Visit To Poros

I am beginning to understand the young college woman [my son] Joey and I met in Poros. She has haunted my imagination. She was there and could not leave nor could she (did she wish to) learn the language. She was protected, accepted, and safe. The Porosians gibed her for not making more of an effort to learn Porosian Greek and for wishing to sleep with her door open to relieve the heat at night.

She was a lovely girl and sat all day at the coffee house where George, the proprietor and her boyfriend, picked up some English from her. She said she wanted to return--rather, felt impelled to return--to Connecticut, home and college the next autumn, but for now was content to sit on Poros.

I remember her lovely long black hair, beautiful eyes, and chubby figure. So young, so wise, and perhaps, so weary. She'd come to Poros in the spring--at Easter time when a solitary re-colored egg is given one and all to commemorate grandly the Resurrection, and she had never left.

Two or three ferry boats came by daily; otherwise, nothing happened on Poros, sun and sea eternally. I often wonder if she ever left and how she feels if she did not--and how, if she did. Surely, she came in search of a family, this child from Upper Exurbia, New England, and she found a ready one. But she was silent, except to speak with American and French tourists, only to guide them to rooms or restaurants.

George spoke "hallow" and "Go right on block. Ask for manager." He was proud of his English, very Greek, dark, black-eyed, and lean. He had a not-disgruntled, but rather sinewy, stern quality about him. He disliked and at the same time depended upon the seasonal tourist trade. A young man bred of Poros. Closed-in, trying hard to keep out the world that had found his island, loving by night a lovely dark-haired American girl, keeping her in check by day, at once proud of and a little afraid of this stranger from across the sea, sharing all there is without many words.

                                                                             ---Velma Jean Robinson Reeb

Reeb, a former resident of Manhattan's Upper West Side, now resides in Portland, Oregon. For a brief time she and her son Joey lived in Greece.


                                                         
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Today is Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. As you may know, in 1941, Japanese war planes bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, sinking ships and killing and injuring many American sailors. This led to the United States entering World War II.