jon_decles

First off: I hate the fact that this blog requires me to misspell mine own name to log in. But that's technology. Some day there will be a wreckoning!

The good news is that the long-awaited sequel to The Particolored Unicorn is finished and finally out and available. To take a look, go to:

http://www.Piswyck.com

You can see the spiffy cover by Bonnie Callahan, who is Guest of Honor at this year's Confurrence (the furry convention), read the great blurb by Paul Magrs, who writes for Dr. Who, among many other kinds of writing, and you can read the opening of the first chapter.

Then, in your unbelievable excitement, you can actually purchase a copy, then and there!

Yes, there is one gross misspelling. We'll try to get that fixed.

Next on the agenda: finishing the shadow puppet play about Herakles, and finishing the travelogue that I started here last summer.

There is also a different novel to complete. Its about a fifth of the way done.

Just a quick note to let you know why the travelog has been in abeyance for three months: I've been busy, overworked, inundated with younglings, and am now a month behind on the book: as well as about to open in the Great Dickens Fair in no less than three consecutive roles.

I'll be back as soon as I get a chance to breath. Which won't be improved if I keep eating marshmallows.

I was worried because I had 45 messages, but they turned out to be page after page after page of drivel about Live Journal (the business) moving a bunch of big ugly metal boxes out of somebody's basement in San Francisco into somebody's basement in Montana.

Montana is where they used to train people to work on nuclear submarines. Maybe they still do.

It might be well to say at this point that a certain amount of notoriety had attached to my fall during the race at Nemea. Mr. and Mrs. Economu had mentioned that they saw me on TV. At the dinner and performance at the De Laet's place, Dr. Miller noted that he had been by the Nemea Museum right after we had, and that the people there said to him that they had seen me. It seems that my fall was caught on camera and deemed newsworthy, so for the next couple of weeks people throughout the Argolid recognized me as 'the man who fell,' asked if I was all right, and treated me as someone a little bit special.

Late in life I have become a minor sports celebrity: and for more than fifteen minutes!

The morning after that magic night at the De Laet's, we went into central Nafplion (ok, I've been spelling it wrong: the f comes before the p, but it Greek it is completely different anyway.) We met the charming couple (Brenda Bunting and John Ilnicki: thank you Diana for taking notes!) with whom we had talked while waiting for Dr. Miller to lead us up the mountain, and decided to have a brunch together, not at the cafe where we had planned, but down on the waterfront, in the more touristy area.

Outdoor tables on the Bay of Nafplio are everything one imagines experiencing in a sophisticated movie about jet set people with enough money to do whatever they want. But you can sit there and enjoy the view, and talk with friends, for far less that the Onassis family spends. And though you just might see James Bond at another table, you would be too relaxed to get excited about it.

It is said that the water of the Bay of Nafplio is a different color every hour of the day. I think that might be true, but remember that all the colors are tints of that striking Aegean blue. Elegant ships, both sail and power, go by, and in the center of it all is the Bourtzi, a small fortress covering the tiny island Agio Theodoros.

The Bourtzi was built by the Venetians in the 1400s to protect the bay. Chains linked it to the big castle on the hill and the opposite coast as well. Later it became a home for the executioners who killed prisoners from the big castle.

For all that grim history, the Bourtzi is... Well, almost cute. It looks like a kind of getaway cottage of a fortress, a summer place to escape the attentions of the Fifteenth Century paparazzi. It might not look so cute if one were not comparing it to the huge Palamidi Castle that dominates the landscape, but as we sat there munching and talking I could well imagine some romantic Venetian couple booking it for a wedding that they wanted to be really, really private. Say, no more than eight hundred guests.

Brenda a John are really neat folks. They live in Hawaii, another of the mythic places we would like to visit, and their companionship was a perfect way to start the day. WE had much in common, and I hope that fate allows us to meet up with them again.

After we parted, Diana led me down the promenade by the bay to a travel agency, where she booked our passage on all the ferries and other sea-going vessels we were to take. Part of this sort of thing had been done by computer, but once in Greece we discovered that using the internet was not as easy as back home. In fact, it proved impossible.

The rented Greek cell phone, on the other hand, worked well and consistently. Unlike the ones in the United States, which are primarily of use to teen agers who spend hours and hundreds of dollars saying inconsequential things to one another in order to prove how cool they are, and that they can possess the latest technology. --The Stateside Cell Phone works fine so long as you have nothing important to say. The minute you need it, as for instance in the case of your car breaking down, you discover that you are out of range.

(An acquaintance of mine who is a Highway Patrol officer found himself embarrassed when his car broke down, his cell phone did not work, and he had to flag down somebody to make a call for him when that someone got to a location where a cell phone would actually work.)

After the booking Diana persuaded me that I ought to have a hat more functional than the folding petasos I had brought along. (The wind kept pulling it off.) I got a neat ball cap, but soon discovered that my head was badly abraded and that the hat was taking the skin off; so I was back to bareheaded, with Diana smearing on sunscreen at every opportunity.

Diana discovered that she had already filled the two chips she had brought along for her digital camera, so we went to a photo store, she bought a really gigantic capacity chip, and had the two chips downloaded onto a CD, then the chips cleared.

That turned out to be a mistake. The smaller chip downloaded just fine, but the larger of the two did not, meaning that we lost all the pictures from the Nemean Games. If anybody reading this knows how to surf the net for stuff like television footage on UTube, we would sure appreciate anything that turns up. If I was on television, then somebody ought to have pictures of me falling on my head, right?

Next was Epidaurus.

Our hotel was situated between two main roads, one of which led out of town to Argos, and all those other cool places, the other to Epidaurus. Diana had, at first, had doubts about our being able to fit in a trip to Epidaurus, but it was only about 34 miles, and the major difficulty was, the tourist books told us, figuring out which of the three places named Epidaurus was the right one.

For me, the 'right' one was the location of the Greatest Theater In the World, and, it turned out, we didn't have any trouble at all finding it.

The site is pretty well-developed, with a museum put up by the man who first excavated it, what amounts to a large, surrounding park, and the centerpiece, the theater, which after millenia is still in service, and which still has the best acoustics anybody has ever devised.

Hitler sent his engineers to copy that theater, but his copy didn't work. Recent research has discovered that the secret is the exact stone out of which the seats are built. The stone has the interesting property of absorbing the sound of the audience, but reflecting the sounds from the stage.

This is THE place of pilgrimage for any actor. It is said of this stage that if you drop a handful of coins from your pocket, someone in the top row can not only tell you what coins you dropped, but which side landed up. That is probably a bit fanciful, but the acoustics are truly spectacular. I spent a lot of time last year recording a novel of mine for a podcast, with earphones clapped on my head so that I could hear exactly what I sounded like as I spoke. The effect of standing center stage at Epidaurus and speaking is exactly the same. You can hear your own voice reflected perfectly, so you know exactly what you sound like. And the people all the way up can hear you, too!

Diana only climbed about halfway up the steep steps of the seating, but she said I sounded fine as I read the Homeric Hymn to Asklepios. I then went all the way up and listened as she spoke, and I could hear her, too.

Sadly, the performance season would not start until two weeks in the future, so there was no way for us to catch a performance in that most sacred of theatrical precincts.

The museum is not large, but the stuff in it is beautiful and interesting. Some reassembly of architectural members has been made there, and one can see the wonderful treatment of ceilings which the ancient buildings enjoyed. There are many statues of Asklepios and his daughter, Hügeia, as well as Aphrodite: which was surprising to me.

It must be remembered that the theater was not the central attraction in Ancient Epidaurus. Rather, this was a sanctuary of the God Asklepios, and one of the great healing centers of the world. Think of it as a combination of the Mayo Clinic and Lourdes. There are testimonials carven in marble walls preserved in the museum, and votive statuary concerned with healing: statues of limbs that have been healed, and so forth. There is every evidence that the medical practices of the place were effective, else so many sick people would not have flocked there, nor so many provided testimony of restored health.

There were large buildings for people to stay in, and large kitchens to cook for them. A good deal of the treatment consisted of making sure people ate a healthy diet, drank plenty of pure water, and got good exercise. There was also a good deal of counseling by the priesthood, no doubt much of it about lifestyle and its effect on one's overall health. All this, however, was preparation for the main event, which was a personal encounter with the God, which took the form of a dream.

A special building (the Abatos) was set aside in which the patients, having undergone preliminary treatment, were set to sleep. In this sanctified sleep, the God would come to the patient and advise him or her on what was needed to effect a cure. Sometimes the advice seems to have been common sense. Sometimes it was downright wonky. But it seems to have been effective, and the reputation of the work at Epidaurus continued high until it was first destroyed by Goths, and then thoroughly ravaged by the order of Theodosius II, one of the fanatical pseudo-Christian emperors of Rome.

When one thinks of a modern hospital, or even of Christian healing sanctuaries, the images of a theater or a sports complex do not immediately spring to mind. Yet Epidaurus featured both the facilities, and a look at the cultural ideals of the Ancients reveals the good sense of these inclusions, and perhaps points to some good ideas for our own troubled times.

The theater of Ancient Hellas was conscientiously cathartic. That is to say, one went to the theater to be purged of a great deal of built-up negative emotionality. In short, it was a ritualized form of major stress reduction. Whatever problems life might be presenting, at least the average person did not have to contend with the horrors of being born into the families of Atreus or Oedipos. The tragedies were meant to wring every bit of agony out of the members of the audience. Beside the tragedies were presented the satyr plays and comedies that restored the spirit, and a lightness of feeling, to one's life.

Current research indicates that the best treatment for depression is not another regimen of risky drug therapy, but straightforward intense exercise. (The very opposite of sitting in front of a TV watching sports, which only serves to pump up the epinephrine without releasing it.) A palestra, a gymnasium, a running track where, in addition to regular exercise there were regular (every four years) competitive games in honor of the God: all these were no doubt excellent additions to a lifestyle designed to restore health.

