Kalamata

Posted on May 18, 2003 in Book of Days College Travels - Past

Note: This is thirtieth in a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about a place you know, but not well.

The seven of us — six confirmed in our minds as writers — sat around a glass-topped table that squeaked (because it had metal rather than wooden legs supporting it) rather than groaned with hor d’oeuvres which we’d brought to complement the carnivorous gluttonfest of chicken, salmon, and shrimp that our hostess, Donna, had prepared for us. In the middle of all this food was a bone white bowl of mixed olives. I selected out one of the long, dark puce ones with my thumb and forefinger and remarked:

“You know, I’ve been to the town where these come from.”

“Kalamata?” asked maple-faced Garnette, who knew her olives.

“Where’s that?” asked Donna.

“It’s in Greece. The southern part,” I said. “At the bottom of the peninsula that they call the Peloponnese.” I chewed off the briny meat and put the pit on my plate, adding to a growing litter of olive seeds which would never sprout.

Kalamata. I’d actually been through it twice on a bus filled with American college students. To get to Pylos — where Nestor had had his palace — and out of it again, you had to pass through this town. Kalamata was a hair-pin turn set inside whitewashed walls that have soot on them. It may have had cobbled streets or sidewalks.

Widows wearing dark dresses and veils — Christian women who held their eyes religiously to the ground if you ran into them walking somewhere — stared openly. So did men wearing the heavy grey sweaters made for those times when waves slapped them off their fishing boats for a swim in the sea.

Kalamata as I recall it was just those facades and those faces: no billboards. No produce vendors showing off their peppers and melons. No butchers carving chops off dead sheep that bled from their noses. No telephone poles. No yellow taxis. No olive trees even.

Maps show it to be a port, but I don’t remember the smell of the ocean. The fumes and turns of the bus unsettled my sinuses and my inner ear: Kalamata is an exotic name stapled to a nauseating recollection.

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Will I continue? See MORE.

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Sure, why not? Nurse Ratched? chari? Anyone else want to join me?

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