About ten minutes into the trip down the Apollo coast to Cape Sounion, an old man boarded the bus and asked if he could have the seat next to mine. I smiled at him and moved my bags onto my lap.
“Vous etes francaise?” he asked me.
“No, ” I replied in French. “I’m American, but I speak a little French.”
He spoke to me in French for a few minutes before smoothly switching to English. The old man was at least 6’4″ and appeared to be in his early 70′s. He had a welcoming face – the kind of face that always smiles when it speaks to you. His whole being was welcoming, inviting.
We talked. He was 87 years old with perfect posture and a full head of hair. We talked about Italy – he spoke Italian as well. In the course of a few minutes he spoke four languages with me.
I asked him if he knew any other languages.
“Oh yes,” he said. “I speak Swahili and Arabic. I can read and write Arabic as well”
I asked him how he came to know so many languages.
He liked to travel, he said, and had spent some years living in the Middle East and the Belgian Congo.
“I was a big game hunter and photographer, so Africa was ideal for me.”
“What kind of work did you do that allowed you to travel so much?”
He paused for a long while, then tapped his index finger against his temple. “I forget sometimes,” he said, trying to convince me that he was actually old.
After a ten minute pause, he suddenly spoke, “Bookkeeper. I was a bookkeeper.”
I looked at him.
“It was an international company, you know, so I was able to travel quite a bit.”
I gave him what may have been a wry smile.
Bookkeeper.
He spoke some more: He’d had a triple bypass six years ago and his doctor had forbidden him from diving below five meters anymore – he could still swim as long as he wanted to. He used his PC to keep track of all his medical records so he wouldn’t forget. He loved the sea. He was in the Greek Navy during WWII and had traveled around Great Britain. He wanted to learn Chinese but thought that he might be too old now. What kind of camera was I using? Was I married?
We made our way through Attica.
His stop came up, the town of Avonissos near Sounio. He pointed out his house to me as the bus driver pulled to a stop. Then the old man shook my hand, wished me a pleasant stay in Greece and got off the bus.
There goes another one of the ancients, raising the standard for all of us, I thought as he made his way off the bus.
As the bus pulled away, the old man looked up with his smiling face and waved goodbye to me through the window.
I wished that I could have cloned myself, and that my cloned self could have gotten off the bus with the old man and spent the next year sitting at his feet, listening to his stories.
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