because i said

We had not visited Paris in years, and had forgotten how it is positively bursting with culture. Out for a walk, you’re elbowing through crowds of Rodins, tripping over mislaid Canovas and Fragonards.

Continue reading “Pissing at the Louvre”

As I write this, I am sitting at a small plastic table outside our room at Shea’s Riverside Inn and Motel in Essex, Massachusetts.

Our room, the Fredonia (#14), is flanked by the Caviare (#12) and the Eugenia J. (#15). Eugenia is the belle of the motel, as she offers a panoramic view of the Essex River estuary, whose waters empty into the Atlantic and, throughout the spring and summer months, supply tourists with great clouds of small biting insects.

Apart from these facts, Essex County is the birthplace of the comedian Bo Burnham, as well as the birthplace of the fried clam.

But all that is recent history. For in the 19^th century and into the 20^th, Essex was a shipbuilding powerhouse. It produced more two-masted fishing schooners than any other place in the world. Of the 4,000 schooners built in Essex — an astounding number — fewer than ten survive.

At the Cape Ann Museum

If you visit the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, you’ll find an entire wing dedicated to the painter Fitz Henry Lane (1804–1865). His many views of Gloucester harbour are sublime, luminous; as are his paintings of wooden schooners, which were mostly built in nearby Essex. Shipowners commissioned Lane to paint their ships, the way people today want portraits of their dogs and bungalows. You can see why Lane was kept busy. His paintings are impressively detailed and, as the plaques point out, easily withstand close scrutiny by the most demanding maritime historians. There isn’t a knot or plank out of place.

But after a while (these are not my dogs, my bungalows), the paintings all become rather the same thing: handsomely painted, closely observed wooden boats. The eye wanders, attention flags. You may as well be looking at paintings of haystacks and water lilies. And yet, Lane’s paintings of ships endure, even as the ships themselves moulder at the bottom of the ocean.

I’m reminded of a visit to Prague Castle many years ago, roaming through a maze of stone galleries filled with seemingly identical paintings of the Madonna and Child. One echoing room after another, and everywhere the insipid smiles, everywhere the pasty flesh, the pervasive and suffocating sense of rapture and doom — for you know how this story ends. In shipwreck and, ultimately, in exaltation and boredom.

* * *

Somewhere in my basement is a box with a photographic portrait of six-year-old me. The photo is printed on textured, heavy paper, in shades of warm grey.

A photographer has been engaged, Greek of course. My mother has dressed me in a striped short-sleeve shirt and cuffed shorts. She hovers. The photographer places me on a coffee table, sideways, tells me to bend one knee. He tells me to smile, tilt my head. Hand under chin, now. Thoughtful. That’s it, now hold it.

Growing up, this photo was inescapable. For a long stretch, it was in an easel-backed frame and sat on a side table in the living room, a constant smiling rebuke. Always and everywhere, you are nothing more than this.

Fitz Henry Lane at the resurrection

Born Nathaniel Roger Lane in Gloucester, the painter apprenticed to a lithographer in Boston before returning home to launch his career as a maritime painter. What else we know about him: He was lame from an early age and went about on crutches. He may have been a Spiritualist. He never married. At age 26, he successfully petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to change his given names from Nathaniel Roger to Fitz Henry. No one knows why. This is one of several mysteries that attach to the artist. Here is another:

The house Fitz Henry Lane built, from Cape Ann granite, is today owned by the City of Gloucester. Handsome, plain and freshly cleaned, it stands on a hill at the waterfront and commands a fine view of Gloucester Bay. But for a long time after Lane’s death in 1865, the painter was forgotten and his many portraits of ships collected dust in grand houses throughout Boston and Cape Ann. Meanwhile the Lane House sat alone on its hill, neglected. It passed from one owner to the next.

Among these owners was the Polisson Family. Wandering through the Cape Ann Museum, I come across a black and white photo of the Polissons, in front of their new home. A date is scratched into the lower-right corner: April 6, 1914. The date is in Greek.

Five Polisson children sit cross-legged on a kourelou village rug in the foreground. Directly behind are two seated bouzouki players, in suits. Between them is a third man in a suit, possibly the singer. Other family members in white shirts and dresses stand at the back and form a kind of frieze or chorus. On the left is a moustached man with a cigar clamped in his mouth. He holds a tray of glass tumblers filled with wine. A man to his right, in a flat cap and tie, holds a roasted lamb on a long wooden skewer. The Easter feast is about to begin.

A quick picture, then, before we eat. That’s it. Hold it, now.

* * *

Jesus in Prague comes to mind. How the wheel of time turns, how things come round, with the seasons and the generations, but always with small surprises, with fresh signs of death and resurrection, with evidence of the sublime and ridiculous.

