I spent a month in England with AFS when I was 15, and a month in Greece with my Aunt when I was 13. Which has been on my mind because my kids are getting older. By 13 I had an unusual (absurd) amount of freedom. So I reflect on who I was, what I was doing as I became a teenager, and compare that life to that of my children.
In London one evening, busy ignoring a production of "The Pirates of Penzance," I spent most of the play flirting silently with an usher across the auditorium. He ended up keeping in touch, writing me poetry, and eventually visiting in the states. That's some fairly serious flirting for two people who never said a word face to face. In the end, though, he was mostly accent. The eyes really can't say it all.
Which shouldn't stop a girl from trying. In 1979 in Athens Greece I showed up for dinner in the hotel restaurant wearing pants. Where I was promptly asked to leave and return properly attired in a skirt or dress. Women were not allowed to wear pants. Its good for my daughter to hear such things, and reflect on the immediacy of history. (She's currently reading The Evolution of Calpurina Tate about a dress rejecting girl from the 1800s.) Dinners there, at that time, lasted several excruciatingly boring hours. One can only fiddle with iced butter curls (unsalted!) for so long before giving in to broader horizons. I spent all the time I wasn't eating moussaka silently flirting with a busboy. We stared and stared and STARED at each other, never saying a word. Days later an older waiter followed me into an elevator and pushed a piece of paper into my frightened hand with the name and (I assume) address of my friend.
Alas, I don't read Greek so I never wrote him or saw him again. My daughter asked why I didn't just have it translated online? "Because online hadn't been invented yet," I responded. There were no computers. And people were allowed to walk on the Acropolis. Which I believe was closed to foot traffic very soon thereafter.
Your pants memory reminds me of one from Scotland, traveling alone in the Outer Hebrides. I headed down a few dark and dank steps into the only pub in the village, and stuck my head in the heavy door. The man behind the bar looked up with a glare. I paused. Four or five old men were visible through the smoke filled room, draped over their stout. The bar man held his stare for half a beat more and then called out, "There's no ladies toilet." I was confused. "Sorry?" He set his lower jaw, jabbed it toward me, and repeated himself, "There's NO Ladies toilet!". I was used to being denied a full pint, "You mean aha' pint?) but this was a new level of sexism. I decided to let it go, as the heavy door gradually eased back into it's age-old notch, as the men into their established ideas.
ReplyDeleteOoooh, this is such a rich image, CC. I can smell that pub, "draped over their stout."
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