The Summons

"So, are you coming to Greece with us?" my friend Lisa asked over lunch in February.

Greece? A few doubletakes later, I found myself sitting crosslegged on the floor of a lecture room at Pacifica with tears in my eyes, shakily holding a flyer for Greece with Chris Downing. Chris Downing, professor of Greek and Roman myth, author of a more than a dozen books including The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine. Chris Downing, who had taught with Z. Budapest and Carol Christ. A crone with a sparkle in her eye and a passion for literature and the soul, who at 74 thinks nothing of walking thirteen miles a day. Her suggested reading list included Mary Renault and Euripides and Aristopanes.

The itinerary was a hit parade of many of the places I've studied or helped catalog for the Perseus library: Athens, Eleusis, Delphi, Mycenae, Epidauros, Delos, Naxos, and...last but not least, Santorini. Thera, its proper name. A speck on the map in the middle of the Aegean Sea. It was that name that made me sit on the floor and shake.