One wonders how many ailments treated at Epidaurus had their roots in bad eating habits, a sedentary lifestyle, or any of the other bad ways of living with which we are once again saddled today.

The running track at Epidaurus is now usable, and they are working at restoring the tunnel through which the athletes entered for the competition. The track, we are told, is now used for such competitions as special high school meets and the like: but as the restoration continues, one might consider whether Dr. Miller's work at Nemea is having a greater effect than he planned.

And speaking of restoration: there is a wide-spread practice coming into fashion in Greece of partial restoration of buildings that have been thoroughly excavated, so that people today may have some idea what the Ancient buildings looked like in their glory days. We have mentioned the restoration of columns at the temple of Nemean Zeus. At Epidaurus there are two notable restorations underway that may soon make this one of the most spectacular sites to visit in all of Hellas.

The Themyle (or Tholos) is one of the most exquisite of Ancient buildings, and we know a great deal about its physical appearance. There is a great deal of speculation about the underground maze (it's not much of a maze) and what its meaning might be. --The maze is pretty much what is left intact of the building. --But in order to let people have some idea of what this magnificent building was like, they have undertaken an at least partial restoration, with the base and part of the columns already in place.

Nearby they have begun to put up the columns of the Abato, so that one can already get a good idea how big it was, and what it looked like.

And there is also work on a Propylon, a formal entry gate by which the new patients might come into the place where they would be staying. We see the logic of having new patients arrive through a very impressive entry in the grand lobbies of modern hospitals: an edifice designed to build confidence in what is to come.

There was also a temple to Artemis here, and a great deal else.

Even if you can't see a play at Epidaurus, this is a place well worth visiting. Take the trouble to buy a tourist book, so that you will know what you are looking at, and then marvel at what wonderful things people built without power tools,

***

It was to be our last night in Nafplion, so we had dinner at the romantic taverna again. It was late enough there were other people there, apparently large families, and we knew we were going to miss it. We asked about the recorded music, but our host said it was a mix tape his son had put together: he couldn't tell us what to look for in stores.

I think maybe that was the night we bought a bottle of good Nemean red wine for the Economus, but it might have been another night. In any case, they got the bottle, and we prepared to depart on the morrow.

I regret not having gone swimming at either of Nafplion's beaches, or climbing the 999 steps to the Palamidi fortress/castle, and seeing all the city's more modern history. I would love to go back to Nafplion anytime, for an actual vacation. It is what I always imagined the Riviera to be like, but without all the stuffy rich people.

A wonderful, wonderful town.

I think it was about five years ago.

Each summer (for a while) I did a weekend on Angel Island, in the middle of San Francisco Bay, in my most celebrated role as the young Mark Twain: in conjunction with the Victorian House Tour, an opportunity for the public to visit some of the houses which are being conserved by the simple expedient of having the park staff live in them.

It is downright shameful to see the decay which has set in due to neglect of this powerfully interesting historic site: but there is hope, as the park struggles to preserve some of San Francisco's most historic buildings.

Mark Twain came to the island during the Civil War in his role as reporter: to examine the newly refurbished defenses. Many of those defenses are long gone, but it was my pleasure and privilege to paint them with words for our visitors, and help them to see what it was like in that bygone day: and, there are some of the buildings of that period still standing, one very much restored by a couple who devoted great time and energy to the project.

Mark Twain was not alone for these tours. A great many costumed docents were on hand to show people through the houses, to serve them food of the period , to bake bread in the Civil War period bakery, and to teach general lessons in Living History.

One evening, after all the guests had taken the ferry back to the mainland, I fell into conversation with a woman who had been hosting at Quarters Ten, the elegant Civil War officers house which had been floated out from the City on a barge and drawn up the hill. Somehow the topic turned to the word 'arete,' which she assumed I did not know. I laughed, and assured her I did know it, and that it was very important to me.

"Well," she said, "are you a fan of football? You see, a school friend of mine made great use of that word in her memoir of her father. The word was very important to him. You might have heard of him: Y. A. Tittle?"

I assured her that though I am not a fan of American Football, even I knew the name of the man who has been argued to be perhaps the greatest football player of all time.

The conversation wandered, as it does at the end of a performance day, and I filed away the information with the intention of looking up the book.

In the Summer of 2007 I discovered that a talk was to be given at Boggs Mountain State Forest by one of our most illustrious residents, Mr. Don Emerson, on the history of the town of Cobb, and its glory days as a resort area. Mr. Emerson was instrumental in the building of my tea house, having provided me with permission to hunt and cut a madrone tree on his land, to use as the post of the tokonoma; so I was interested first to hear him speak, and second to know more about that romantic period when people traveled all the way from San Francisco for a week or two of relaxation in the mountains.

It was a fascinating talk, including the information that up until the early 1920s the last leg of the journey was still made by stage coach.

At the end we were shown a whole table full of photo albums and individual photos of the history of the area.

"...and here," said Mr. Emerson, pointing to a photo of the crowd in the dining hall of the old Hoberg's Resort (where Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, and later, Jefferson Airplane, all played) "you see a picture of Y. A. Tittle. And here he is again, golfing of the new golf course we built. He used to come up here all the time."

Hmmm. Time for another mental note about that book.


So here we were, in Greece, in the Summer of 2008, at Dr. Stephen Miller's house (you have already perused the party) and I was introduced to Mr. and Mrs. De Laet, who were to host an artistic event at their home the next night.

Mrs. De Laet, Dianne, had been instrumental in working on the musical and performing aspects of the Nemean Games in 2004.

You can imagine my astonishment when a little later Dr. Miller informed me that she was the daughter of Y. A. Tittle, the famous football player, and that she had written a book weaving her memoir of growing up as his daughter with the Greek myths.

In the words of Mark Twain: "I was floored!"

Thus we return to the main narrative, as Dr. Miller leads our expedition away from Argos and into the Valley of the Inochos River, and finally up a winding dirt road into the Artemision Mountains.

***

The orchards in this part of Greece bear the look of hard times. There are many abandoned farm houses, which, being made of stone, have held up much better than buildings of similar age in California, where they will have been built of wood.

One had no trouble understanding that the road on which we were traveling was a hundred years old, and probably built for donkey carts. Our procession teetered precariously up, then finally came to the house, where many of us parked precipitously along the edge. (Did I mention that Hellas is mainly vertical?) We had to park that way because a truck needed to pass us to make a delivery!

We went up an outside stairway to the living area, which is, of course, the top of the house. The bedrooms have been built where the sheep pens used to be, downstairs.

The De Laets told us that they had bought the old house from the brother of a friend, and with the help of excellent Albanian stone masons, were restoring it.

You can see what it looked like early on, and the breathtaking view, at the following website:

http://www.aretepoetics.com/elagaia.html

I can assure you, it is now something of an artistic masterpiece, and the threshing floor is usable at a theater already. (You can see the stone wall that holds it up in one of the photos, and the round, flat area as well.)

The house is called EleGaea, and it is meant to be a place for the performing arts.

It is.

Dinner was served on the upper terrace, and I made bold to corner Dr. Miller with my mental list of the questions from the day before.

New information included the clarification of something I had previously misunderstood.

The dusting with various forms of fine earth did not take place over the olive oil, but rather, after the bath.

"I remember," said Dr. Miller, "when I was young, and one went to the barber, the last, finishing touch was to dust one with talcum powder from a fine bristled brush. That is what the dust was about. One tossed it in the air and walked through a fine cloud of it. It was done in a different room than the oiling."

I remember that dusting also.

"Okay," I pressed on, "What are all those chambers under the floor of the Temple Of Zeus about? Some sort of initiatory system?"

He smiled.

"Actually, they are just economy. The upright blocks are the same thing as floor joists in a modern house. They support the floor, but you don't have to use materials filling in between them."

Finally I mentioned the small fire in what I thought to be a possible adyton.

"Well, we are puzzled by that chamber, and of course we have no evidence to tell us what it was, as yet. But the fire... Well, I told the people kindling the torch to light the fire on the altar. Of course, the altar for that temple is the long, thin one in front. But in a Greek Orthodox Church, the faith in which most people here have been raised, the altar is inside the church, at the far end from the entrance. There being no altar there that they could find, they went down to a place where they would expect one to be, and lit the torch there."

It is well for those of a mystical bent to remember Solon's Seventh Tenet: "Make Reason Your Supreme Commander."

That time sitting on the wall, drinking wine and talking casually with Dr. Miller, was one of the high points of the trip for me. In all our previous encounters he had been so busy, so much at the center of things, that I felt as if I were imposing. Here, at sunset, I discovered him to be what I always suspected: a really nice guy.

Then it was dusk, and time for the performance.

Diana and I seated ourselves in the second row, on folding chairs, and watched as the lighting was tested and the sound system prepared. We didn't know what to expect, but what happened next was about as far from anything we might have expected as could be imagined.

Dianne Tittle De Laet is truly a Renaissance Woman, accomplished not only as a writer and poet but as a concert harpist, a sculptress, a performance artist, and activist in the cause of Peace. She has established the Arete Foundation, is exhibited in many art galleries, works with friends in a gallery of her (their) own in Redwood City, and goodness knows what else. Do a search for her on the net and you will be as dazzled as I was.

Near the opening of the performance I was downright pixilated to see a the Quail Dance from a Japanese Kyogen comedy.

Imagine that! After all my years of studying Cha No Yu, I saw my first Kyogen in the Artemision Mountains of Greece under a full moon rising over the Inochos Valley.

The heavy, central body of the work was drawn from writings by a hired soldier who was assigned to accompany the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears. This was part reading, part dance, part song: Cherokee song, as well as some pieces from other languages, and it was heart-breaking.

