Just After the Beginning
One of my roommates at college was in what Phi Beta Kappa calls the “junior eight.” In other words he was one of the smartest guys in his Harvard class or, as his friends said, “not a complete idiot.” Even before he became an academic, he was a natural lecturer. If you passed by his undergraduate bedroom and study, you might hear a Red Sox game, but he would interrupt the announcer with an impromptu talk on just about anything.
When he and I travelled together at times during the year after college, we once arranged to meet in Greece. “On Rhodes you will find me dining outdoors on the quay,” he told me, naming a restaurant.
After learning to ski in the Alps, I went to the island of Rhodes and was relieved to find him eating on the quay. When I got to the table he gave no sign of greeting but launched into a lecture on Greek food, starting with the point that Europe was divided into a butter zone (in the north) and a zone of olive oil (around the Mediterranean). Then he told me about the menu item tete d’agneau, half a head of lamb served with a generous helping of brain. Then he described the dish that he’d more cautiously ordered, which was a large salad spiked with feta cheese. Then he looked up as if shyly and murmured, “oh, hello.”
Lest you mistake him for a tiresome pedant, he was the first person to teach me that really interesting people are often a little weird or as we learned to say, “special.” In my later work as a “book creation coach,” I could easily overlook strangeness if I felt that a client, through his or her writing, was nudging the culture in what I believed to be a good direction, as was done, for example, by Vicki Noble on feminism (Motherpeace) or Margot Anand (The Art of Sexual Ecstasy).
And as the son of parents who had emigrated to escape the Nazis, and who had earlier “converted” to hide their Jewishness, my friend also had a tragic sense often then missing in the kind of Americans who, at our college, ate cucumber sandwiches with the crust cut off white bread. Besides, he was enormous fun.
In north London he showed me the school he’d attended on his family’s way from Eastern Europe to a liberal arts college in the Midwest. In west Berlin he knew the history of Germany. In Italy he could tell me details about the Renaissance.
But back to Greece: on Rhodes we rented a motor-scooter to zip down to the acropolis of Lindos, a ruin high above the sea. On the way the scooter broke down. It seemed the whole nearby village came out to help us (well, at least the males). Talking volubly, far beyond our tourist Greek, local people began pulling parts off the motor, such that I wondered whether the machine would ever be put back together. It was. It ran. They gave us a bag of blood oranges and waved farewell.
My friend was as generous with his knowledge, and as natural, as they with their mechanical virtuosity and their sack of citrus.