.  That’s another reason I love Thanksgiving.

So I cooked the pie that made Woody Johnson marry his wife Suzanne.  It’s keeping cold on the porch.  On Thursday we’ll find out if I’ve finally hit on The Ultimate Apple Pie—good enough to become a Thanksgiving Tradition, like Chocolate Kahlua.  I’ll let you know.

Does The New York Times Scorn Women?

If you read the New York Times announcement of my daughter Eleni’s wedding last year, you might think the mother of the bride was dead, hidden away in the attic, non-existent or had never held a job in her life.  The New York Times (free-lance!) writer, Devan Sipher, who wrote the announcement cited the professions of the mother and father of the groom and the father of the bride, but refused to mention the fifty years I had spent writing for national newspapers and magazines, even though 21 of the articles I’d written had appeared in The New York Times.

(You may remember Devan Sipher as the writer of the notorious “Vows” column in the Times celebrating a couple who dumped their spouses for each other after they met at their kids’ pre-kindergarten classrooms.)                                 .

While the snub was painful, I put it aside until yesterday, when I read a new post on my daughter’s blog “The Liminal Stage” called “Nice Work if You Kin Get It.” Eleni studied folk lore and mythology in college and will publish her second book “Other Waters” in February.  She usually writes in her blog about “psychological thresholds, times of transition…The biggies are birth, marriage, death.” The subject of yesterday’s post was “kin work” which she explains as  “the term anthropologists use to describe the ‘conception, maintenance, and ritual celebration of cross boundary kin ties’” –in other words, hosting Thanksgiving dinner, remembering birthdays, sending Christmas cards…you get the idea.

Eleni went on to say that it’s usually women who do kin work and their work is usually unpaid and therefore undervalued. She continues:

“I also think it’s a question of identity. If someone goes into an office every day, society knows how to define him or her–by his or her title or job description. The fact that a person goes somewhere and does something that someone else pays them to do renders them, inherently, worthwhile. Those of us who work at home, juggling work that pays us along with kin work, are considered dilettantes.

“This was brought into high relief for me during my wedding, by the writer who wrote up our New York Times’ wedding announcement …

“The reporter asked where my mother, a writer, had been published in the past year. I said Vogue and Budget Travel. 

‘If that’s it, that’s exactly what the Times is trying to avoid–-part-time work,’ said the man, a freelancer himself.

“This angered me for any number of reasons: First, who gets to decide how many publications per year make one a full-time freelancer versus a part-timer? What if your sole publication is a groundbreaking article or book? (I mean, if my mother had been Harper Lee, would he have said, ‘And what has she published in the last 51 years since To Kill A Mockingbird?’)

“And second, what’s wrong with part-time work anyway? In an economy such as ours, and a world in which technology enables us to work from home, more and more people in any number of fields are going freelance. Does the fact that they don’t go into an office every day mean that they don’t really work?

“But what angered me most was the misogyny of it all. My mom had gone into an office before she started raising kids. As did I. And the fact that she re-shaped her career to make room for kin work, as well as paid work, had rendered her so unimportant in the eyes of a paper she had contributed to well over a dozen times, that she was omitted from the graph describing the jobs of the parents of the bride and groom in the wedding announcement of one of the children she’d made time to raised. So yes, as Mary Elizabeth Williams pointed out in Salon today, the New York Times does have female trouble.”

Eleni’s right. I did go into an office for many years—working first for Ladies Home Journal, then in London, editing a small magazine called “Homemaker’s Digest”, then, after returning to New York and marrying a reporter for the New York Times, I worked for a syndicated features service that published my articles around the world.  By the time the second of our three children was born, I only went into the office a few days a week, working at home on other days.

When our third child was born in 1977, our family was moved by the New York Times to Athens, Greece, where I raised the children while my husband spent most of his time in Turkey and Iran covering revolutions and war as the Times’ foreign correspondent for the Middle East. (He usually made it home for Christmas.)  During the five years in Greece, I wrote a number of articles for the Times about entertainers, politicians, artists, travel and archeology.