As the soldier told of the suffering of a Christian Cherokee woman who gave her only blanket to keep a sick child warm, and who died of exposure. along with so many others, I am sure there was not a dry eye in the house.

I do not believe that people have any need or reason to be cruel to each other, not in the name of anything. I think that at the heart of all this cruelty is the perverse Prokrustianism that seeks to trim our souls down to a single one-shape-fits-all kind of existence. That, and nothing else in today's world, is the root of evil.

The performance ended and there was much applause. If one has a chance to see any of the work of this wonderful woman, I recommend that one do so.

The pain seeped away, the night softened, and we all said our goodbyes. I managed to get a moment with Mrs. De Laet (her husband is as tall and imposing a figure as she is, but he stands back, no doubt in the same awe that the rest of us feel) and told her about the inevitability of our meeting, ever since that day five years ago when Mark Twain sat down for a cigar on the back porch of Quarters Ten, during the Civil War.

Then it was time for the scary scramble down the mountain and back to Napflion.

Monday morning started with a trip to Tyrins.

I am still jazzed by our usual route during our stay in the Argolid. I mean, we had a choice of going straight, to Argos, or turning at Tyrins, on the way to Mykenae and Nemea. This is the heart of Mythic Hellas, the place where most of the good stuff (in the literary sense) happened, and there we were, driving it as if the signs said 'left to Oakland, right to Berkeley.'

Homer was impressed by the walls of Tyrins, and so were we. It was easy to see why the more recent of the Ancients assumed the walls had been built by the Kyklopedi. This city, like Mykenae, goes back way before the Trojan War. This is the realm of Perseus, the time before Herakles.

It is on a hill, rather than a mountain, with flat planes surrounding it and the sea not far away. The museum was closed (it was Monday), but we were able to trudge around the site and try to imagine what it must have been like in its heyday. This site was important to our excursion, as it plays a vital role in Diana's next book "Sword of Avalon."

The famous "Sheep Gallery," so named because for untold ages local sheep sheltered there, and burnished the immense rocks smooth, is not open for one to enter (a bit dangerous), but you can look down it and wonder at a hallway like that, still really functional, after more than three thousand years.

The megaroon had something else built on top of it, possibly a temple, after the fall of the Palace Cultures, but it is clear enough to determine that it is pretty much like the one at Mykenae, both in size and layout.

Tyrins was inhabited for a very long time: long after the fall of the Palace Cultures and the end of the Heroic Age. The site is lit at night, but it is grown up and weedy, revealing less of its splendor than the photos taken at the height of its excavation. In a country like Hellas you can't blame the government for not spending more on it: there is stuff all over requiring money and work.

If the recovery of Ancient Hellas were properly funded, the whole of Greece would consist of full time archeologists and presenters, and there would not be room for all the tourists who would flock there.

Study up some on Tyrins: it is just as interesting as the other sites, but has not had so many plays written about it.

After Tyrins we headed back to Mykenae, to see the Tholos, possibly a tomb.

There seems no evidence that it was ever closed up, and whatever it was used for remains a mystery. It is in pretty good shape for something so old, and the fact that people built it at all is a miracle. The stones are more neatly cut than those in the citadel, and though the bronze bosses that decorated the ceiling are gone, it remains beautiful. In shape it is somewhat conical, rather like the taller of the crowns of Egypt.

It's orientation is typically Mykenean, with a chamber to the right as you enter, in the same position where the throne of the King would be in the megaroon. This small chamber cannot be entered, for safety reasons we guess, but could benefit from lighting. It's too dark to see into it.

The entrance to the tholos, and the entry passaage, with its huge, finely cut stones, is even more impressive than the Lion Gate at the citadel.

From Mykenae we continued to Nemea, and though the museum was closed (Diana has now forwarded me the notes on our actual, versus our projected, itinerary) we finally got to see the site.

At the gate, the woman behind the counter said: "Oh, you are the man who fell in the games. I saw you on television! Are you all right?"

I was surprised to find that my run had made it to television, and I assured her I was recovering.

The interpretive signage at the baths was exemplary. What books seldom tell you is the details. I learned, for instance, that the scraping off of post-exercise sweat was done in one room, and that the athletes then descended to a low room with sinks, where they took buckets and sloshed each other clean. Once clean, they then climbed up to the various pools in which they could soak in waters of different temperature.

In fine, the system was pretty much like that in a modern Japanese bath house, though without the high temperature hot tubs.

There is not much to be seen of the temenos of Opheltes, and as yet one cannot take a close look at the hippodrome, or that part of the dig.

But the temple of Nemean Zeus is spectacular. Work was continuing on the restoration of columns, and we were able to take a close look at the remains: which look prompted many more questions that answers.

At the back of the temple was a stairway leading down into a basement-like chamber, and under the main floor there appeared to be many other chambers. The basement-like part occupied a position pretty much the same at the adytion at Delphi, and my mind immediately connected the fact of Oracles of Zeus to its possible use.

There was also evidence of a small, fresh, fire there.

The Sacred Grove, which I knew to have been restored, based on evidence from the past (the original grove was apparently planted with trees from a nursery, in pots) was something of a surprise. I remember asking Dr. Miller once what kind of trees had been planted there, and he had mentioned cypress: what in California is usually identified as Italian Cypress but which, in fact, are a prominent feature of the Greek landscape as well. There were a couple of that kind, but there were more of another kind which I could not identify: wider spreading, but growing just as tall. --They are all pretty tall now, and it gives one a sense of how much time has passed since this work began.

The remains of the unique, long altar in front of the temple were especially interesting.

Diana went in search of the restrooms, across the beautiful, manicured lawns, then we headed out, stopping first at the electrically-cooled water fountain on the porch of the museum to refill our water bottles. There were folks inside, I guessed graduate students, continuing the never-ending work that archeology requires, and it seemed as if we set a good example, as a number of them came out and filled water bottles as well. Some, as I recall, were Americans, some of whom I might have met at the annual Nemea lecture. If so, they seemed kind of shy for Berkeley folks.

Diana navigated us toward Argos, down a road we had not yet driven. It was a wide, heavily-travelled road, and we passed through both open space and small towns. As we were passing through the small town of Fiichtia I suddenly frightened her out of her wits by pulling a radical U turn across traffic, swerving back around a tree, and screeching into the parking lot of a statuary store.

"Honey," she began, out of breath...

But I was already out of the car and standing in front of an eight foot high marble rendition of the Zeus of Olympia.

"It will never fit in our luggage," she opined, catching up to me.

--But there were other, more, giant statues, and a whole store just chock full of stuff, into which I was bolting. I had discovered The Mother of All Statuary Stores!

As it was air-conditioned, and we were pretty much alone, Diana quickly got into the browsing. She guessed this must be the place from which everybody else in the country got their supply. There was everything from copies of the most ancientest to the relatively modern. There was a whole bay devoted to gold, both jewelry and reproductions of cups and plates and the like from Ancient Mykenae. Diana liked a couple of cups with scenes on the sides, and they would have been very practical for carrying in luggage...

But they were GOLD!

The e-dress of the store is www.amforeas.gr

I have not visited the site yet. I don't dare!

And this, it turned out, was the branch store.

Diana said the life size copy of the famous bronze athlete who may be catching a ball, would definitely not fit in our luggage.

There were copies of statues I've never even seen in pictures.

We found the chief object for which I had been questing, a fairly large, archaic shaped, geometric painted, with horses, kantheros. Diana figured we could buy anther piece of luggage and make it a carry on. We headed for the counter.

A tour bus arrived, and way over a hundred people swarmed through the store. The poor folks who were trying to sell became frazzled. We waited, discovered that they really, really don't like to ship, as it costs so much, and got our kantheros, neatly wrapped in lots of bubble wrap. We returned to the Fiat (llooking back sadly at the giant bronze athlete and a smaller marble of Zeus and Ganymede that I have never seen) and headed, once more, for Argos.

Our plan was to stick to the outskirts, make our way to the two akropoli, see them, see the theater, then loop around (the map made it look a lot like a ring road) and get back to the place were Dr. Miller would meet us.

We now have a new saying in our family. If something is damned near impossible, and probably not worth attempting anyway, it is 'Like Driving In Argos."

There are the standard brown signs, but they don't help. We kept getting lead out of town in the wrong direction. We gave up on the akropli and tried to just get around the town and back where we wanted to go.

The tourist books warned of 'complicated and confusing one way streets.' They did not mention that the one way streets are like the paths through the Old Forest in Tolkein; they keep changing and moving as you are traveling them! They become narrower and narrower, even by Greek standards.!

Finally, there we were, in a narrow, cobble-stoned street, at a sort of Y junction, and suddenly, straight ahead, there was a huge truck, filling the space entirely. To our left there suddenly appeared a beautiful young woman with red hair (there are just about no redheads in Hellas), riding a motor scooter: which was sufficient to block that way. (We later reasoned that this was a particularly capricious way for Hermes to tell us that He was still with us.)

Have a mentioned lately that I still did not know how to put the car into reverse?

I struggled, I fought, I prayed to Hephaestos.

Nothing!

Abruptly the driver of the truck open his door, climbed down, and strode toward us.

He pulled open my door, reached across, and put the car into reverse for me: showing me carefully that one was not to pull up on the gear shift itself, but on a small ring located inside the leather sheathing of the shift. A feature I had never before seen.

Instead of saying "Efkaristo," I stammered "Parakalo."

He smiled slightly, that sort of 'stupid tourist' smile, and headed back to his truck. I backed up, the red haired young woman wheeled around me, I went down the way from which she had emerged, and the truck went where we had been.

I followed one way streets through the maze until, amazingly, we emerged in front of some ruins. I parked.

The ruins were un-prepossessing and surrounded by high fences. A Roman theater, I think, and possibly a temple. There was a restaurant, however, and though the man inside spoke no English at all (he was really surprised to see anyone walk in the door at that time of day) we managed to order moussaka and a frappe, I think.