I’m sitting in Cafe Sicilia, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, listening to a couple of beefy men engaged in grave, whispered conversation. They’re tanned and wearing work clothes and speaking in what sounds to me like an Italian dialect. A lady offers them a seat on her bench, since they’re standing. But they politely decline, down their espressos and leave. In a corner of the café, a family of five sit in front of their untouched cannellonis. They stare at their phones.

When you enter Cafe Sicilia, the first thing you see is a five-foot square piece of AstroTurf glued to one wall. The AstroTurf is decorated with red neon letters that say Ciao!

The other thing you’ll notice is a three-foot-high painted statue of the Virgin and Baby Jesus. They stand on a high shelf above the counter: Crowned, solemn, making gestures. To the right and just behind the Virgin’s skirts is St. Joseph. He’s about a third smaller than the wife, but doesn’t seem to mind. Immediately to the left of the Virgin and Child, like a shimmering crowd of worshippers, stand a dozen bottles of bright green dishwashing liquid. These are for sale.

Rough business

On our first visits to Gloucester, some years ago, the waterfront was rougher. People had warned me, made jokes about it. But there’s nothing like the sight of a drunken sailor, normally part of a punchline, to cure you of the notion that there’s anything funny about a drunken sailor. You see less of that now, maybe because of tourism and gentrification.

Tourists and their money are welcome in Gloucester, but the real business is still out there, on the water. It’s a rough business. You can tell as soon as you drive in. The roads are clogged with massive tractor trailers, circling the warehouses or parked with their engines running, waiting to be loaded with fish. There used to be more fish. But in the crowded harbour, big trawlers still tie up at Cape Ice to fill their holds (with blocks, cubes, crushed ice or shaved) before heading out to sea. Meanwhile the surrounding yards — filled with rusting iron hulks and decaying wooden boats — function like ICUS. Large men with tools clamber over the stricken vessels all day, fighting to stem the decay.

Gloucester was first settled by Europeans 400 years ago, making it one of the oldest ports in the United States. In the 19th century, these waters were still seething with so many fish there simply weren’t enough skilled hands to get them onto boats and to market. So the Irish came for the steady work, followed by the Portuguese (mostly Azoreans) and Italians (mostly Sicilian). Canadians arrived, too, by the boatload. By the end of the century about half the workforce was Canadian-born, largely from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.

These immigrants prospered, bought and manned their own boats, started families, built churches and, for those lucky enough to not die at sea, filled cemeteries.

* * *

During our three days in Gloucester, I’ve lingered at Cafe Sicilia three times. The espresso here isn’t the best in town. And, to tell the truth, the cookies and pastries aren’t all that good either. But why would I take my coffee anywhere else?

I haven’t posted a short story about Park Extension for a long time. For those of you who don’t know, or need reminding (that’s how long it’s been since I posted a bit of fiction), Park Extension is a working-class neighbourhood in Montreal that has, for many generations, been a home for new immigrants. In the years I spent there as a child and adolescent, Greeks probably made up the biggest ethnic group. Most of the Greeks have moved on, although their churches remain.

I hope you like the story.

It’s titled Clothes Make the Man.

In the morning, while the Germans, Americans and Brits sleep off last night’s dinner, the ladies are out among the gardens. Over faded dresses and threadbare slacks they wear reflective safety vests, they carry brooms and rakes. As they chat about last night’s TV show, the state of their kids and husbands, they clear the paths and flower beds of twigs and fallen leaves, and by mid-morning they’re gone.

During these same morning hours, I wander the formal gardens facing our hotel in Kérkyra (“Corfu,” to non-Greeks) to snap pictures of its many statues. Uniformed and besuited Worthies, carved in marble, are scattered through the winding paths. Famous generals and prime ministers, scholars and bureaucrats, all of them men, all of them briefly astride History.

Kerkyra is parked just off the coast of Greece, in the Adriatic, which makes it a geopolitical prize. And so, for centuries the Great Powers each took their turn. Venice installed its Worthies and ruled for centuries. The French had two goes at Kerkyra, the second time led by the megalomaniac Napoleon. After they ousted Napoleon, the Brits stayed on for a bit. Then they decided Kerkyra wasn’t worth the trouble and, following Greek Independence, “gave it back.”

But it was a 19^th century view of independence. Out for a run one day, I pass the Mon Repos Palace where Prince Phillip (William and Harry’s grandad), of wholly German stock, was born in 1921.

* * *

A few days before our arrival in Kérkyra, we were staying in the town of Kalambáka, beneath the monk-haunted mountains of Meteora. One evening, as we were walking toward the agora to scope out a taverna for dinner, a Dutch woman turned to me and confided that she always felt nervous speaking with Greeks. She would eventually have to reveal her Dutch background, and might be blamed for the punishing austerity measures Greeks endured after the global financial crisis of 2008. Tens of thousands of Greeks were left homeless, families went hungry, suicide rates spiked. As society went into freefall, the public safety nets vanished.

