You should be here, sitting at my outdoor café table in this market square on Crete. I hope you’re doing okay.
What an amazing place this is. Hookahs, baklava made from Egyptian nuts and honey syrups, grape leaves drenched in olive oil, large flat silver trays filled with phyllo, feta and spearmint stuffed lamb. Middle Eastern music, veils, and rippling jeweled bellies.
Near Chania’s old town, narrow streets are filled with backgammon competitions, card games and cigar smoke. Hundreds of locals are meeting for Saturday night socializing. Parea. I hear them speaking choppy English while bobbing in-and-out of Arabic, Turkish, Greek and Farsi. You should be here.
Beans are selling, cheeses are marinating, goats are moving, pistachios are cracking, rugs are weaving, figs are jelling. From the taverna next door, three-hundred-year-old traditional laments are pouring out of hand-made clarinets in evocative, minor keys.
Merchants are pulling their ceramic donkeys, Byzantine iconas, miniature marble Parthenons and wool scarves inside for the evening. It’s 11pm.
I’ve just ordered a chilled bottle of raki.
You need to be here - to take in the colors, choas, languages, scents of kabobs and absence of anything digital. If you were here we would dig up every fact we could remember about Roman Civilization and how The Ottoman Empire ruled the world for over 400 years.
“The world has changed in a million ways and yet nothing has changed at all,” I would say.
“Oh, no, the world has gone to a new level of crazy,” you would counter.
“It’s reached crazy like this before.”
You would insist the world has gone beyond mad, mumble something about greed, buffoons and boorish behavior. “It’s just not possible to ever have reached this level of crazy before,” you would shout. “I refuse to believe otherwise!”
We would pour more drinks and shift the conversation. As always we would talk about the possibility of buying real estate in a new country.
“How far do you think our Euros can go on Crete?” you would ask. “For 100,000 euros, do you think the villa comes with the olive grove and a hot Greek gardener?”
I’m thinking about all the escapades we’ve shared exploring the world together over ten years – florentine omelets in Provence, Tawny Port, Fado and Posadas in Portugal, Oscar Wilde and Jon Keats graves in Ireland, Tango in Toledo, Flameco in Sevilla, Hans Christian Anderson and mermaids in Copenhagen, hot homemade cinnamon buns and foot-stomping fiddlers in Halifax, lemoncello birthday cakes in Orvietto, flirty sponge-divers in Symi and hand made ceramic tile collections from almost everywhere.
At this moment, you’re processing test results, meeting doctors, starting treatments. I know you’re a super-human baddass who out-smarts everybody. I know you’ll get through this. But you should be here.
It’s getting late. The temperature is dropping and the bouzoukia music is amping-up.
You should be here, but of course you are here.
Drinking cold raki with me at my outdoor café table in this market square on Crete.