She was gone. It had been rumored that
they were moving abroad but when the reality of it came it was almost too
painful to bear. The emotional withdrawal crept in slowly, not the first day or
even the first week but incrementally and constantly eroding my peaceful sense
of being; like two cars colliding in slow motion, it was unavoidable and
predictable. Whisked away, as if by thieves in the night, in a clandestine
operation, my beautiful, effervescent, talented granddaughter was taken from me,
destined to grow up in a distant land on the other side of the planet.
Athens, Greece.
My heart ached with an uncompromisingly
inconsolable pain, torturous and unending as if one of my vital organs had been
savagely ripped from my gut. She was a part of me and the sudden loss left me
with a void, a pervasive, lonely emptiness.
By the miracle of modern technology, my
I-Pad rang one morning and I answered it to see the beautiful smiling face of
Keira, my granddaughter standing in front of the Parthenon on a bright sunny afternoon
in Athens! I had always been fascinated by Ancient Greece and all that had been
accomplished there. Archimedes, Theodoros of Samos, Hero of Alexandria,
Aristotle, Plato, Euclid and Pythagoras, Homer, Hesiod, King Leonidas,
Alexander the Great and of course Pericles who in the 5th century BC
oversaw the building of the four major monuments on the Acropolis: the Erechtheion,
The Temple of Athena Nike, The Propylaia and of course the Parthenon, damaged
in 1687 AD by the Ottamans when gun powder stored within exploded due to a
Venetian cannonball hitting the monument during the Morean War. Keira proceeded
to take me on a walking tour of the Acropolis.
“It is very hot here like a desert!” Keira
said pointing the phone down to show the Jurassic limestone below her feet, which
had been thrust up through the younger metamorphic Schist due to plate tectonics,
to form a Nappe or overthrust sheet, an outcropping five hundred feet above sea
level and a perfect citadel for the ancients. It had been inhabited since
Neolithic times and the earlier civilization of the Mycenaeans had built a
palace here.
We had arrived at the Erechtheion built
with Caryatid pillars in the form of draped female figures used to support the
entablature.
“Do you see the ladies holding up the stones?”
my tour guide pointed out.
“Yes, I do Keira, they must have had a
good breakfast!”
“Oh, don’t be silly Poppy!”
It was time for her to go now, she waved
goodbye and she was gone as quickly as she had arrived having made an old man
very happy.
Jim
Oct 2020
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