My Twenty-Four Year Relationship

Next month will mark twenty-four years that I've had a relationship with the Republic of Cyprus. My first visit was in 1987, at the end of September; before that Cyprus was a place in literature, a setting for Othello or the Greek Myths. I had no more knowledge of the island than of any other on the earth. But I came here with Andreas, my best friend, to meet his family and bring us closer since we had come to the realization that we would get married after we returned to the U.S. from our Peace Corps service in Kenya. Cyprus was another new place for me to learn about and through the eyes of someone I loved. Now, we are here for our annual trip when we bring our daughters, Chloe and Talia, to visit their grandmother and numerous relatives in and around Limassol, in the southern part of the island. We come in August, when the temperatures are high and the populace is in vacation mode with the coming of August 15th, the religious holiday celebrating the ascension of Mary to Heaven. Andreas' mother, Eleni, is usually fasting by the time we arrive, eating vegetables and legumes but no dairy or meats or leavened bread.

I have a love-hate relationship with the city of Limassol. I love it for visiting family and for its proximity to the coastline. I do not love the heat or humidity or the heavy traffic. I don't love the prevalence of strip bars and pornography or the constant building of high-rise apartments and hotels with no regard for the environment or for the residential neighborhoods that have existed here for so long. The influx of immigrants from numerous countries has changed the flavor of the city from a purely Cypriot Greek one to one that seems culturally un-congealed.

I love being here for the yearly experiences the island provides my daughters; they know all of their family from Illinois, Kansas, and New York to Tasmania and Cyprus. They are fortunate to have traveled here so much, and we are fortunate to be able to give this trip to them each year. Even so, the trip is sometimes hard on us as a family; at home we are not always together this much.

Taking my own Advice

I teach writing and urge people to write every day, yet I never follow that advice myself. I write sporadically and periodically but not daily. I read an article on changing habits and found myself nodding in agreement over all of the steps I should take to write every day, as a habit, but I have not taken that advice either. I don't think that I am a lazy person, but I am not an overly ambitious one. I sometimes wish that more ambition would find its way into my psyche. That I will become an ambitious goal-setter and do all of the things that I envision myself doing; that I will conquer my bad habits and replace them with good ones (I almost wrote healthy in place of good, but that would signal a topic change into the area of bodily health which I do not want to talk about now); that I will wake up and follow my plan for the day and see the end product in my mind while I achieve the small steps necessary to arrive at the destination, the goal. These things are not in me every day, though, and I muddle through my lists and days and weeks and months and then Wow! I'm another year older.

I teach writing and focus on process and how it all comes together into one huge life-changing revelation, but that is not what happens. I need to heed the words of writers past when they suggest that all that writing is is work and daily work if anything is going to ever come of it. I have to sit down and write every day or not. If not, then maybe I am not that writer I think I am. If so, then maybe something extraordinary will come of it, say a collection of poetry or short stories or maybe a novel or book of essays. Writing is a process, but the end-products are the only measures of what we have done. I have two poems published to show for four decades of writing. My craft is not perfected because it is not a daily habit. Changing habits is hard.

When I was a teenager, I thought that I should have to suffer for my craft. I should live in poverty or in fear of my life for a period of time, or I should struggle to live by my wits alone away from people. I should travel, but in a way in which I will need to work hard to survive. I have never done this, and I am still not the writer I envisioned nor do I have the writing life that I want. I continually refer to my next life as if I am so sure that there will be one where I will have another chance to become the writer I want to become (and here invites the "just do its" and the "go for its" which do not work on me). Or I may return as a giant millipede.