WISTFULNESS AND WISDOM

Yes…autumn is the time of the year for letting go…of buckets of summer sunshine and ripe fruit with sweet dribbling juices and buzzing bees and the shrieking of children splashing in the waves and need I say more. Chania has gone quiet now with the children off to school and the flocks of tourists flown off like migratory birds. But there are still some drifting in from cruise ships and others, desperate to snatch the mellow rays of the late-autumn sun before going back to blustery weather. This is also the quiet season when the older generation steal out to sequestered pebbly beaches to bathe in the autumn sea and soak up all richness of the water to strengthen their old bones and keep the aches and pains of winter at bay.

But oh the autumn nights… when they descend, they drench the air with humidity and it does very little good for people like me, people of the frizz, who go out with smooth hair and come back with a shocking mop of frizzy frills. But alas, the show must go on and we need to walk the walk. Last Wednesday, Yiannis and I…The-Over-The-Hillsters… started out for our usual… sometimes brisk when we remember and other times leisurely… walk around the town to quicken our pulse and get the blood whooshing around. We drifted in and out of various subjects with him shouting at the top of his voice. This is one of the hazards of his trade, firing instructions over the rat tat tat of jackhammers, the whining of drills, the rumble of excavators etc which has left the poor man with a perpetual roar in his voice.

Me: Shh! People are looking at us.

He: So what! We don’t owe anybody any money.

So with not owing anybody any money, we walked with abandon lost in loud conversation and stopped at Marks and Spencer’s to get our supply of ginger and almond biscuits. They also had a Christmas pudding that had matured for six months and I grabbed it and swept up a box of panattone as well. So with my armful of goodies we approached the check-out with him standing solidly behind me, making sure that I didn’t drop any of our precious nibbles. I let the stack tumble out on the counter and the cashier beeped our crunchies and munchies one by one and looked up and asked,

C: Do you want a bag?

Me: Uhhh…..Yes.

He: Do we have to pay for it?…( eyeing their paper bag with suspicion ).

She answered in the affirmative, mentioning a couple of cents and he got his hackles up and refused the bag and I murmured some threatening protests and everyone was watching us including the cashier… and he declared loudly that he would carry the whole lot himself with no assistance from me. He started stuffing the biscuits in his pockets and made his way to the exit with shuffling movements for fear they would crack and break and we’d end up with packets of crumbs fit only for the sparrows in our garden. The pudding and panattone had handy loops on their boxes, which he had slipped through his fingers on either hand and swung them stiffly. We had to cut our walk short because with his deep pockets all bulging out, he couldn’t bend his knees and marched like some wooden soldier, and all because he wanted to make some point. I didn’t offer to help.

So in the dimming autumn lights and in the autumn of our life, Yiannis has decided to take Oscar Wilde’s advice…`Be yourself; everyone else is taken’

And what is himself?…`If you can’t say what you feel at this age then when can you?’

His next big threat of free expression, is to tell the man who runs our Sunday luncheon haunt… perched on a cliff, where the tides rush in and foam along the pebbled beach and vessels big and small, bob like paper boats in the blue horizon, that…his prices are getting too exorbitant.

Me: No don’t do that! We can just lay off our Sunday lunches there for a bit and uh…he’ll get the message.

I didn’t want us to burn our bridges there, a place that piques so many memories…late Sunday afternoon lunches when we let our minds stray and our limbs stretch and our gaze travel to the far reaches of the horizon or with friends and visitors chatting and laughing about inconsequential stuff, the stuff of weekend brains, Annie’s pre-wedding party we hosted for our families, from here and various parts of the world and we all spoke in tongues and nodded in conviviality without understanding  each other and the party after the wedding for Yiannis’ employees…so why oh why couldn’t he, at our wrinkly age, just let go of the whole thing?

He: No! He needs to be told!

He was in good company. On Saturday night when we went out with our Saturday night friends, we, the `girls’ talked about the sadness of world events and then cheered ourselves up by talking about makeup and the wise `boys’ decided that people need to be told …this has come to them in the autumn of their lives…and certainly the restaurant guy needs to be told and maybe told off.

So that’s it my friends. As Richard Carlson says: Don’t sweat the small stuff and it’s all small stuff’.  I’ll see you when I see you.

Cheers.