Among the journalistic gigs I’m proudest of is the series of essays I wrote for the Times “Hers” column in 1979.  People born since 1970 cannot imagine what a journalistic milestone it was for the Old Gray Lady to launch a weekly essay written by women about women’s issues.

During the 1980s I wrote a monthly column called “Kids in the Country” for  Country Living, and have continued to publish free-lance articles everywhere I can, including several in Vogue, as well as writing a number of movie scripts with my husband (which have been optioned but so far not made it to the screen.) So, from my point of view, it feels like I never stopped working

Daughter Eleni ends her blog post with a thought about her baby daughter Amalía: “This attitude towards women–and work–this idea that any work done at home is irrelevant, is something I struggle with now that I am doing more kin work than ever. How can I raise my daughter not to think that her father’s work is more valuable than mine because papi gets dressed and drives off to the office, and mama stays home and writes in between loads of laundry…Maybe by the time Amalía does kin work of her own, we’ll have figured out a way to reward it, beyond just giving it a name.”

I share that wish, and I hope that when Amalía gets married some 30 years from now, her mother will be included in the New York Times announcement, acknowledged as a real person who had a real career.

A House in a Greek Village

                       

(This watercolor of the restored Eleni Gatzoyiannis house was done by visiting British artist, Bill Peake.)

On Saturday, my husband, Nicholas Gage, and I returned, as we do every summer, to his small Greek village of Lia near the top of a mountain in Epiros, Greece, just a kilometer below the border with Albania.

As the sun began to set, we joined the villagers sitting at tables in the courtyard outside the inn under the plane trees.  Soon some visitors to the region came over, one by one, to introduce themselves.

This happens every time Nick returns to the village. The visitors have come up this twisting, vertiginous mountain road into the Mourgana mountain range because they want to see the places that figure in Nick’s 1983 book “Eleni” about the life and death of his mother Eleni Gatzoyiannis, who never left this village. 

In 1948 she was executed, at the age of 41, by a firing squad of Communist guerrillas because she had managed to get four of her five children led out of the village and down through mine fields to freedom under cover of night.  Eleni organized this escape after she learned that the children in the guerrilla-occupied village were to be taken away to camps behind the Iron Curtain in the last days of the Greek Civil War. (28,000 children were taken from Greece in what is called the “pedomasoma”, or “gathering of children”). On the last day before the escape, she was forced to stay behind with one of her daughters to work for the guerrillas in the threshing fields.

Since the book “Eleni” was published in 1983, it’s been translated into 32 languages. People from around the world come regularly to Lia to see where Nick’s mother lived and died. A week ago, Nick showed his village and his childhood home to 14 students from John Jay College in New York and their professor, and on August 2, he will welcome 30 students from Northeastern University, who read the book in their Greek History class.

Once the weather turns good in the spring, nearly every day brings a foreign visitor or two on this pilgrimage, although they find that some Greeks, even in this village where so many were executed, still harbor pro-Communist sentiments, and may be unhelpful in answering their questions—even to denying that Eleni Gatzoyiannis ever lived there. 

Last Wednesday night, the two couples who were astonished to find themselves sitting in the Inn’s courtyard with the author of the book included David from Wales and his Greek companion Effie, and a couple who had come from Austria, Hannelore and Claus. 

                                                                Effie & David with Nick

The next day Nick led them on a tour of the spots that are significant to the story, including the ancient church of Saint Demitrios where Eleni worshipped every day and where her bones were kept in the ossuary after being recovered from the ravine where the guerrillas threw the thirteen civilians they executed on August 28, 1948. 

  Nick looking at a relative's recent grave.  His mother's remains have been moved to Hope Cemetery in   Worcester, MA and buried next to his father.

