Thirteen loose leaf binders and two photograph albums wait on my dining room table in my home in a Boston suburb. The enormity of material is overwhelming. Until now, these carefully curated records had lived with my younger brother since our father’s death in 2006. Now, seventeen years later, they are mine to explore. Richard Crawley’s letters home to [...]
My life-long love affair with Greece began in September of 1974, shortly after arriving in that country for the first time. The CIA-sponsored seven-year dictatorship by the Greek colonels had ended only months before my coming; Greece and Turkey were waging war over Cyprus; anti-Americanism was rife. As a twenty-five year old speech pathologist, I traveled alone for a job [...]
It’s early morning September 1st. I’m leaving for 25 days in Italy and Greece. My small silver suitcase is packed, ready to be stowed in an overhead bin, assuring my outfit for one wedding in Verona and another near Sounion won’t get misplaced in the multiverse of lost transatlantic luggage. The text message on my phone drops the news that [...]
The night before, when I checked into the Super 8 Motel in Albuquerque, the TV was tuned to Jeopardy. Our family home in Taos, New Mexico, where I’d been staying, doesn’t have a TV. It had been 30 days since I’d watched a television. This box bracketed to the wall seemed almost mystical, almost magical. It reminded me of my [...]
In the winter of 1974, I answered an advertisement in a professional journal for a job as a speech pathologist in a center for cerebral palsied children in Thessaloniki, Greece. Desperate to leave behind the disappointment of a failed marriage, even though my newly found life as a single person had been buoyed by the burgeoning feminist movement, I took [...]