We wake up between 8:30 and 9:30 each morning. The kids usually get up earlier – between 7:00 and 8:30 and read books on the iPad. They have bulldozed through much of the library of books on their Epic and Dr. Seuss apps. Sennen can tell you about some obscure Dr. Seuss books and everything in the National Geographic Kids series of books ranging from presidents to animals to outer space. They also read a lot of fiction including fairy tales and popular children's stories.
In Greece, they don't want a cooked breakfast – some yogurt (for Ailyn the Peppa Pig strawberry yogurt and for Sennen Greek yogurt with honey) and fruit or some cold cereal is all they'll accept. Without school, camp or the need to be present and working in the mornings, we can get up and going at our leisure. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays have typically been beach days and we have an informal expectation that we'll get out the door between 10 and 11 since Matheus starts work at 10. He usually starts his day by making lunch for the kids and himself and packing them for the beach. Sometimes there's the debate over which beach to go to that day – one person wants this one, another that one. These are the tough decisions along with whether Sennen wants a peanut butter, pistachio butter, turkey or salami sandwich. Sometimes he goes wild and combines turkey and salami.
Some mornings – especially Mondays – before we go to the beach, I run a few quick errands around town: the laundry, butcher, bakery (bread for the sandwiches which isn't made on Sundays), jugs of drinking water and taking out the recycling. Garbage and recycling are less convenient than at home – they have to be walked to the nearest location of waste or recycling bins – and the recycling separated. But it has the advantages of not having any waste sitting around the property and never worrying about garbage day.
Increasingly, I know the people at each stop and a lot of the people coming and going. My morning errands are full of greetings, nods and waving. The bakery rounds down what I owe them as does the butcher. No one here likes the government imposed tax on plastic bags – so they just take it off voluntarily if it pushes the total to an odd number of cents.
We typically drive only to the beach and occasionally to restaurants near a beach. Everywhere else, we walk. The tavernas and cafes at the beaches are among Emily and my offices on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Wednesdays and Fridays the kids now go to the gym with Emily and have their hour training session with Coach Tenassos whose exercise class they say is the most fun thing EVER. Coach Tenassos has the distinction of being an American citizen who has never stepped foot in the United States. His mom, Fotini is of Patmosian origin, but born and raised grew up in Dayton, Ohio and sounds more like a tourist than a local when speaking English.
After everyone's time at the gym, Emily takes a quick shower and we go to lunch – usually gyros or pies. Sometimes we walk around town and shop or do errands. Other times, we just get lunch and then take the kids back to the house. Matheus watches them in the afternoons Wednesdays and Fridays while Emily and I work and then have the evening to ourselves. Sennen and Ailyn rarely mind because their Matheus evenings usually include the playground, sunset, sometimes dinner out, a movie and gelato.
"You guys can go out more. Go everyday if you want!" Sennen once said.
I grocery shop once or twice a week and have everything delivered so I don't have to schlep it up the hill. The groceries, like our laundry come by motorcycle. We take the kids out to dinner twice a week too.
Weekends are completely ours. We have nowhere to be at any time other than whatever we decide to do. Sometimes it's a beach. Sometimes an activity like walking around Hora. A couple of times, we've hung out at home for a lot of the day, because the kids are feeling lazy (all that beach time really takes it out of you…).
Unlike home, I make dinner twice a week on average instead of 4-5 times. Because Emily is being less restrictive with her dietary habits, I have some different cooking options open to me. Mostly, I cook Greek-style food. Sometimes I cheat and buy meat that is pre-seasoned by the butcher. I can't do it as well and unlike at Gelson's or Whole Foods, the cost of the pre-seasoned meat is negligible. We have very fresh vegetables – local, seasonal and Greek in variety. Same with our fruits. The most contrived produce we get are bananas – because Ailyn can't live without them in the mornings. But the rest of the day, she's eating apricots, watermelon, plums, figs, grapes – mostly organic and all regional products.
Tuesdays are my busy day. For some reason, I get large clusters of phone calls, meetings and presentations that day. It never works like that at home, but it has here and I'm grateful because it usually makes the rest of the week lighter. Emily's busiest workdays are Monday and Tuesday – so by Wednesday, life seems lighter and more flexible in general.
