Pillars of Sand

"You cannot separate culture from language!" To put an end to the discussion John banged his empty glass on the sturdy taverna table, but when he let go of it, he hiccuped which knocked the tumbler over. Surprised by the mishap, he sat paralyzed and detached, watching the glass roll to the point of no return, already curious about how and where the shards would scatter. One of his drinking companions, a fisherman, reached over and caught the glass in mid-flight and stood it upright on the table. The incident brought John around enough to refill it from the dregs in the bottle. The more he drank, the less he believed how much he had consumed. "It was just a couple of glasses," he'd protest, when everyone knew he had polished off two bottles of cheap white. "Mathematical propositions express no thoughts," he'd say and wave away the concept of counting drinks.

"We need to get him home," one of John's Greek friends muttered to an English painter at the table. John raised his full glass in the air to make a toast. "To life," he slurred. "We are asleep," he raised his voice and sat upright in his chair, " but we wake sometimes, sometimes..." He slumped back again and his chin nodded toward his chest, though one hand still anchored to his glass like it lashed to a mast in a pitching sea. Someone shook his shoulder. "Hey! Ela Yianni!" a voice said. "Time to go home."

John's head lifted but his eyes barely opened. "....dreaming," he mumbled, finishing his thought before his chin hit his chest again. His companions nodded at each other; their friend was too far gone to walk home. They'd need to commandeer the wheelbarrow that was kept outside the vegetable shop beside the taverna. Besides helping the short square wife of the greengrocer bring her produce to the shop, it doubled as a communal luggage carrier and was free to be pressed into service if it was returned intact. John was easier to control if he was a dead weight, knocked out by alcohol, because if he started flopping he would bail out of the barrow and stagger back to the taverna, bouncing off walls in the narrow streets, attempting to keep his spinning world on a vertical axis.

The village where John lived was a jumble of white cube houses that huddled behind a rocky headland whose high cliffs plummeted dizzyingly toward the sea. John's house was high up at the back of the village There was a zigzag route without steps to get home from the taverna, but in the dark it was a complicated and strenuous climb. Some of the hills were so steep that with two friends pushing, it took serious effort to gain enough momentum to transport their groaning cargo to the next level. The disadvantage of taking him home the long way round, was that they had to rush past the cemetery in the dark, a place where they had all witnessed relatives buried. Once past the spooky section with it's black candle cypresses, the road to the top was easier. They could dump John off at the top of the cliff and he could find his way from there. It was only a few steps down to a steep trail that squeezed through a maze of vertical rock slabs which had broken off a quake-shattered necropolis. John sometimes woke up in this miniature canyon under a blaze of blue sky with no memory of why he had been cast into the biblical wilderness, only to realize that he was a few steps from his front door.

"Peroni or Fix?" the taverna owner would ask when John stopped by for a beer in the afternoon.

"Knowledge is needed to make a choice," John said solemnly, "and I don't know what chance thing will influence my decision until the time comes."

"You're too smart for your own good Mister John." From habit the taverna keeper flattered his customers, and John was a good one. He winked so John knew he was playing with him. "But now that you are here," the man said, "the time has come. I will bring you a Fix."

John didn't get drunk every night but if he ran across the right people at the right time, he started and couldn't stop. Wheelbarrow John as his friends called him, laughed and joked when his friends suggested he drank too much, and he would paper it over with one of his philosophical nuggets, like "Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself." He might swear off alcohol for a while and try to eat properly, but he'd never learned the mysteries of the kitchen, so if he drank a beer while figuring out what to eat, it would become a second beer and then he wasn't hungry anymore.