The gift was several years old by this time, and I had taken it along on trips before and left it empty each time.
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The notebook was like a new door to an old place, one I wasn’t sure how to get back to. My brother had given it to me, saying, “I remember when you used to draw all the time.” I did too, and I missed it. In my carry-on was a Moleskine notebook with a set of black pens, for sketching. I was, then, determined to have my first real vacation, even from writing. I was also teaching writing, and that was its own blur of constant tasks, email in particular. But I had come to feel a little like an on-call doctor for patients who would never fully explain themselves to me. as I am at 11 a.m., and if I ignore them, they tend to go away and not come back, and so I had learned to just go and write, no matter the hour.
As a freelance writer and a “visiting writer” at a small liberal arts college - a sort of high-end adjunct professor, better pay but with all of the uncertainty - vacations meant working vacations, or, as I liked to call them, “really beautiful places I have freelanced from.” As a writer, the time I don’t work is never very clear I am as likely to get an idea at 11 p.m. Like most Americans, I had accepted the loss of even the idea of a vacation as a fact of what everyone kept calling the new economy. The invitation to join my friends there had showed me a simple truth about myself: I never took real vacations. I hadn’t come to the Cyclades for the famous islands. I imagined Apollo biting the tribute to see if it was real gold, and wondered if it was now famous for not being famous - some last affliction from the sun god. They then told me a story about how it was known for its gold and silver mines, but after the islanders angered Apollo by sending him tribute made from gold plate, he flooded the mines. When the couple asked where I was going, and I told them, they said, Sifnos is not as famous, just like that. The ancient gods seemed alive to them, but as if they were friends. I asked where they were going, and they said Anafi, the island Apollo made for Jason and the Argonauts to rest during a storm, after capturing the Golden Fleece. Serifos is where the giants mined for iron, they said. As we bought rounds of beer, we passed the islands and they spoke familiarly of them. This was so far off the mark that it charmed me enough to keep chatting. They leaned over and asked if I was Belgian - their guess, as I’d been quietly drinking beer and reading comics. I didn’t think about whether Sifnos was famous or not again until I was on the ferry from Athens, when I met a friendly young Greek couple - a gardener and a social worker, working with refugees. I was confused, thinking she had mistaken me for the sort of person who would only want to go someplace famous, but she quickly explained that most tourists were interested in the other islands, which meant Sifnos was affordable, and so she and her husband could afford to vacation for a month there with their two children, and over the years invite a mix of writers and academics and the people who had married or befriended them for a house party set among apartments, all of them renting near each other at the island’s center.
My friend Sabina said this to me when she invited me to join her there in the summer of 2008. The first thing I ever heard about the Greek island of Sifnos was that it was not famous.