Old Man.

OLD MAN.


By D. Jonas Laurence.



There’s an old guy who walks up and down the beach selling grapes and slices of juicy honeydew melon. Up and down he goes in the shimmering heat – the sand is too hot to walk on, for me, yet he wears no shoes at all. The pads of his feet are hard like leather.
He has a large scar that runs from his thigh down across the knee and onto the top of his shin. I wonder how he got that scar.
Yesterday, or maybe it was the day before, I saw him leaving the beach with two other Greek men….in a boat. He was rowing.
Here on the beach he works from a cave that is cut into the side of the volcanic cliff that rises behind the sand of the beach. The cliff is terracotta red.
Today the old man saw us drinking a bottle of wine and when the bottle was empty and lying in the sand, he came over to us and asked if we would like some more wine. He said that what we had just drunk had “too many shemicals” – that was how he said chemicals, shemicals. His wine did not have any shemicals; he squeezed the grapes himself with those leather feet of his. He stamped the sand to demonstrate.
He left his two baskets of fruit lying in front of us and ambled back to his cave with our empty bottle. He returned some moments later with the bottle full of homemade resina – very strong he explained.
As I write this, listening to the constant crash of the surf upon the beach, he has just approached us again and given us a free shot of his resina – and tried to sell us some grapes as well, of course.
After we drink his wine we will have “many, many sex, ha ha”
But then off he goes, back up the beach with his voice echoing in the cove, selling his melons and grapes the same as he has always does for how long I can only guess.
It’s time to go now, and get some late lunch from somewhere, ride our slow little motor scooter in the breeze. But still I wonder, as we pack up our books and towels and tramp away from the cave cut in the cliff, away from the pounding waves, along the hot sand in our expensive sandals, still I wonder... just how did he get that scar on his knee?
I bet that that is an interesting story.



THE END.


Santorini, October, 2000