Refreshed, we got back in the car and attempted our Escape From Argos.

We managed to circle the town, got back to where we were supposed to meet Dr. Miller, and parked in front of the landmark nursery, an hour early. Moments later another American couple we had met the previous afternoon arrived, and the men chatted and the women chatted, and we avoided looking straight ahead into the alien geometry of the streets of Argos.

I have to apologize for not remembering their names, right of the top of my head. I don't do that well, and as I write this, Diana is off climbing Mount Shasta. They were really nice folks, and we look forward to meeting them again. We did, in fact, have breakfast with them the next day.

But others arrived, Dr. Miller arrived, and we formed our caravan for the trip into the Valley of the Inochus river.

--But this point it becomes necessary to indulge in a five year flashback, and a side trip into the world of American Football.

After the bleeding, after the dehydration, Diana and I slept in late on Sunday morning. With all the cuts, abrasions, and general gore, Diana had to help me take a shower. I think that day got muzzy in my memory, because in asking Diana what we did (she took notes) I discovered that I have made some mistakes in my narration.

Looking back again, and reaccessing my Random Access Memory, I discover that the day I thought we had devoted to Mykenae was actually a day when we got there late, and spent time instead going through the chachki shops.

So...

On the Sunday we got up late and rather creakily and got on the road around noon. We had leftovers from the box feast at Nemea, went to Mykeknae, toured the museum, climbed the akropolis, and came down too late to see the tholos tomb, otherwise known as the Treasury of Atreus, etc..

We got to Nemea too late to get into the temple site or the museum, so instead I drove us over the mountain to show her the Temple of Herakles, and as much of the long race route as was practical. On the way back out the dirt road we encountered a farmer's truck off the road, and I got out to see if anyone was injured. There was nobody in the truck and I called out, and the driver appeared from the other side of the road. Though he had no English, he indicated that we might pull it back on the road.

It was a small Japanese truck, and we tried, but my long-term groin problem (the doctors tell me it is not a hernia, but an 'end of season football injury') prevented me from being any use. The driver made clear that he had called for help on his cell phone, and we headed out, just as someone bigger and stronger arrived.

Dr. Stephen Miller had asked us to come up to his house for coffee, and we followed his instructions through Nemea and up the hill.

I had heard about the house from a mutual friend, but it was still a surprise. Greeks usually build upward, vertically. Dr. Miller and his wife Effie have build vertically and horizontally, up and out, so that the top floor is more like a California ranch house, with wings. It is easy to spot from anywhere in the town, and is quite beautiful. The entry is on the top floor, with parking space up there (outside) as well, and when you enter you are struck immediately by the view. You look across the living space and through a window, and there you see framed the Temple of Zeus, now with eight columns rather than the three standing from antiquity. It is the centerpiece of the Valley of Nemea, and it manages to be both spectacular and subtle at the same time, residing amid the gentle green of the vineyards and homes that surround it. Residing, rather than dominating: a wonderful distinction.

The Millers led us into the library, where they have a large and long table with chairs, somewhere between a formal dining table and a executive meeting table.

Diana asked about a good book on the flora and fauna on Ancient Greece, and soon she was ensconced with the recommended tomes, while other guests arrived.

I am sure I have sung Dr. Miller's praises as an archeologist many times. He has the rare gift of doing important work and making it explicable to those beyond his field, without condescension or becoming a popularist. It might be well to note that both the Millers are consumately graceful persons as well, a thing not easy for people in the complex and difficult world of academia. It seems singularly appropriate that in retirement (which means spending the rest of his life cataloguing and writing books about the many years of work he has done at the site) they have the privilege of looking out each day on the results of a life well spent and the beauty that life has wrought (though not, as I am sure Dr. Miller would append, without a huge amount of help from many, many others).

Mrs. Miller brought in a large tray of chocolate-covered baklava and coffee, and then announced that it was a surprise party: for us, the guests, because although Dr. Miller knew it was his birthday, the rest of us did not.

Of course we sang the song (not the Berkeley version) and the conversation ranged hither and yon, and then it was time to leave. We were invited, the next night, to a performance at the home of one of the guests, which invitation we happily accepted. It was to be a Monday, and all the museums were likely to be closed. (Well, they are usually closed, but sometimes they are not..)

As the area of Argos is posted in all the tourist books as a place NOT to drive, and as everyone expected to have trouble finding it, Dr. Miller was to meet us all and lead us in caravan.

From the home of the Millers we made our way back down to the stadion, where a 'cultural event' was to take place.

This turned out to be a large pageant about Nemea, with many Goddesses and personified ideas and places communicating with the Goddess Nemea. It had amplified music, which was very good, and featured rhymed verse, something apparently unusual in Greek. We thoroughly enjoyed it, even without being able to understand the text. It is a mark of good pageantry that people be able to understand what is going on, even if they can't hear the words, and this criterium is especially important when many members of the audience may not have the language of the piece. As I believe most of the people in the audience may have been local, this excellence of the presentation was really good for us.

I do not have the name of the composer at hand, but then, being dropped into a dazzling variety of musics by performers famous in Greece, and in the rest of Europe, was both a joy and a despair. The composer was famous, but how was I to absorb it all, short of coming home with hundreds of CDs?

We made our way back to Napflion, and to the wonderful taverna that Mr. Economu had recommended.

Many of the eating establishments we visited on our trip hand the customers, as a matter of course, a little cardboard folder with information about the place you have just eaten: and a map, so you can find it again. This is a wonderful idea. Without the little folder I would not be able to tell you the name of the place.

I may not be able to tell you even so, because the folder is in Modern Greek: but here goes, with my ham-handed translation:

Koütoüki "To Parelthon"

It is located on Profiti Ilia, just off Xar. Trikoüpi, which runs between the main road to Argos and the main road to Epidauros.

I cannot recommend this place, and the wonderful family running it, too highly.

I think it was here that we first had lamb Kleftos (sp?), where the lamb and vegetables are wrapped in paper and slow-baked, but I am not sure. (The dish has great historical significance.) We had several deserts, on different evenings,, none of which were standard and all of which were great. We also had mezes, and Greek Salad, and ouzo. -Not on this night, but over the course.

In fact, the only thing we had that I didn't like was a Greek specialty of what I took to be kidneys roasted in slices on a spit. Unlike Mr. Leopold Bloom, I do not relish the inner organs of various animals. (Too high in iron for a person with my degree of Elf blood.) Diana liked the flavor but found it tough. I think its called Kokoretsi, but we kept leaving the phrase book back at the hotel.

I am sure we had some wonderful mutton at this place as well.

A least one day of our stay in Napflion was spent running around town looking for things like the bank, the tourist office, and a place where we could make our reservations on various ferries and high-speed catamarans, all ocean-going vessels. That would have been the day when we first saw the little fort on an island in the middle of the Bay of Napflion. That might have been the morning when I thought we had toured Mykenae, but hey, it has been a month. And all in all, the narrative drive seems, in the long run, more important than the exact order of the expedition. Such a scramble would not do for Archeology, where the exact order and location of every detail is vitally important, but it may serve for literary communication.

We retired, looking forward to Monday, and the performance, and whatever else we could fit in.

I really do not have any sense of what a kilometer is. I don't mean intellectually, I have a pretty good idea of it that way. It is the gut level that leaves me wanting. No feeling for it. I have to translate with my brain, rather than feeling how much distance has passed or how much there is still to go.

The line of busses went up, and up, and through open country, and past apricot orchards (if I recall correctly) and there was a winery, and there were vinyards. We went long a ridge, and then down into the town of Kleonia, where Herakles first took the Nemean Lion after he had slain it.

The reason for this was that on his way to slay the lion, Herakles had stayed at the house of a laborer named Molorchos, in Kleonia. Molorchos wanted to make a sacrifice, but Herakles told him to wait. If he, Herakles, returned safely, then they would make the sacrifice together, to Zeus the Savior. But if he did not return in 30 days, then Molorchos should assume he was dead, and sacrifice to him as a hero.

The story of the slaying of the Nemean Lion is familiar, so I don't have to retell it here. What is not so familiar is that Herakles carried the corpse of the lion, once he had killed it, back to Kleonia, where he found Molorchos ready to sacrifice to him as a dead hero. Instead, they made the sacrifice to Zeus, and then Herakles took the dead lion to Eurystheos.

That is why there was a substantial temple to Herakles in Kleonia.

The road through modern Kleonia winds downhill past houses festooned with the ever-present orange trumpet vines and pink oleanders, past a large and beautiful church, past small businesses, past tavernas where people sat having their afternoon frappe, past more houses, and down still further.

We left the town and continued into the countryside. I was beginning to wonder just how long (subjectively) a kilometer might be when the busses came to a halt and we were disgorged by the side of the road. The crowd of us was led up a dirt lane through what I think were probably olive orchards, then down a side lane, and thence to the ruins of the very substantial Temple of Herakles.

The Greeks and the Germans quickly found the shade. The rest of us wandered around marveling at the remains of wonderful architecture. My acquaintance from earlier in the day, the Sports Historian, was also running, and we talked about divers things.

The same man who had administered the oath in the morning got up on some high stones and began to speak in Greek. The poor man now looked so frazzled from his work load that I did not wonder he seemed a bit harsh.

Some rude people cried out: "In English!"

He patiently plowed on, and then a young woman I had met on the bus stood beside him and repeated everything in English. I think she was part of the archeology team.

We had the oath administered, we were told there would be water along the way, and then we crowded together for the start: and started!

As we ran by a pallet of bottled water we each grabbed one, turned left, and headed up a dirt road: a different route than the one by which we had arrived.

The real runners quickly distanced themselves from those of us who were not. But so far I was staying with the pack.

Only the road went up, and up. There was more water, and occasional things made of stone that one wanted to stop and look over, only it was a race, and one kept going.

