The ghosts of ancient Greeks and their gods surrounded me as I sat alone in the ruins of the stone theater near the Acropolis in Athens. I felt small and insignificant in their presence. The art of true tragedy was born here and played again and again for audiences to learn from the mistakes of others. How many plays had been performed here? How many tragedies born from the minds of famous playwrights—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—and who could guess how many others not so famous, or lost in the dust of history?
The stone was solid under me, but much of the theater was in ruins. I recreated it as best I could from pictures I had seen and descriptions I had read. The chorus would enter on my left, chanting or singing their stories, their observations, and their wisdom. When they paused, the actors would enter, and the story would unfold.
Who had sat where I now sat? The theater was where ordinary people came to learn lofty morals from the plays that portrayed the mistakes of others, and what became of those who sinned against the gods. Even petty criminals were released for the day to see that they should change the direction of a wrongful path. Perhaps a child perched here, squirming with discomfort and boredom, too young to understand why the adults had come to this crowded place to sit for hours listening to people shout or watching them cry. Or perhaps there had been someone very like me, with a troubled heart, looking for healing.
Where did my own life story fit into this larger scene? Could my personal tragedy have been made into a play to intrigue such an audience? Here is the plot: a middle-aged man suffering with terrible depression, which no one really understands or knows how to cure, chooses in desperation to swallow poison to end the pain he can no longer endure. What poor intrigue this is, with only one death, no brave battles fought to avenge old wrongs, no deeds to be repented, no revenge to be rendered. Can this truly be called tragedy?
But should the plot I wrote be about his life? Perhaps the tragedy was mine. My grief was unrequited, the wound unhealed. No gods answered when I called out for respite from my suffering. But as far as we know, no writer in those ancient times had ever been a woman who dared to write of her own tragedy. Surely she would have been pushed aside by the men who wrote of braver deeds and more worthy sacrifices than could a mere woman.
This place was perfect for my meditations, and I tried to place my grief into a better perspective than I had been able to do before. One person’s grief, when compared to what had transpired over the many centuries that had passed since this theater was new, was surely an insignificant thing. At least one small enough to deal with, if I applied enough understanding, love, and forgiveness.
The sun was nearly gone now, and the stone seat had grown uncomfortably hard and cold beneath me. I rose stiffly to leave my gods and ghosts, and my thoughts, for the present. We had enjoyed a good but silent dialogue, and I felt they wished me well as I left, alone.
The gods and ghosts were never far away from me on that two-week trip. My daughter had come with me to tour the country in a rented Volkswagen. In our naivete, we did some daring things, making up our itinerary day by day, and even driving the perilous and terrifying road over the winter mountains to come down to return to Athens on the Adriatic side of Greece.
The second week we spent a more quiet time on the island of Rhodos. A few days before we left for home, we were walking on the almost deserted beach. The shore was mostly volcanic rock, smooth where it had hardened from molten rock, seamed and full of holes of all sizes. The Aegean Sea had cast her waves for centuries against it to smooth the black and white stones of every size that were everywhere, lying piled on the flat places, filling the holes, moving in and out with the surf. Diane and I walked apart, but within sight of each other, each wishing we could take all these beautiful stones home with us. We filled our pockets with only the most perfect.
It was January 22, 1972, my 46th birthday, the first time I had ever been anywhere on my birthday but home in the cold winter. Here it was sunny and mild. As the sun shone on the wet stones, my eye was caught by one white stone different from the rest. I picked it up, and as I held it in my hand, my broken heart was soothed. It was a tiny marble goddess, the torso only with its arms close to its body and the legs together, no feet or head. I touched it with wonder, my own small Greek goddess, my special birthday present. Truly, the gods were with me.
Grandmom's Stories 
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