Our errands are minimal. At home, we both seem to have so many places to go, things to get, situations to transact. I'm sure if we were here long enough, the doctor and dentist would be inevitable items in our rotation. I do take the car to the car rental man once a week for a free car wash. I park it in front of his office and come back at 10 am with it sparkling clean. I suppose that takes the place of my weekly trip to the car wash at home….
Somehow, we don't have that much structure to our lives and very few demands. We are much more relaxed. By most measures, our quality of life is quite a bit higher here.
On the other hand, we pay a little more in rent than we do for our mortgage, although we don't deal with bills – so there's even some value there. We do have to deal with a landlord and he's surprisingly higher touch/maintenance than any previous landlord I've had. But he's mostly harmless. Our house is far from as comfortable as home, especially the mattresses. Our bathrooms are more spartan (which I suppose is a Greek trait?) and Emily and I essentially have a slightly extended powder room for our master bath – which is generous because I'm pretty sure one of the half-baths at Emily's parents' house is larger than our bathroom here. I also sometimes miss my car which is a lot more comfortable and fun to drive – although it would be nothing but a liability on the Patmos roads. But a rear-view camera and sensors would be REALLY nice since parking is perhaps the most challenging part of Patmos driving life.
These things are all surface, though.
What we really don't have are friends. We did for a few days and we miss them. We don't have family either. We talk to them frequently – but it's not the same as being together. As the Fox teaches the Little Prince, "'What is essential is invisible to the eye. It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."
We also have no Jewishness in our life here. No synagogue, no Jewish community and the closest thing to a bagel is the this round-bread pastry filling with goat cheese, which does have a charm of its own. Moreover, no one here really even knows what a Jew is beyond the poorly-behaved Israeli cruise passengers.
What we have instead is a lot of freedom and an increasing network of friendly acquaintances – people who are willing to let us be part of their community in a special role reserved for foreigners. We're not one of them, but we can share their world to a degree. In this and several ways, Patmosians are similar to the Balinese who welcome foreigners – even expats – but have clear boundaries about how those foreigners can and can't participate in community life.
Besides dumping some of the trappings of daily suburban American life and running a household, what we've really cut out are the demands placed up on us by our community. The needs of friends, family, institutions, neighbors. Without those things, we have the freedom to leave the house later, dine out more often and most significantly, have an open calendar to do with as we please.
Instead, the people around us have the stress – the long hours in the tourist season making their money for the year, handling the bills, washing the car, schlepping groceries up the hill, the burdens they place on one another, their individual and collective struggles. We sit outside their circle – as well as our own – Free. It's glorious - for a time.
The oft-forgotten secret to quality of life is that many of the things we escape on vacation - and feel so good to take off our shoulders – are the very things that bring meaning to our lives. Interdependence, not freedom is at the core of human happiness. We are a social animal and the more our lives are about serving one another – being connected to one another, the richer they become. The rise of the nuclear family in our society has brought about so much angst, isolation and depression. We aren't meant to be just a few people completely wrapped up in ourselves – or a small unit isolated from the community around them. Our children aren't art projects that one or two people intensely sculpt. Parents can't raise children alone and children can't be happy being the center of their parents' world any more than they can being neglected.
Spending the summer in one of the best islands on earth, having incredible freedom and ease, I have thought many times about whether or quality of life is better here or home. At times, the island tries to deceive me – a paradise of respite. But when I close my eyes and look with my heart, I am reminded that it's the annoying, sometimes painful things that are the actual quality of life. Being needed to volunteer when it's not convenient, having to drop everything to take my kid to the doctor, changing my schedule for the school play, getting to my in-laws' on time for Shabbat or a holiday, running that extra errand because Emily's stressed, calling and sorting through some billing mistake, taking in our neighbor's garbage cans, showing up for a funeral across town during the middle of the workday, driving an hour to meet a friend for lunch, picking someone up from LAX, talking to someone whose grief seems unbearable, getting dinner on the table at the right time every night, waking up at 6:15 to start another completely routine and often rushed morning with 20 things to remember and do. Ironically, these are the mundane building blocks of a life well-lived. The needs, demands and inconveniences of the people we love and care about and the community in which we live is not only not always fun, but can feel heavy and constricting. The responsibility is a weight. But also a privilege and what keeps us strong, vital and in the end fulfilled.
Getting back to our friends the Little Prince and the Fox: "“People have forgotten this truth," the fox said. "But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.”
And if you're lucky, you live in a garden.
