Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Athenian Odyssey
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
I’m waiting for my son Ben in an Athens taverna along a narrow passageway in the tourist-packed Plaka. I’ve ordered a gyro and carafe of retsina. Between keeping an anxious eye out for Ben, my gaze turns upward towards the Acropolis.
Ben is doing a junior year abroad at the Athens School of Fine Arts. He is majoring in Greek antiquities. At first, I teased him, “If you want to study antiquities, what about studying your father?” His grimace, I like to think, was formed with love, if not approval.
I’m worked up, excited and nervous. I haven’t seen him since he boarded American Airlines over four months ago.
By his standards, he’s on time. Ambling towards my taverna table, he looks thinner. We quickly hug, and before he is fully seated he is ordering lunch. As he wolfs down his moussaka, only the top of his head is visible.
I don’t say a word about his weight or his manners. I can be as stoic as a Stoic.
His stomach full, he asks. “Have you done anything to my room?” He confesses that art history might have been a bad choice. He is considering quitting. “Athens doesn’t suit me,” he says. I just listen, but my throat seizes up.
His expression is the crumbled, broken face of Oizys, the Greek goddess of misery, anxiety, depression. In the sweltering summer heat, my heart freezes. Every father’s burden since long before the Iliad and the Odyssey were penned is having my happiness limited by the happiness of my children. That’s how cosmic justice plays itself out in the human heart. Ask any Greek god.
Feeling every one of my forty-six years, I want to dadsplain that he doesn’t have to be good at his work to enjoy it. I want him to know that the world is full of pitfalls and pratfalls, but learning art history is not one of them. I want to tell him there’s no quick cure for his fear of failing or his homesickness. Instead, I am stoic.
As the sun sneaks down behind the Parthenon, Ben smiles—a blended grin of youthful embarrassment and unburdened brightness. He is talked out. In the mysterious way of dads and sons, he steadies himself with an unspoken injection of confidence.
He launches into telling me about his first visit to the Parthenon. Forgetting that I teach high school history, he sonsplains about the 5th century BC temple, its architectural lines, the columns and the caryatids, the friezes.
He wraps up by regaling me with a story about exiting the Acropolis and overhearing a piercing, shrill New York accent bellowing, “Henry, Henry, are you listening to me? I’m not moving. Not another step. You go ahead. I’ll wait here.” Ben turned to see a portly woman in a flowery summer dress and floppy straw hat wailing at her husband. She had to have flown thousands of miles, sweated up and down hilly Athens, climbed the steep steps from the Agora and now there she stood—balky as a Greek donkey—planted a scant half-step away from one of the world’s icons.
“I guess art history isn’t for everyone,” Ben laughs, soon uncontrollably.
I’m laughing too.