The guerrillas had taken over Eleni’s home for their headquarters and they kept her and 30 other prisoners confined in the basement where the animals had been stabled, while the prisoners were questioned and tortured.  (It always brings a gasp from visitors when they step into the cave-like basement and realize that the prisoners were packed in so tightly that they couldn’t even lie down.) Now the basement contains display cases showing artifacts discovered during the reconstruction, including a hand grenade, a rifle, plates and cups, even part of the wrought-iron bed that Nick’s father had brought up the mountain to the village, where most people slept on pallets on the floor.

Some 37 bodies had already been buried in the yard around the house when Eleni Gatzoyianis was taken prisoner.  There was no room for more, so on August 28, 1948, the guerrillas marched their last group of 13 condemned prisoners to a distant plateau where their bodies would be thrown into a nearby ravine.

In  2002 our daughter Eleni, her grandmother’s namesake, spent a year living in Lia, rebuilding the family home, which had been allowed to fall into its foundations.  She spent nine months restoring the house as it had been in her grandmother’s life. She was moved to find that the elderly villagers who remembered the terrible events of the war helped her and donated their own belongings, including a painted wooden cradle and many embroidered textiles, to keep the house authentic to its period.  In 2005, "North of Ithaka",  Eleni's travel memoir describing that year and her experiences living in he ancestors' village, was published by St. Martin's Press. 

During the rebuilding, the stonemasons found a coin under the original cornerstone which showed that the house was first built in 1856. A new keystone over the door of the gate to the courtyard indicates that Nick’s father added on to the house in1924, and that Eleni rebuilt it in 2002.

A local carpenter carved two panels of the exterior gate, one showing the eagle of Epiros and the other representing Epirote mothers.

Here is the fireplace in the restored “great room” with a photograph of Eleni Gatzoyiannis and her husband Christos at the time of their wedding.  She dreamed that Christos would bring her and the children that followed to live with him in Worcester, MA where he was a produce seller, but her dream was blocked by the outbreak of war in 1939.

Nick took his visitors to see the spot where he got his last glimpse of his mother, as she turned and waved before being led around a bend toward the threshing fields. After we returned to the Inn and the nearby church of St. Paraskevi, and Nick pointed out the route the escaping children took down the mountain, our visitors left, amid tears and hugs all around.

(Here is part of a group of 11—two families from Omaha, Neb.-- who departed today, after spending two nights in the inn and touring the Eleni Gatzoyiannis sites.  Notice the mud swallow who has built a nest in the light fixture over their heads in the reception area.)

Like the hundreds of strangers who had come before them, these visitors left their names inscribed in the guest book in Eleni’s house, a tribute to a Greek peasant woman who sacrificed her life in her remote Greek village to save her children so that they could live her dream of America.

Red Eggs for Easter

Yesterday was Good Friday and once again we trooped off to pick up our slaughtered Easter Lamb from Bahnan's Market on Pleasant Street in Worcester, where they celebrate Easter every year in four languages.  Once again, I got queasy in the ice-cold room where the lambs were hanging and had to escape to the fresh air outside.

Today, early,  we rushed off to church without a bite of food, eager to end our fast with communion.  Then we made our annual pilgrimage to the Pancake House where we wallowed in treats forbidden during the past weeks of Lent (but no meat--yet!).  Now we're dressing for the late-night Easter service which culminates with the church in complete darkness until, at the stroke of midnight, Father Dean announces "Christ is risen" and the light from his candle spreads throughout our congregation and then through the city and through all the world as we make our way home, protecting the flame, and begin to eat  mayeritsa soup and crack our red eggs in competition to see whose is strongest, repeating each time,  the great good news:  "Christ is risen!"  "He is risen indeed!

(If you would like to read a delightfully humorous, lyrical and personal description of the rituals of Orthodox Holy Week as written by daughter Eleni, click on her latest post on her new blog "The Liminal Stage, below." ) 

http://www.theliminalstage.com/?p=321

Below is the saga of our Greek Easter as I reported it last year in a post called "Easter in Four Languages."   The story this year was pretty much the same.  That's one of the great things about ritual, tradition and holidays.