My historian friend pulled ahead. The young woman who had translated pulled ahead. I began to take walking breaks more frequently. I am guessing I was now three quarters of the way back, with old folks and children behind me.

We came to the first houses. People of all ages had chairs in front of their houses, still on the dirt road, and bless them, they cheered every one of us.

Pavement appeared, and then we were back in the town, about in the middle. People in tavernas cheered, and though I could barely breath, they sure made me smile and wave.

More water. The roadside was littered with empty water bottles. The real runners grabbed a bottle, chugged it, and tossed the bottle away. I realized that I was probably drinking about a third of what other people were drinking.

Past the church, hairpin turn up and back, through more houses, more cheering, and finally, still going uphill, I left the town. About this time a bus pulled up beside me and the driver ask: "Are you all right?"

I smiled and waved. I realized this was one of the busses stationed along the way for people who just couldn't go any further. Some of the children who had joined the race were aboard.

I kept going, more walking than running, and noted the really interesting flora that grew in various piles of stone. Were those ancient or modern ruins? I wondered.

A policeman came by on his motorcycle.

"Are you all right?"

Smile, wave...

A little bit of downhill, and a fork in the road. Another bus there, more water, and a man waving us to the right: and uphill.

"Are you all right?"

By now I was moving alone. There were still people behind me, but I think we were all walking. The great crowd of real runners was long gone, up ahead.

I passed the winery, and got into a stretch of road with woods on both sides; and realized that I really needed to relieve my bladder. I heard no sound of cars, so I moved to the side of the road and did just that.

Oh-oh.

My urine was the color of black coffee!

My first thought was that I had done some internal damage when I fell in the first race. Maybe my kidneys were crashing. The second was that maybe all those others knew something I didn't in chugging so much water.

About then the road started to descend into the Nemea Valley. I could have started running again. But considering the prospect of internal injuries, and that there was nobody visible behind me (though I could hear voices a way back) I decided to walk.

I passed the little park which has been built where the ancient spring flows. Only it was not flowing, and needs repair.

I passed the churchyard, all pristine and mainly white with graves.

Finally I entered the site of the stadion, left my shoes in the locker room (we were allowed to use shoes for the long race, though we ran barefoot in the stadion), ran through the tunnell, and made a lap around the track, to end before the altar of Nemean Zeus and Demeter. I said my thanks, then went to look for Diana.

Others came behind me. So, once again, I was not the last.

The games were over, and the ceremonies commencing. The winners had headbands and palm branches, and were called forth to receive their victory crowns of wild celery.

When it was done I spied Alexandros in a little knot of people, and took Diana down to meet him. He was easy to spot. He had on a tee shirt, on the back of which it said: "Alexandros the Great." Diana agreed that he really did look like a Hero, and he smiled shyly. We asked if he would be at the dinner, and he said no, his girl friend wanted to go home and... Well, we understood.

We were young once ourselves.

As we were filing out of the stadion I found myself surprised by being approached by several handsome young men. One said: "I want you to know how I honored I am to have been in a race with you." Another handed me a handbill as said: "We are having a race on the beach at Marathon, and we would be greatly honored if you would come and compete with us there."

I was floored. Flabbergasted. These young athletes were treating me as if I were something special, when in fact, I had gone down, and come in near the end.

Talk about mixed emotions! I was almost speechless. Our schedule would not allow me to participate, but they really seemed hopeful that I somehow could. I was humbled by their kindness, and got a funny feeling of pride that they had noticed me at all.

We headed into the town of Nemea (a short walk), where there were box dinners of Greek food. No small feast this: the box dinner was as varied as a Japanese Bento, but designed to fill the bellies of athletes.

There was also plenty of wonderful Nemean wine. In case I have not sung the praises of Nemean wine already, hear me sing! Where ever you are, seek it out! The reds are spectacular!

We had made the acquaintance of a British couple on the hillside (well, Diana had, and introduced me), and we ended up teaming with them on a bench on the corner. We ate and drank, me rather sparingly because I had to drive, and eventually there was nobody left but us, and the table where ( I think he was the Governor, or the Greek equivalent) and the locals were partying.

We made our way to the parking lot, and after several prayers to Hephaestos, got the car in reverse and headed back to Napflion.

The day of the race dawned. I wanted to be sure we got there on time, so we got up extra early. I am not sure what time that was, as for me, extra early usually implies about 9 AM: but I am sure it was earlier than that.

Mrs. Economu made us breakfast and we hit the road.

By now the route was familiar. Leave Napflion, head for Argos, turn right at Tiryns, pass Mikenae, past the freeway and into the Nemea Valley.

The valley was clogged with busses and cars, and the policeman directed us to the parking lot, which was a not very smooth field full of weeds. Just like home, and the early days of the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. We parked and made our way as far as we could into the madding crowd, where chaos reigned supreme. --I mean that spelling, by the by. There we were, a couple thousand athletes being kept under such control as possible by the few people who had some idea what was going on.

We were to run by age group and gender. Men first, then women, then younger men and children of both genders but in different groups.

I was one of the Old Guys, and we were to run first, so eventually we were let into the locker room.

At the time of its excavation, and possibly still, it was the oldest locker room yet discovered. Primarily, there are some standing columns. These are, to my recollection, from the era of 500 BCE. To this basic layout there had been added wooden structures for practical use, and the whole covered by a big white tent. One wooden rack had suspended from it a line of arbylos (pl?) filled with olive oil for rubbing one's self down. There were volunteer slaves in yellow handing out khitons of the short tunic type, with peronai (cinctures) (cords or belts) for the waist. They also provided plastic bins in which to dump one's street clothes.

I considered the prospect of running nude, as they did in Ancient times. I have been assured that I would not be arrested, but nobody thus far has done it.

I considered what my body looks like at Age 39, then stripped, went over and oiled myself: and put on the khiton. I noted that I was not the only person to run 'naked under the kilt.' I am used to doing games in the nude, and maybe some of the others were: but esthetics triumphed and we compromised. Most of the Old Guys kept their underwear on.

We then crowded around the entrance to the tunnel.

The stadion, like most of those from Ancient Times, consists of a big horseshoe shaped berm. People spread their blankets on the rising ground to watch. The athletes enter the stadion through a stone tunnel, which at Nemea is still preserved as it was back then. It's under restoration, with scaffolding, but you can still use it.

The chaos continued until one of the ranking judges arrived, managed to get us together despite the polyglot of languages we spoke, and administered the oath. Being the first to run, we missed all the ceremonies out in the stadion, including the singing of the Olympic Hymn, but we had enough on our plates, comparing notes and nervously wondering if we would live through it.

I think one of the competitors was in his 80s. There have been competitors in their 90s.

Finally we were called forth, and a tall, strong-looking young man with a good voice for heralding and a good sense of pronunciation in several languages, announced each one of us to the crowd. A trumpet blared as each of us ran toward the starting blocks.

One gets one's lane assignment by drawing a lot. The lots were in a bronze helmet, and consisted of big white stones in which letters of the Greek Alphabet had been etched and painted.

I drew Zita.

In my excitement I forgot completely that the Dread Zita Lane is one of the two Bad Lanes. Beneath the surface of the soft clay, an outcropping of granite extends under that lane. Not being an experienced runner, I would not have understood the danger anyway.

I said another prayer to Nemean Zeus and asked him for what arete I might add to my life.

The hysplex was drawn tight and ready. The hysplex is an affair of ropes that allows the starter to release all the runners at the same moment. I think Nemea is the first place to make use of the actual device is modern times.

The Greek equivalent of "Ready, Set, Go!" was cried out, and the hysplex went down. I took off (I am told) like a bullet from a 45 Magnum.

I thought of nothing but getting to the end as fast as I could.

But then -- something started to go wrong.

Inside myself I felt like a pinball machine being lifted and tilted. My balance was going.

I kept pumping my legs, but they were landing unevenly.

I went tumbling, ass over teakettle, as the saying goes. My legs landed, my head struck, my shoulders and ribs. I remembered in a flash falling off the trellis at Greyhaven and breaking four ribs.

Then I scrambled up and started running again.

Epinephrine is a great pain killer. I ran, single-mindedly, but noticed that I was passing another man in another lane.

I reached the end, threw up my hands, and thanked Zeus.

Then I noticed that I was hurting.

Dr. Kim Sheldon, who is now head of the Nemea department at Cal Berkeley, appeared next to me.

"Come on," she said. "Our medics will be happy to have something to do."

She took me to the side where two women were waiting with medical gear, and translated for them and me as all the questions were asked. They coated me with mercurichrome in places that I had not noticed were bleeding. Dr. Sheldon went in search of ice, and let me know that she had been sitting next to Diana when I went down, and that if I could walk, she would find me with the ice.

I returned to the locker room and stripped off my khiton. As I was dressing I turned and...

There was a young man changing who looked, I swear, as if he had stepped off the Argos. I said: "You look like one of the Heros! As if you had stepped off the Argus."

He smiled and the whole room lit up. "No, really," he said shyly. "But my hero is Alexander the Great."

Frankly, if you look like that, then you are destined to win.

All bandaged up, and with ice packs from Dr. Sheldon, I managed to get across the field, up the path, and finally to Diana. I eased down next to her and she checked to make sure I would live. She had got me with the camera when I started, but not as I went down. She had got me when I got up and kept running.

"They cheered more for you than they did for the man who won," she said.

We watched the next race, and of course, Alexander won. (He told me his name, but he will always be Alexandros to us.)

After a while, and many more races, they announced that the women should get ready. Diana headed for the locker room and left me her camera. I struck up a conversation with a young man next to us, who had finished his race. He turned out to be a sports historian, which he felt to be a rather obscure field. I laughed, considering my admiration for Dr. Miller, and we talked about the upcoming "Footsteps of Herakles" long race.

