My Favorite Cities

Sydney

Photographs I made of some of my favorite cities... 

New York City

New York 

Buenos Aires

Asheville and area

San Miguel de Allende

Guanajuato

Istanbul

Savannah

Vancouver

London

Seville

Prague

Amsterdam

Sitges

Chattanooga 

Rome

Athens

Paris

Florence

Hilo, Hawaii

Tokyo

Nara

New Orleans

Provincetown

San Juan

Santa Fe

San Francisco

--Jack

Remembering Delphi and Athens

Delphi Journal-1985

This morning, waking with the sun and the crowing cocks, John and I took our usual bread, cake, and marmalade, then drove to the walkway to sacred Delphi. Few were there when we arrived before eight. An elderly woman opened a gate that could easily have been circumvented. Yet her opening took on ritual feeling as I spoke " Kalimera," and she answered me in French. Following the path on which she forced us, we saw first the gymnasium before arriving upon the temples of Athena. The latter took on the hallowness of early morning as sunlight streamed in shafts through the resurrected columns of the tholos. Wandering alone among the shrines, I found the Castalian spring, drank of it, and anointed my head in its cold cascade. Anemones the color of fresh blood trembled from crevices in the morning air. A tending gardener, cutting the wild grass with an old scythe, paid me a compliment as I left Athena's grounds along the sacred way: he asked me, when I had said good morning to him in Greek, whether I were Greek, myself.

From the temples of Athena, from which we had watched the sun move in a clear line to light the mountain shrines above, we climbed to these temples of Apollo and to the center of Delphi, where the Oracle once spoke. Tourists began to arrive: German, French, Spanish, Dutch dominated the few British and Americans. John and I were able to avoid them for the most part, and were able to stop in silence before the shrine of the kings of Argos, the Athenian treasury, and the standing columns of Apollo's temple. The treasury, well preserved, holds only sparrows now, whose cries are those of protesting spirits emerging from holes and crevices of the treasury walls, flying in the face of the tourist onslaught as if to check the armies of Darius.
We climbed on, beyond the amphitheater, few tourists following. The path rises vertically, dissuading all but the true pilgrims. There, pine trees overhang the path, as does an ancient fig tree whose old limbs reach nearly to the ground. Anemones and other purple and yellow wild flowers color the tranquility, which the choruses of singing birds complete. Beyond a final bend of the upward path, the stadium opens in level expanse beneath the rock peaks of Delphi. From this quiet, highest reach, we gazed back over the ruins below descending in grandeur to the distant gulf of Corinth.
The sun-- Apollo, as I realized in revelation -- shone warmly upon the navel of the Earth. We returned to the lower temples past the throngs of people pouring through the gates. We visited the chambers of the museum, like a tomb itself, its rooms echoing as if through centuries. I looked longest upon the living face of the charioteer, whose gemstone eyes flashed in the light of the room in which he stood alone; And upon the face and body of Antinoos, last of the gods, lost to the Nile, Hadrian's vision of Beauty and Eros .
Keats' lines from Endymion seem appropriate here,

...Full in the middle of this Pleasantness
There stood a marble altar, with a tress
Of flowers budded newly; and the dew
Had taken fairy phantisies to strew
Daisies upon the sacred sward last eve,
And so the dawned light in pomp receive.
For 'twas the morn: Apollo's upward fire
Made every eastern cloud a silvery pyre
Of brightness so unsullied, that therein
A melancholy spirit well might win
Oblivion, and melt out his essence fine
Into the winds...