(Please click on the photos to enlarge them)

Today is Good Friday and in a Greek household that means we can’t eat dairy or meat (that’s been going on for 40 days) and also today we can’t eat oil, so on Good Fridays we usually end up surviving on things like plain baked potatoes and peanut butter on crackers.

But today the Big Eleni, who lives with us and is the best cook in the world, has all sorts of “fasting” Good Friday food ready – Halvah, stuffed grape leaves, rice-stuffed tomatoes, taramasalata (made from fish roe) and some sort of artichoke/spinach/ hummus concoction. And boiled shrimp.

Today was also the annual dramatic journey into Worcester to collect the lamb which we had ordered far ahead from Bahnan’s Market on 344 Pleasant Street. As you can see from the first sign above, the people at Bahnan’s are ready to sell you your Easter needs in four languages: English, Greek, Turkish and Arabic.

(And they now have a café where, according to local Greeks, you can get the only authentic gyros for miles around.)

Shopping at Bahnan’s is like a visit to the United Nations, but on Easter week it’s like several festivals rolled into one.

There was a considerable line of people waiting to get into the refrigerated back room to receive the lamb they had ordered and have it cut up to their specifications. And this was in the morning, before church let out. I imagine by afternoon the line was out the door.

I didn’t last long in the refrigerated room, because of the cold and the proximity of all those lamb corpses, some of which looked the size of a small horse. (Our lamb was very small—I believe 27 pounds.)

I had to escape before the butcher started sawing, I couldn't take it, but this process is still easier than some early Easters in Nick’s Northern Greek village when the adorable baby goats were tied to each house’s front door knob and my offspring loved petting them. Then I had to drag the children, (all three under ten) out of town on Holy Saturday to prevent them seeing the general bloodshed as the baby goats were slaughtered and the blood ran in the street.

In the village on Easter Sunday you see spits outside every house, each one tended by the patriarch who is drinking homemade moonshine called Raki and having a good time. We sometimes do the lamb on the spit outside in Grafton, but not when Easter comes this early.

(By the way, this is a rare year when Orthodox Easter and everyone else’s Easter are on the same day. Usually we Greeks are later because Orthodox Easter has to be after Passover. It’s complicated.)

In the photos above you see the Big Eleni shopping for Greek cheese at Bahnan’s. We already have our large round Tsoureki bread with the red egg in the middle. And on Holy Thursday, as always, we dyed dozens of eggs red for the Saturday-night egg-cracking duel when you challenge everyone – saying “Christ is risen” “Indeed he is risen”. Crack! And whoever’s egg comes out the winner gets the other guy’s egg.

Tomorrow—Holy Saturday—we will all go to church very early and without consuming as much as a drop of water beforehand. We line up to take communion and then are free for the first time in seven weeks to eat dairy (not meat. Not yet. But we are free to rush to the Pancake House where we traditionally stuff ourselves with high-calorie breakfast treats that have been forbidden for weeks.)

Then it’s back to church again at midnight.—for the dramatic Midnight Mass on Saturday night when the church is plunged into darkness and the priest comes out at the exact stroke of midnight with a single candle and announces ‘Christ is risen!” Then the flame passes from his candle to everyone else’s and the church fills with light as we sing the Resurrection hymn: “Christos anesti!” We try to keep our candles lit as we drive home to break the Lenten fast by cracking eggs and eating the delicate dill-and-egg-lemon soup made by the Big Eleni out of the lambs intestines.

(Actually, she doesn’t put in the intestines because she knows that our kids would never eat it. In fact one is a vegetarian. And after my visit to the market today, I understand perfectly.)

I hope wherever you are celebrating Easter or Passover -- in any language – you are enjoying warm spring weather. Here in Massachusetts it has finally stopped raining and will be a beautiful weekend. Kalo Pascha!