At such a distance I was not sure whether that was Diana or not down on the field. People tend to look a lot alike wearing a standard white khiton. But it turned out I picked the right woman (in a great many ways) and got shots of her race, where she came in with the middle of the pack. Way better than she had expected, it turned out.

She returned to the hill and said: "I guess the wounds tell us that you won't be doing the long race."

"What?" I exclaimed. "I didn't win the race I ran. Byron was counting on me to win. If I don't try the long race, I won't have a chance. I may not have a chance anyway, but hey, it could happen!"

I am sure she thought I had scrambled my brains with the run. After all, I had never before even attempted a long race. And hey, it was only seven and a half kilometers, over a mountain, from the Ancient Temple of Herakles beyond the next village, back to the stadion.

The races in the stadion were continuing when we put our khitons back on, they loaded us on busses, and we headed for the Ancient Temple of Herakles.

In the second installment I commented on Greeks giving directions. Diana sent me the following:

"This is going to be interesting. I took lots of notes. You didn't. You are right, you do have a good memory. Since you are doing the narrative, I think I'll report with a series of essays.

Navigation was complicated by the fact that people had pasted posters over some of the road signs, and main streets don't have signs on them anyway-- you are there, aren't you? You must know what street you are on. We had to stop and ask two people before we found the place. After that we gave up on street signs and used landmarks-- "When we pass the store with the big red percentage sign on the window, we go down a block, turn left, and then drive several blocks, turn left again, but not hard left because that's one way, up, around, and double back again to get to our street, except when construction equipment is blocking the way."

Actually, all the rooms we reserved were doubles with bath. Many, though not all, had lifts, which were usually big enough for one person with luggage. It's kind of unnerving to watch the walls of the intervening floors slide by the open doorway, but they seem to be safe enough."

Your auctor continues:

Having settled in, Diana felt it time to eat. However, we didn't want to repeat the financial disaster of the previous night, so she asked Mr. and Mrs. Economu if they knew of a nice taverna nearby. Mr. Economu said he did. (We mistook what he said and thought it was owned by his cousin, but it turned out it was not. He just thought it a good place, and nearby, for his guests.)

We asked for directions, and he said: "I'll show you!"

He walked us to the corner, pointed, and there was, a couple blocks distant, a discreet neon sign. We walked down the semi-paved street in the gathering darkness and entered a garden courtyard with a canopy over it and romantic lanterns hanging around. We had not yet learned about Greek dining habits, and we pretty much had the place to ourselves.

We were greeted by the proprietor, who had an incredibly handsome face with a greying beard; aquiline nose, and brilliant, alert dark eyes. His wife sat behind a counter, almost invisible. She was beautiful in a kind of Sophia Loren kind of way. A young man we took to be their son, very tall and equally good-looking, seemed to be learning the ropes. I would guess him to be in his early twenties, the couple perhaps in their early forties.

I am not sure what we ordered, except that it was delicious. I think it might have been our first moussaka on Greek soil. We also ordered a bottle of Nemean red wine. It was more than planned for in the budget, but we are very fond of Nemean red wines, and after all, were there to run at Nemea.

The recorded music was Greek, and wonderful.

How to describe that Magic Night? Well, if you have seen Disney's "Lady and the Tramp," it was THAT romantic night: except that there was no spaghetti, and we were not, after all, dogs, and the food was Greek, not Italian.

It was so wonderful I don't even remember the desert!

It was warm, and after dinner we walked slowly back to the hotel.

This might be a good place to introduce the most important observation of the whole trip.

The people of Hellas are warm, friendly, kind, and many of them speak English: which was really good, because my modern Greek really sucks: we kept leaving the phrase book back at the hotel. They went out of their way to help us, over and over again. It was like San Francisco used to be, forty years ago: only it was the whole country!

If you want to go somewhere, Hellas is the place to go.

In the hallway we looked out the big window at the lighted castle and the full moon, Diana took pictures, then we retired for the night. That meant that Diana turned on the refrigeration unit, and I bundled up under blankets.

The shower, by the by, consisted of a shower pan slightly smaller across than the average Neopagan. The drain in the floor was not only helpful, but really necessary.

In the morning Mrs. Economu prepared us a Continental breakfast, which included Cafe Helleniki (at my request), juice, toast, etc.. Oberon G'Zell once complained that Greek coffee was too sweet and tasted like mud. Well, its boiled coffee and there are some fine grounds at the bottom, but I happen to like it. You don't drink the grounds any more than you would drink the dregs of really old wine.

The plan was to go to Nemea, so that we could try out the track. We hopped into the Fiat and headed out, but we had to go right past Mykenae, and how could we pass up a chance at that?

As one drove up the hill we observed the signs, new and old, for many hotels. They mainly were named for historical people. "Agamemnon's Hotel," "The Orestes," etc.. But one had a new sign, and under that the older, more worn sign:

"Klytemnestra's Rooms, with Bath."

We figured that was a good place for singles to stay, but probably not auspicious for married couples.

We paid our admission, bought guide books, and moved past the gates into the Archeological Park of Mykenae. We drank from the fountain, then went into the small but very good museum, which includes a helpful model of the site.

Then it was time for the big one.

The Lion Gate is every bit as impressive as one ought to expect, but it is only the begining.

It is easy to believe that the Kyklops built the walls of Mykenaen cities. If you live in an apartment, then I would venture than many of the stones are bigger than your dwelling place.

A lot of the site is off limits to tromping around, but that is all right: as you keep going up and up, you can see down into such features at the grave circles. There is pretty good signage, so you can mainly know what you are looking at, though there is a bewildering amount of it to see.

Climbing to the top, we came at last to the palace.

The Megaroon, or throne room, is built at the edge of a precipice, and is off limits to romping. The throne was backed by a wall which had collapsed, and which had been restored. Nobody was going to get at the king from behind, that was sure.

But looking at it, and pacing it out, I suddenly realized that it was essentially the length of the living room at Greyhaven, and perhaps twice as wide. Was it a Golden Section? I couldn't judge, but...

"Hey, Honey! This is doable! We have rocks in California! We could use cranes instead of Kyklops, but... We could build a Mykenaean palace!"

Diana looked at me dubiously, sweltering under the blazing, treeless sun. standing atop the citadel of Agamemnon.

Have I mentioned the light?

I think it was Henry Miller who first made me aware that the light in Hellas is different from that anywhere else. I suspect that it may have to do with being surrounded by seas. But, I had not quite known what to expect.

It suffuses you. It is like being in a bath or a pool of light. It seeps into you and fills you. It's not the heat, though there is plenty of that: it is the light itself.

We had been warned that if we wanted to see the cistern that supplied water to this wonderful construction we would need to provide our own flashlights. We had forgotten them.

Worse, our time was running out. Diana pointed out that we still had to get to Nemea before that sight closed.

"But... but... There's more ruins down there!"

Nevertheless, we needed to get to Nemea, and I didn't want Diana to melt into a puddle of butter like the tigers in the Sambo story.

We headed down.

--But we just HAD to stop at a couple of tourist shops, because, well, they had POTTERY!

Two stops was adequate, we learned much, and then we headed for Nemea.

We got to the stadion and the lad at the gate informed us we only had about twenty minutes. We paid our way in, drank from the mouth of the Nemean Lion fountain, filled our bottles, and headed in.

Hellas is very careful and respectful of its treasures, and I was not sure I would be allowed to try the course. But then, wandering in and checking things out, Dr. Stephen Miller (one of my heros) appeared, and said:

"You're here! I saw your name on the list but I thought it must be a joke!"

We had been trying to get there for twelve years, and I fear he had given up on us.

The young man from the gate showed up to tell us we had to leave, but Dr. Miller told him we were friends, and also told me to go ahead and try the course. He said all his students had been doing it for a week.

I pulled off my shoes, fitted my toes into the slots of the starting gate, and ran.

I must confess that I had been scared. I was afraid I would not be able to make it. That my legs would not hold out, that my breath would fail. I came to athletics late in life, and, frankly, I had NEVER run a full, real race before.

It was a miracle.

The clay upon which the Ancients ran (the very same clay on which I was running!) was a lightly crusted powder, soft under my feet.

I ran though the wind. I could feel the hot breeze, was aware of my speed and movement. All that I knew in those moments was my body, the gift of my effort to the God.

I dashed past the finish, stopped, breathing very hard, and thought: "I have a chance!"

The last thing my little grandson Byron had said to me on embarcation was: "Grandpa, I want you to win!"

For the first time in twelve years, I felt as if I might just be able to bring home a palm leaf and a ribbon, and a wreath of wild celery.

In the morning the car we had ordered (for driving around the country) was brought. It was supposed to be a (something or other of which we had never heard) but it turned out to be a Fiat. A bright green (sort of between lime green and chartreuse) little car, and I was very pleased. I used to drive a Fiat before our Dictatorship, backed by Detroit, prevented them from being imported.

Good gas economy! Great handling!

We loaded up and began our Odyssey.

Unfortunately, Greeks do not give good directions. The man who handed over the car said: "It's easy, here's the shift, you pull up and back for reverse. Bye!"

After about eight tries at getting it into reverse we prayed to Hephaestos, and the car went into reverse. We pulled out and headed south, as Brauron was not too far away.

There are great Archeological Site signs all over Hellas, in Brown and in Greek and English, which is a different color from all the other signs. Still, it took a while to find it. There was a museum on the way that we thought might be it, but it was closed. Finally we did find it

It is not really a developed site, which was good. We were able to meander around while the caretakers weed-whacked the growth. The ruins of the small temple were the very first that we had visited. The area where the 'Little Bears' lived and learned was nice, and the sort of quad where they no doubt danced and exercised looked like a good space for little girls. There is a certain amount of stonework still standing, so you can get an idea of what it was like. Really nice Doric columns.

