I remember the time when we got our first TV in the 70’s. It was a showcase, a decoration piece in our living room; we only turned it on in the evenings. There weren’t too many channels back then, we had ORF I and II, the Austrian TV stations, we could get the German channels ZDF and ARD on clear days and we watched Rai the Italian TV station.
I never knew his name, but he was a familiar face. He didn’t live in our village, but he came often by and stayed for a few days. He sharpened tools, knifes and scissors. He was from the South of Italy; his face was dark brown and looked weathered. He wore old clothes; his pants and shoes were old and the knitted, patched up cardigan he wore had seen better days as well.
I worked as an interpreter and translator for many years. You have seen so many places, you have traveled so much, I hear this quite often and it’s true. I have traveled and seen the world -as I always wanted to- and I got paid for doing so.
There was a farmer who grew excellent quality corn. Every year he won the award for the best grown corn. One year a newspaper reporter interviewed him and learned something interesting about how he grew it. The reporter discovered that the farmer shared his seed corn with his neighbors. “How can you afford to share your best seed corn with your neighbors when they are entering corn in competition with yours each year? ” the reporter asked.
Out on a walk on the island of Hydra, a vacationing Greek American comes upon an old Greek man sitting on a rock, sipping a glass of Ouzo, and lazily staring at the sun setting into the sea.
The wealthy American notices there are olive trees growing on the hills behind the old Greek but that they are untended, with olives just dropping here and there onto the ground. He asks the old Greek who owns the trees.
Of course I woke up early on Christmas Day; I always do when I promise myself to sleep in. When my feet touch the ground, that’s the signal for our four-legged family members to get up as well. We all had to use the bathroom (not together) and I decided to go for a short morning walk.
Last year I replaced all the windows in my house with those expensive double-pane energy efficient kind, and today, I got a call from the contractor who installed them. He was complaining that the work had been completed a whole year ago and I still hadn’t paid for them.
I often wish that old furniture could talk. What a story many of these antique pieces could tell. Where do they come from? Who made them and who did they belong to? All the people they have met and most importantly, what brought them into my little workshop.
My husband came home and he looked exhausted. “I just spend 30 minutes in the drugstore looking for a cheap lipstick and they gave me Hell,” he said and I laughed; we sat down and he told me the story.
The last months have been hard financially, we had unplanned repairs and expenses left and right, we just couldn’t catch a break. Every time we thought we were caught up, something else happened and things that we had planned or wished for had to be postponed again and again.