Liminal Stages and Death on the Internet

I thought I’d introduce this subject with a photo of a fabulous horse-drawn hearse that I saw in Granada, Nicaragua.  The coffin rides like Sleeping Beauty inside the glass compartment, and you’ll notice that the horses are draped with crocheted blankets.  "Why?" I asked.  "Because this is a very serious time,” I was told.)

My husband claims that I’ve been preparing for death ever since my twenties--over 40 years ago.  I guess that’s what you get when you marry a hypochondriac with a gloomy Scandinavian background. (Remember in "Annie Hall" when Diane Keaton and Woody Allen were breaking up and sorting out their books? She said something like: “All the books with ‘Death’ in the title are yours.”  You should see my library.)

So about death. Like everything else, dying has apparently been transformed by  the creation of the internet.  I think we’re all familiar with on-line memorial pages where mourners can post their condolences and memories of the dear departed.

In today’s New York Times (Jan. 25) there’s a front-page story reporting that  funeral homes are now offering bereaved families the opportunity to invite friends and relatives who can’t make it to the actual funeral to watch the services live on the computer and then re-view the tape over and over again. Some of the companies offering this service to undertakers are FuneralOne, and  Event by Wire.  Even the famous Frank E. Campbell funeral chapel in Manhattan is introducing a webcasting program.

Some funeral directors offer the on-line funeral service for free, according to The Times, and others charge $100 to $300.  A family can make the funeral broadcast open to the public or issue invitations along with a password. (I wonder, does Evite do funerals?) This service has allowed the military colleagues of a Marine killed in Afghanistan, for instance, to view his hometown funeral including the arrival at the airport, the graveside ceremony and the 21-gun salute.  The father of the young Marine said he watches the funeral over and over again on the computer. “I don’t know why, but I guess it’s healing.”

Two weeks ago, the cover story in the Sunday New York Times Magazine of Jan 9, 2011 --“Ghosts in the Machine”-- was all about what happens to the words and images of yourself that you’ve posted on the internet—after you die.  Will you be remembered by your last foolhardy Tweet?  By those embarrassing photos on Facebook? Entrepreneurs, according to The Times, are popping up who will manage your digital afterlife for a fee—acting as a virtual executor who will categorize, file, organize or just do away with your on-line self. 

Andy Fish, the artist and instructor who taught me about blogging and Photoshop and computer illustration, says that he plans another kind of digital immortality—in which he can communicate with his fans from beyond the grave.  Andy often writes  a week’s worth of posts for his blog,  www.AndyFishWrap.blogspot.com , and then schedules the dates on which they will be posted on Blogspot.  Using that facility, he plans to post an annual message on his birthday well into the next century, even if he’s already gone to his reward.

Death, of course is one of life’s major passages. So why not make some plans for it ahead of time? 

For a woman’s group I belong to, with a different topic for discussion every month, we once wrote and read aloud our obituaries. It was a worthwhile exercise.  Leaving a draft of one’s obituary probably would be helpful to  survivors as part of your  internet estate unless, like my husband, you already have an up-to-date bio on your computer for public appearances and press coverage.

(One of Nick’s colleagues at The New York Times back in the day was the head obituary writer. He was always amazed that he could get in to see anyone—no matter how important—by mentioning his job.  Every big shot cares about what his Times obituary will say about him.)

Speaking of life passages, daughter Eleni Gage just launched her blog “The Liminal Stage”, on New Year’s Eve, which she calls “The most liminal night of the year".  The subtitle is:  “Navigating a modern world with the help of time-tested traditions.”

"Liminal" comes from the Latin word for “threshold” and Eleni has packed several liminal moments of her own into the last year: getting engaged, then married and moving from Manhattan to Miami. 

Here you see her at her wedding in Corfu, Greece, about to toss a decorated wedding bread to the single ladies behind her (a Corfiote twist on throwing the bouquet.)