There were plenty of prickly pear cactus growing in the ruins, and fig trees.

After a pleasant stay at Brauron we headed further south, to Cape Sounion, which you see in lots of pictures. The temple of Poseidon is one of the big view sites, and being on a promontory surrounded by the Agean, you can't miss it. They light it up at night.

In the pictures it looks huge, but that is an illusion of the Ionic columns. Diana noted that it was not much bigger than the place that one of the Troth members is building in the southwest.

The brochure told us there was a substantial temple to Athena there as well, but try as I might I could not find it. Then I discovered a man giving a lecture to some of his students, and when he finished I asked him about it. It turned out he was a compatriot of Stephen Miller, at Nemea, and was the man who was in charge of measuring the stuff at Nemea. He pointed downhill to a far less impressive set of ruins (practically nothing there), but Diana said we had to get going.

I had parked in the lot, the car facing the cliff. It would not go into reverse. Diana began to have visions of having to hover over space and push me backward. (She doesn't drive shift.) We prayed to Hephaestos some more, with some more pleas to Hermes to make sure we didn't go over that cliff. Finally the car moved backward, and we headed for our next destination.

Diana was the navigator for the trip, and she was sure she had the ring road system down pat. Only somehow we got off, and before we knew it, we were plunging across Athens, which is a lot like Los Angeles, only faster and with fewer rules.

People drive wildly in Greece. There are many motorcycles and motorscooters, and they all rush to the head of the pack when everyone stops at a traffic light. Then they all take off fast.

We saw our only accident that day, in Athens, when a scooter went down.

Our destination for the day was Napflion, which had an inexpensive hotel. We crossed the Korinth canal, then found the exit, (we were back on modern highways), which happened to be the same exit for Nemea.

We drove two lane roads past Mykenae, Tyrins, and finally arrived in the thriving beach town of Napflion. But after an hour we still could not find the hotel. Diana finally gave in to my importuning and used the rented cell phone.

"Oh, it's easy," came the reply: precisely what everybody said for the whole trip. But we did negotiate a number of one way streets, find the Hotel Economu, parked, and piled out.

It was a sort of hostel, but being an old married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Economu had given us a room with a private bath and toilet.

There was no guard door inside the elevator, but from the hall wiindow we had a view of the full moon and the fully lighted, really huge, Venetian Castle. We had not known that Napflion was the first capital of Modern Greece, or the role it had played in the Greek War for Independence. We learned the first of many lessons we had not expected about that wonderful country.

They have these little, curious air conditioners, and when you check in they give you the controller, somewhat like a TV remote. I was happy with the temperature, but Diana wanted refrigeration.

Fortunately, there were blankets.

Thus we begin a series about our trip to Hellas, otherwise known as Greece.

Let me preface this by saying that you should understand how far away Hellas is from California. There is a ten hour difference. Thus, to call home, we had to wait until about 10 PM, by which time folks in California were beginning to get up and stretch. --Look at it another way. We got on an airplane in San Francisco and it took us 17 hours to get to get to Athens. That is several meals and a very long time to sit in a cramped seat doing nothing. Of course we were flying the cheapest we could, or we would not have been able to afford it at all, even with 12 years of saving for it.

Did I mention that our first item on the agenda was for Diana and I to run in the Nemean Games? That requires the body to be stretched and limber, which is exactly what it was not by the time we got there.

No mind: Diana is an experienced traveler. (I had never been over the US borders before, much less across the Atlantic.) She budgeted time for us to collapse and recuperate for a day, as well as doing some stretches.

We landed at the airport outside Athens and began looking for a bus headed for Rafina, which was not easy to find. We lugged our luggage all over the place before she finally got good directions and a bus came. It was a local, and for the next hour or so we were treated to a ride through what appeared to be the seediest outskirts we could imagine. But as we got accustomed to the landscape, various things began to settle into our jet lagged brains.

The first was that the landscape looked pretty much like California. Everywhere was a profusion of Oleander and Trumpet Vine, and other familiar plant life. The second was that it was not really possible to tell whether a building was going up or coming down..

The Greeks build vertically. Put in some concrete piers, link then with floors and a stairway (alarmingly without rails) and you can later fill in walls. There are clusters of iron rebar sticking out of the tops of the piers like rusted tentacles. I learned later what that was about. --And all the houses were in bright pastels.

Eventually we got to Rafina, a beach town much like we used to have in the US: except, of course, that we were on the Agean, where the water is brilliant blue, except where it is shallow and becomes brilliant turquoise. And it is so clear that you can see the bottom as if through glass.

Diana cautioned me that this would likely be the best and most expensive hotel in which we would stay. We took showers in the Euromod glass shower, only it leaked all over the place. Greek bathrooms assume that water will get everywhere, so they have drains in the floor.

We went down to find dinner and we were clearly tourists on our first stop. The very aggressive waiter lured us in, told us we would make something special, and delivered a huge oval platter piled high with many kind of fried fish, all whole, except for the calamari.

Diana happily gobbled red fish and white fish and all kinds of things, and I stuck to the squid and shrimp. I am scared of bones. Diana will eat bones and anything else that isn't moving. But between us we could not finish it all.

When the bill came it was --gasp-- a hundred Euros!

It wasn't THAT good.

On the way back to the hotel Diana went wading in the Agean. She said it was warm.

Uh huh.

I just wanted to sleep, despite the desire to actually swim in the Blue Agean.

By the time we hit the bed, we were out cold.

Paint!

It is now twenty years since Kelson and I painted the Lodge, with some help from our friends. Kelson did the entire outside, in oil base blue. He spilled it, stained rocks, swore a lot, but got it done in less than two weeks. The neighbors were astonished.

Likewise the bathroom was done in oil base: the walls a tasteful creamsicle orange, the ceiling a dusky lilac.

The rest of the house was painted with water based paint.

The outside of the house now shows some flaking, but the color is pretty true. Had we not had major construction to do in the bathroom, there would have been no need to paint. The color is as sharp and true as it was the day we painted. It has been washed, and it holds up.

The rest of the house is faded, worn off, non-washable by any but the strongest of imaginations. It has been suggested that faux finishes are the result of people trying to wash water based paint. It doesn't work. It if move a picture, the spot behind it is a totally different color. In places it is simply washed through.

Eric, who is still doing the bathroom, could not handle the smell of the oil based paint, so he hired Patrick, who is Irish and who did it just fine. I nearly passed out the second day, although I rather like the smell, because as soon as the painting started the temperature dropped. Patrick papered over the place where a door should have been and I survived.

The new color scheme is a little bolder than before. Diana says it is not quite CalTrans orange. The purple is really purple. Eric was shocked when it saw it, but quickly changed his mind and decided he liked it. Grandson Evan said it was hard to believe that something in those colors could be comfortable, but that it was.

The way the light works, when you look in the mirror you look good. That's bottom line.

And then, the tea house was opened. But I won't write about that until Diana gets all the pictures up on line, so that you can see what I am talking about.

The book has ground to a standstill.

We finally did two dump runs, one for yard recylcling, during which Jonathon broke the pitchfork and we discovered that it was made so that it could not be repaired. The second one was a week later, and we ended up with a flat tire and the kids late for gymnastics.

I have been working at the Petaluma museum, as Mark Twain. It is the town's sesquicentennial, and Mark Twain did speak there. You can find out more by going to timegames.org.

I am low on vitamins and money. My lettuce is not doing well this year. I am exhausted, and I have a bump on my toe: did I mention the 22 hour days I have been putting in, and having to walk the last mile uphill to my house at 2:30 in the morning because some idiot set fire to the old, abandoned bar down the road?

I am back to running with Byron after school on Thursdays.

I am looking for someone to write me a blurb on the new book. So far, all the authors I have asked are too busy to read it.

All for now. Just thought you would be amused to find that I am still alive and striking out.

Although it is doubtful, someone out there may be wondering what I am up to these days. It's been nearly a month since I posted.

Well, working, for the most part. The amount of time it takes to enter little tiny corrections into the computer file of a novel, in the hope that the published version won't been too, too awful, is enormous. It wears down the brain. It is worse than reading about knitting, if you don't knit. It is worse than trying to swallow a poliitician's lie.

Well, ok, its not that bad.

But it does put the brain into a state somewhere between tapioca pudding and valium: and I don't mean that in a good way! I have to stop periodically and go into dream time in order to think and work again.

I know! It's just like Highway Hypnosis! Yes, exactly!

As everyone knows, the seat of the emotions is the liver (not the heart) and it should come as no surprise that at the end of the day I feel like a week old blanc-mange.

All that is keeping me afloat is Eric.

Eric has appeared at last and is busily fixing my bathroom. I will have a tile floor. I will no longer have a rocking toilet that leaks because you can't turn the valve either on or off all the way. There will be Walls! I MAY EVEN GET A DOOR!

First, the news you all have been waiting for: the doctor says there was no sign of cancer — though he hedged by noting there was a 15% chance of his being wrong, and offered more procedures. (Does my doctor work for Nick the Greek?) I chose the less invasive, and the one that allows me to run in Greece this summer, provided I can find ze papers that will possibly allow me to get ze passport to leave the Reich.

Next, let me express the delight of seeing so many of you at Pantheacon. Imagine my delight that the first voice I heard was that of our beloved Thallassa, calling to me as I rushed toward my first performance: the Morrison/Dionüsos ritual.

Aside from finding out that we are kind of broke, and having to leave part of the family at home, it was a great convention.

Not least amusing was hanging out with Dan, and arranging his Very First Ever tarot reading: by Stephen Abbot, using the Nekromicon Deck, in the OTO (Crowley) suite. Stephen read, with full dramatic flourishes, all the cards from the accompanying booklet. — This happened because all the Absinthe was gone.

Dan noted that, even though he had never been to one of these things, through the Dickens people he knew there, he was only one person away from all three thousand attendees.