The Dutch woman, a retired chief executive of a global consultancy, said it had all been very unfair. I, too, remember the news stories, and the unspoken judgments: Lazy, feckless, corrupt, irresponsible. They had it coming.

In Canada, among Greek friends, we looked at each other guiltily. Wasn’t there some truth to the charges? We traded our own stories of maddening bureaucracy, reckless spending and tax avoidance.

“But Germany was mostly behind all those austerity measures, wasn’t it?” I asked the Dutch woman.

“Yes, but a Dutch Eurogroup president carried them out,” she responded. “Greeks would remember this.”

I reassured her, without any real knowledge, that it was water under the bridge. Greeks are hospitable people, so how could anyone possibly blame her? We had all moved on.

It was not a good answer, but it was the best I could do. We found a taverna and our group ordered an excellent dinner, with a couple of litres of local wine. It was a memorable evening with much laughter.

A burden on society

Objectively speaking, Uncle Pavlo, who lived with his family a few blocks from our apartment in Park Extension, was a failure. After arriving in Canada, he started several businesses, but they all went bust. As for steady work, he never managed to hold a job for more than a year or two, often just a few months. He’d work long enough to qualify for government benefits, then quit or arrange to get fired. He did that for years, supplementing his meagre UI cheques with the odd part-time job, always for cash. He bought a car, but then lost his license for driving while drunk.

By my high school years, Uncle Pavlo had settled into a tolerable routine. When the UI forms arrived each month, he’d find me at the back of my father’s small store. I was usually at the meat counter, eating a sandwich of warm Greek bread, mortadella and cheese. And beside me, always, a sheet of butcher paper with a tomato cut into wedges and a handful of olives.

“Sorry to interrupt, Bárba Spyro,” he’d say, handing me a pen and his UI forms.

Between bites, I’d tick off the boxes. Yes, he had been available to work. Yes, he had looked for a job. No, he had not succeeded in finding one. Sign here. Date there. I suggested that his kids, both of them about my age, could just as easily fill out the forms. Nope. The cheques kept coming, so why tempt fate?

Meanwhile his kids needed winter boots and school supplies. Money was always short for rent and utilities, for bus tickets to get my aunt to her factory job. There were never vacations.

I also remember several other things about Uncle Pavlo. For instance, he was a good cook and taught me several classic dishes, including tas kebab. When he had a few dollars, he joined his cronies at various Greek dives in Montreal, where he was a legendary drinking companion. He could be hysterically funny. When Uncle Pavlo was “on,” with a beer parked on the table in front of him, he would hold a room for hours. On Saturdays he played the fiddle in a Greek dance band. Sometimes I watched him practice, his thick, nicotine-stained fingers confounding all expectation, as they raced up and down the fingerboard to conjure a maiden eagerly skipping along a mountain path and into the arms of her lover.

Until the day he died, Uncle Pavlo called me “Bárba Spyro,” a common endearment for an elderly gentleman. He began calling me “Bárba Spyro” when I was in grade school. I must have been a serious kid.

* * *

Later in the day, roaming the narrow lanes of Kerkyra, we come across a yiayiá with her broom. It’s such a common sight throughout Greece that, after a time you scarcely notice them. Ancient women eternally sweeping their front steps as a cat sleeps under a pot of basil.

The Ant and the Grasshopper

No one knows what Aesop looked like, but in sculptures he is always ugly and troll-like. According to ancient accounts, Aesop was a former slave. Some place his death in Delphi, maybe in 6^th century BCE. But the history is murky. We really don’t know much about him. Even Aesop’s existence is in dispute. The first and greatest fabulist may have been a fiction himself.

One of Aesop’s best-known fables, “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” has been endlessly retold, reinterpreted and illustrated to suit every age. You know the story.

Winter arrives, with howling vengeance, and Grasshopper makes his way to Ant’s snug little cottage. Hungry, cold and bedraggled, seeking shelter, Grasshopper bangs on the door. The door opens a crack, then swings wide to reveal Ant, who is wearing bunny slippers, a green woolen housecoat lined with thin-striped red satin, and a warm nightcap. Behind him, a fire blazes on an iron grate. Ant surveys the shivering Grasshopper, grimaces at the fat drop of snot trembling at the tip of a red nose. Ant clucks his tongue.

“Well, will you look at that. While I slaved all summer long, while I prudently stored up food and provisions to tide my family through the winter months, you, Grasshopper, you sat lolling on a sunny rock and sawing at your fiddle all day. Without a care in the world, eh? Now, here is the day of reckoning at last.”

And with that, Ant slams the door in Grasshopper’s face.