ATHENS Journal 1985

Beginning and end, city spreading its white houses and buildings into the haze of the mountains and sea, Athens still lies beneath the two towers of the past: the ancient Acropolis and Mt. Lycabettus, symbol of Byzantium. As I sit sipping a pint of German beer, surrounded by olive old men smoking and drinking the sludge of Greek coffee, as the fumes of Omonia Circle waft into this sad, deteriorating interior of a once grand cafe, I look out at the noise of the city, over the accumulated trash of the election, the tourists, and the indifferent Greeks. Where is the civilization, the wisdom that was worshiped here?
Even the Athenians need refuge. It lies in the adjoining parks of the National Gardens and the Zapion. The limbs of Orange trees with as much ripe fruit as leaves weigh over the walks. A dozen species of birds swoop and chirrup through the tall pines. I sit on a carved bench cracking pistachio nuts, watching afternoon strollers: the families, the lovers, the casual businessman taking a siesta. Roses, bougainvillea, and countless flowers I cannot name fill the parks with their fragrances. The parks open to two other worlds: the plaza where a band gathers to play bouzouki music across a space that includes fountains, statues, sculpture, and a view of the Acropolis; and named after Herodes Atticus, the road lined with trees that passes the Royal Palace and the gates of the Parliament, where skirted guards march their odd goosestep, exchange places, and pretend to ignore passersby.
John and I are staying in the old Plaka section at the base of the Acropolis. Less than a block away are the Arch of Hadrian, gateway to the city in the First century, and the temple of Zeus, largest in Hellas, which took 700 years to build. At night, Artemis, Zeus' daughter, gives the Temple her ghostly moonlight. We stand reverently gazing through the Arch at the lost splendor, behind us a rapid river of autos, buses, trolleys, and taxis speed past, reverent only to modernity and to Pluto, god of money.
The base of the Acropolis is my favorite area of the city. Up the steep, narrow streets cars rarely ascend. Rather, there are walls of honeysuckle and bougainvillea, numberless cafes and roof gardens, and quiet views of the Roman ruins, the Agora, and elegant if slightly worn homes, their French windows opening to balconies above untended gardens along the broken towers. It is a world ruled by cats lying on every ledge.
On our last night in Hellas, John and I ascend Mt. Lycabettus. Our walk takes us into Kolonaki Plaza, like a Paris park, a fountainhead in the midst of elegant European boutiques and cafes. Unlike the rest of Athens, Kolonaki is the domain of Athenian aristocrats. I experience again, as I did fifteen years ago in Paris, the grand European manner --the leisurely evening meal or drink, the intelligent conversations, cosmopolitan people of fashion.
Above Kolonaki plaza the street climbs to a dead end where a series of steps recall San Francisco. At the top of the steps we look back over a vista of white city at the foot of the tree-lined street below us. Above is the funicular, a cross between subway and cable-car that lifts us though the rock of Lycabettus to the peak.
Atop the mountain, we watch as Apollo sets over his once adoring city. We sit respectfully as armed guards lower the blue and white flag and goosestep away. Reverently, we tiptoe inside the Byzantine church of St. George, filled with polished silver icons to the dragon-slayer. Most impressive, of course, is the view of the expanse of Athens white from sea to mountains. As the day fades, the city becomes a shimmering galaxy of moving, twinkling lights. Athens becomes Mexico City: hideous, awesome, and sublime. Only a brief display of lights on the distant Acropolis below distinguishes Athena.
In Athens, the values of ancient Greece are in the same state as Athena's temple, the Parthenon. The ruin stands as monument to ideal form, to mathematical harmony, to the design and embodiment of reason. Yet it is a ruin, nonetheless -- as much a ruin as the high consciousness of Pericles and Phidias who conceived it. That bright morning when John and I mounted the worn steps of the Acropolis, I felt for a moment the shade of that high consciousness, knew the cosmos of the Timaeus and of Aristotle's De Caelo. How swiftly that shade fled as daylight brought the gesticulating, clicking tourists; and with them, the lizard looks of suspicion from the Parthenon's present guardians.

Civil Union Summer

Summer 2000

San Diego Starfish
(photo by Jack)

Our Inn near Woodstock, Vermont

Summer Itinerary:

• San Diego, San Antonio, Kennebunkport
• Asheville, Savannah, Chattanooga
• Amherst, Burlington, Vermont
• N. Conway, N.H.
• Woodstock, Vermont
• Brattleboro, Vermont

lobsters in Maine Singing "Rock Lobster" with the B52s in Piedmont Park to celebrate Gay Pride Day, looking from our balcony over San Diego Bay, taking in the Pacific at La Jolla, where we had seafood overlooking the ocean at George's Cove, or strolling the Riverwalk in San Antonio and eating fresh avacado and steaks at Boudro's, we have had a delicious summer so far. Then there was Kennebunkport, dining on Lobster Napoleon at the Colony Resort, watching the full moon rise over the Atlantic. 

We've also hiked the Blue Ridge with Starr and Bruce, Pamela and Bob. We dined in

Asheville with David and Tricia, and went twice to the Laughing Seed. There was a visit with the Killians at Tybee. And for the 4th of July, we attended a party in honor of Paula Gately Tillman and Joe Roman from Baltimore. The weekend of July 21, Starr and Bruce cooked us a feast and we had a fine party on Lookout Mt joined by Pamela and Bob on the eve of our Civil Union. 

Civil Union and Tennis in New England July-August 2000 

On July 29, we were wed by Civil Union on a sunny morning in a garden gazebo in Essex Junction, Vermont. Cecile Tougas was our witness. From nearby Burlington, we traveled to New Hampshire for a week of tennis on the red clay courts of the New England Tennis Club. We rode the cog rail to the top of Mt. Washington and hiked the White Mountains. We continued on to Woodstock, Vermont where we visited the Billings Farm, and ended our trip in colorful Brattleboro.

Roses and rings: click to enlarge

(photo by Cecile) 

Darryl at the New England Tennis Club 

 (photo by Jack) 

Crossing Lake Champlain 

(photo by Cecile)

In all, Summer 2000 was just ducky.
 (photo by Jack)