Jonathon (Bagel), my youngest, got sick Saturday, was well again Sunday, but had to leave early as grandson Byron had come down with a bad fever. They have all been down with the flu since, but it looks like it is letting up.

The copies of my book (Blindfold on a Tightrope) did not arrive from the publisher until we had left home, so I had no autograph session. This helped alert me to the fact that I need to get the next book in print and in hand before May, and though I got Sadie's proofs in September, I had only done half of Chapter One. I am now applying myself, to the level of exhaustion, each day, getting the work done.

The cover looks great at this state. —Oh, the upcoming book is StormWars!, the sequel to The Particolored Unicorn, which you are all no doubt listening to as a podcast, even as I write this.

It's cold up here, but that is not news. The crocuses bloomed this last week. They usually bloom in early January, so you can look forward to a long winter this year. (My crocuses are not on downers, like Puxatawny Pete. I'll bet on the bulbs over the groundhogs any day.)

I guess that's all the news from Boggs Mountain. I finally got all the stuff from the convention cleaned out of the car as of today.

And Now To Rome!

Well, the time for the biopsy approached (again) and my nerves frayed (again) and none of this was helped by being unable to use the kinds of medicines that actually cure the headaches that come when you cannot eat what you usually eat, cannot drink what you usually drink, and in general are living an Alien Life!

My dear daughter-in-law Kim went to the doctor with me, knowing I would be something of a mess after the event. As we waited and the people in charge kept assuring me that most guys who go through this procedure think it is 'Nothing,' we discovered that Kaiser, grounds and all, is a 'no smoking campus.' Fortunately, Kim does not smoke menthol cigarettes, otherwise I should have said something about 'non campus menthis:' but I did not.

They called me in, and again assured me that I would be ok. They could tell I was having a problem by the dead whiteness of my skin and the trembling of all extremities.

Blood pressure was taken and I was ushered into the refrigerator. I know there are good reasons for hospitals to be cold, but that does not help. Cold makes me tense up even more! And then I had to take my pants off!

Oh, how I was longing for that cast party in the hot tub!

To cut to the chase: the procedure is pretty simple. They shove a sonic canon up your ass and use it to site as they fire a dozen harpoons through your intestinal wall and into your prostate.

The doctor first used the ultrasound to discover whether my prostate was swollen as a whale, but he didn't tell me. He shot first with lydacain ("Lydacain Rose, oh my Lydacian Rose..."), then fired away.

Mind you, everybody was kind and careful and bending over backward to assure that the experience was as least horrible as it could be. They let me tell jokes. We discussed the shores of Tahiti (where it is warm) and what opera I liked (I allowed as Peter Grimes was one favorite, though to call something 'modern' when it was written around the time I was born seems odd..) and many other things designed to divert me from the experience.

In the end (my end) the pain came on and was awful. I bled like a stuck pig!

When it was over, and the very kind doctor was gone, the assistant continued to sooth me until I was able to get up. (They had covered me with blankets against the approach of the glaciers from the hallway.) I did get up, made my way out, and greeted my dear Kim.

And then we had to do the shopping for the ritual two days in the future, which involved a Mexican market with excellent prices.

It was three or five hours later that I realized that the horrible pain was not from the procedure, but a seizure of spastic collitus, brought on by my tension and the cold. I kept on with my LeMaz breathing and by the time we got back to my house I was weak but out of agony.

I am still waiting for the results, but everything else is pretty much working again, and my son is doing the heavy lifting of stuff like firewood.

I cooked the goat, we got through the ritual, and next week we are going to Pantheacon. And, the weather has been a great deal better.

The Old Entertainer is Exhausted!

His newsletter is a month late. His biopsy got postponed, thus adding to tension. There is snow! And more snow! When it is not snowing it is raining! It is cold!

And then, there was the Jeep. On one trip to Berkeley it made horrible noises. I took it to the mechanic, only the noises stopped part way. A week later, back to Berekely, more noiises! Back to the mechanic.

"The Clutch!" says he.

He also notes that I must be the best driver in the world, as I have put 200,000 miles on that clutch.

Up and down the mountains with my daughter in law, and we get back to the mechanic, who shows me what he took out.

You have heard, no doubt, the phrase "The bearings are gone.' Well, in my case, the bearings were GONE! That is, the ring in which the bearings ride was empty. Caput! The noises were no doubt the bearings flying out of the monkey's ass all over the road.

With a ring like that, I could (dare I say it!) get stranded in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge: or worse!

But I did not, and praises go to Hermes and Hephaestos for taking care of us.

I think now I will make a cup of Mr. Micawber's Punch, which research tells me is comprised of sugar, lemon peel, rum, and hot water. I commend it to you all on these freezing nights!

Things just keep coming fast and furious!

My deep desire is to be with my friends from the theater this weekend. You know: sitting naked in a hot tup drinking martinis until four in the morning and talking about Theatah! Besides, I've never been to the Collier's. (Sp?)

The other choice was my tea group's Hatsugama, and I am afraid that one had to win. The days when I could have done that, then got up at Six to drive to Sacramento, are, I fear, long gone. And my bilocation is just shot all to hell, now that I've turned 39.

I am at that stage of my tea career where one has to prove one's self as a member of the community. It's kind of like getting a Ph.D. No matter how much you go by the rules, the university can turn you down (as they did my later brother in law) because it does not feel you would be an 'ornament to the profession.' (He wore sandals, burmuda shorts, and had a beard: that kept him from getting it at Berkeley, in the 60s!) So, I made he decision to go to Hatsugama instead of the cast party.

And it was a good thing I did, because I discovered, at my lesson Wednesday, that I am to be First Guest.

Well, thought I, this will be a Good Thing, because Tea is very calming, and I need that before the biopsy on Tuesday.

Only today the doctor's office called and said they would have to reschedule because their machine broke down.

Visions of a giant drilling machine from a Jules Verne novel flashed into my head. Their MACHINE broke down?

So there's another two weeks of anxiety, and I am sure I will be less than personable as I struggle to finish up things I won't be able to do for a while after it. Heavy lifting things, construction things, etc., etc. etc.. I was hoping to finish my play about Herakles in the lay up time...

And worse, because I am on a double critical today I did not go back to Berkeley (hhmmm novel... short story..."Back To Berkley"...) because I didn't want to be on the road, so I am bereft of my dogs! Oh, the loneliness of of the dog distance walker...

Only I had to go out to communicate and release a mouse anyway...

And I guess that's all the news from Boggs Mountain.

Do any of you folks play Sims on a Mac? I am having the worst time of it...

It has just turned midnight, the day of the 10th, so I have made offerings to Asklepios, God of Healing, Dionysos, God of Theater, and Hermes, my Patron, called The Helper, on behalf of our compatriot Martin, who is going into surgery today. I added a ridier (as they say in Congress) on my own behalf as well. Those of you familiar with Show Business will know Martin from his wonderful portrayal of Scrooge. Please send him lots of good energy, healing stuff. He is a good man as well as a good actor

Our old buddy Duffy, who is a therapist these days, tells me that there are a multiplicity of treatments and that this is one of the things with a likelihood of cure; and that many of the best treatments have appeared in the last five years. In other words, things look pretty good.

I should like to add, at this point, that the past year has been an exceptionally happy one for me. I have spent most of it acting, and in retrospect, I discover that Theater is the place, over the years, where I have felt the most at home. --This is not a sign that I will abandon my literary leanings, but only that the immediate gratification of the ego that a live audience provides is more personally endearing to the performer than the scant requests for autographs upon his books that come far less frequently to his hand.

Could Mr. Micawber have said that any more eloquently?

We were all greatly gratified by the Dickensian attendance at our New Year's Ball, at Greyhaven, and could only have been more pleased by an even greater influx from the temporally shifting environs of our beloved 19th Century London: a pass which we hope will come next year, and the year after, and so on into... in short, for as long as the house stands.

YHOS,

It was really cold (28) when I got home after the ball, but Hey Ho, my wood man was due the next day.

He came, but with him the Wind and the Rain. I had to drive into town to get a tarp with which to cover the wood until my son can come up and put it away (a dry day) and I was warm within, withall.

The next morning was to be Call the Doctor day: only the power went out! --No mind, I had a podcast to make, so I did.

When I got home it was snowing.

This morning the power company said it would be Tuesday before I got power back, so I went and got my son to help me load the laundry, with the intention of doing it tomorrow. (Tomorrow, Tomorrow, I luv ya, Tomorrow...) When we got back the power was on.

I have informed relevant parties that I am up again, and have begun the search for an appropriate photo for the back of the new book.

And, I am tired.

Night All!

When I got home last night the inside of the house was 37 degree. Outside it was twenty eight. Today it started to snow! I would include an image, but the system will only allow me to insert an url, and the pic is actually on my desktop. If you want to see it, look me up or either MySpace or Tribes.

At the dump today I was informed that I was being fined for including steel cans in the trash. Mind you, I am all favor of recycling: but last time I went to the dump I was told they would not accept steel cans for recycling. Now they 'always'' have. Only you have to wash them first.

To be fined for something you have to commit a crime. So it is now a crime to throw away steel cans. Worse, according to the man at the gate, it is illegal not to wash out your empty yoghurt containers! (Which they have also never before accepted, only now they 'always' have. Thank you, George Orwell!)

Ghandi noted that 'freedom is the right to say 'I won't.' A government is within its rights to forbid you from doing something but the minute that government tells you that you must do something, you are no longer free.'

It is reasonable for the Congress to forbid us to use incandescent light bulbs anymore, as they contribute to global warming. But when we are told that we MUST wash our empty yoghurt containers, or become criminals: then we are living under Totalitarianism, plain and simple.

And meanwhile, Global warming seems to be lowering the temperature here in California by alarming degrees.

Am I curmudgeon?

You bet your Fat Aunt Petunia I am!