Eleni  majored in Folk Lore and Mythology at college and, like me, she really loves learning about traditions, rituals, superstitions, divination – in all cultures.  She writes on her blog:

“It’s precisely because people get anxious around liminal stages, and the questions they raise, that cultures develop rituals designed to bring comfort, protection, and luck…My family is Greek so we throw pomegranates on our doorstep to invite abundance, and sit down to a meal in which a lucky quarter (wrapped in tinfoil for hygiene) is hidden inside a meat pie. …Whoever finds the quarter is guaranteed a good year, an extra little burst of confidence with which to face the unknown future. That’s the point of rituals, and of this blog–to invite luck, to celebrate a given moment, and to use traditions to do what they always have–to give yourself the tiniest sense that you can control what happens to you, even if that’s just an illusion.”

 You can find Eleni’s blog at www.TheLiminalStage.com or by clicking on the title in my blog list to the right.

Mykonos and Santorini for Christmas

My friend Helen has a son living in a New York apartment with bare walls, and she promised him some "art" for those walls for Christmas.  He loves the Greek islands of Mykonos and Santorini --especially the beaches and the waves, she said, asking me to come up with some photos of those two islands so she could choose several that I would have printed in a large size and matted and framed for his Christmas gift.

This gave me a delightful chance to go back through photos taken four or five years ago on those islands to give her a selection to choose from.  The photo above shows a Greek woman meeting Petros, the famous pelican who is the mascot of Mykonos.  It seems that there has been a pelican named Petros wandering the harbor around the fish market since forever.  The original Petros died in 1986, it is said, and the whole island went into mourning.  Then Jackie Kennedy Onassis obtained a new pelican, named Irene, to take its place.   I think there are actually several tame pelicans lurking around the harbor, but the natives will always tell you that the pelican you are pointing at is Petros.

Here is another shot of Petros--or is it Irene?  It's a rather pink pelican, so maybe it's a female.  Helen chose three other photos for her son's Christmas gift, but said she might eventually get this one for herself, as she really loves the pelican.

This church--right on Mykonos' harbor near the fish market, is said to be one of the most photographed churches in Greece.  It's very tiny.  It shows in the background of a painting I did of two men in the vegetable market.  I use that painting on my business card.  And I went back to Mykonos and  showed it to the vegetable seller last year.  He loved it.  He said the old gentleman who was his customer in my painting has now passed away.  Here's the painting.

Here's another photo of Mykonos taken from the second-story veranda of a bar where we always go to watch the sun set.  The row of  windmills at the end of the harbor are the symbol of Mykonos--so this scene is easily recognizable to anyone who has been there.  The  stretch of picturesque buildings on the left is called "Little Venice"

This photo was taken during the "golden hour" as photographers call it--the hour before the sun goes down, when  everything turns a beautiful color, including the white-washed stucco houses of Little Venice.  Fashion photographers often take advantage of the golden hour which makes everything, including their models and their fashions look better.

Here is a view of Little Venice looking in the other direction, when I was standing below the windmills.

While sitting in our favorite Mykonos bar, waiting for the sun to go down, I took this photo of my glass of wine with the windmills in the background.  It was at this same place that my daughter Eleni took the photo of me that I use for my profile photo.

As the sun set, we saw this wonderful view of an anchored sailing ship silhouetted against the sky.

Here's one last photo of Mykonos taken from the beach of Aghios Sostis--Eleni's favorite place in the world.  The beach is fabulous and up the hill there's a small taverna with heavenly food cooked in the simplest way on a grill.

Mykonos is a very sophisticated island filled with international visitors and very expensive stores.  It's all white stucco buildings and shocking pink bougainvillea and narrow, winding streets meant to confuse raiding pirates  The island is known for its hard-partying ways and the significant gay culture there.  There are many nudist beaches and loud nightclubs, but there are also wonderful  isolated spots like this one.

Next blog post I'll show you the photos of Santorini and tell you which ones Helen chose for her gifts to her son.