oldernow

boy, I seem to be wrapped up in the past these days! My wife and I went to Colorado to deal with my 86 year old mom, who's just given up driving. She told us lots of stories about the dust bowl, the depression, and pre-war El Paso Texas. A story she likes to repeat is the one about my grandpa who, during the depression, bought a house sight unseen for $700 in Cloudcroft (it's gone now). He came home and told his triple-Scorpio wife (not that he thought of her that way): "let's go see what I bought." What he had purchased was a three-story 7 bedroom house in the high mountains, a place that stayed in the family for quite some time. My mom said that she used to sit on the trestle over the gorge with Bill Mauldin (the WWII cartoonist) and throw rocks at the cars on the road. Of course if you stayed too long on the trestle, the train would come by and smash you, but that was part of the fun of sitting there! She talked on and on for hours: I put a photograph album in front of her and looked over her shoulder with my DVD camera. I hope that much comes out. She has had an amazing life, and at this point her clarity about her youth is strong and fascinating, if also depressing.

meanwhile, we were staying in a local hotel and every day my wife would get an omelet. about the 3rd day I noticed this really old fellow with only a few teeth standing by the omelet station. I don't eat eggs, but for some reason I struck up a conversation with him. Gradually I learned that he was 1) Greek, and 2) had emigrated to NYC in the 1920's, and then moved upstate--really upstate to... Ithaca! which is basically our home town at this point. Then it came out that he had owned the State Street Diner for 37 years, and had sold it in 2001 at the age of 70:



this Diner is a huge piece of Ithaca night life. Not college, not goth, not youngsters so much, but more like a Switzerland for town and gown, for cops and robbers. Open all night, it served the kind of diner menu you'd find on "Triple-D" (in joke for foodies); nowadays its menu is a bit more upscale--a bit more--not a lot. but back in the day you could nurse a cup of coffee and a plate of french fries for hours in the deep night, waiting to sober up, or just thinking about stuff. Stephanos, the then owner, is a small man with a big heart. he told me he took a vacation once -- to see the Pope in Rome -- and didn't like being away from his kitchen that long, so never did it again! He somehow had a presence that made the Diner a peaceable kingdom in the land of the damned, and a place you could (almost) always afford to go.

so he was pleased to find out that I knew and loved the diner--had been a regular there for much of the earlier time he owned it (after a while I moved into the country, and had less reason to be in town after midnight). At that point the head waiter of this hotel restaurant took me aside and said that he was amazed that I'd pried this story out of Stephanos so quickly. He asked for a picture - which I'll upload here if I ever find my camera-link cord again of Stephanos to keep around, and made arrangements for me to take a bunch of pix of the Ithaca Diner.. because... In May Stephanos and his wife (who works in the laundry in the basement of the hotel) is gonna retire at the age of 77! The headwaiter said that he wanted to present a plaque to Stephanos, give him a copy and put one on the wall of this otherwise sterile and cookie-cutter hotel restaurant. I agreed, and the headwaiter said: "this is the first day in a long time I would have come to work for free" by the time we left, my wife, Stephanos and the headwaiter were all a little teary-eyed, and i was feeling just full of some great joy. a joy at being able to tell this man how much his place meant to me as a young student barely scraping by, and as a young man, also barely scraping by. really a remarkable morning all the way around!