Well-worn and Better for the Wrinkles

The halls were cluttered with icons of Jesus, Italian purses, Greek men and women speaking their mother tongue. Incense grabbed our noses. We made our way through the church classrooms turned shops, buying an icon of Jesus ourselves--one of his torso growing out of a vine, spreading it's branches across the gold background to the twelve apostles. As we were leaving a young girl came in with her mother, begging for a censer to swing around her house. She had seen the hanging candle holders in the shop. It was easy to mistake them.

We moved through the fellowship hall where some elderly men and women sold baked goods--Greek pastries, cookies, and baklava. Up the stairs and winding ramp was a wall of glass doors with crosses fixed upon them and Candles burning. We had heard there was a large mosaic of the Messiah on the ceiling. Tile by little tile, he stretched from one edge of the dome to the other.

Earlier we had eaten a Greek combination plate: chicken, rice, seasoned pork, pastitsio, spinach-filled philo pastries. Before leaving we took the opportunity to eat desserts. Baklava Sundays and cinnamon honey donuts. I heard the band leader yell into the microphone, "Here we go!" and the band increased the tempo beat by beat by beat. We imagined Greek weddings, breaking plates and yelling 'opa', dancing around in circles holding hands. We considered how much of the world we are missing and how would we rectify that.

On the shuttle back to the parking lot, a woman and her husband were the last on the bus. She made eye contact with a woman across from her, and life flashed in her eyes, a quick smile. Annabelle said she looked cultured, well-worn. As if she had seen the corners of the earth, as if she had shaken the hands of people in the countryside of everywhere.

"Well-worn in a good way," I clarified.
"Yes, definitely,"

We thought about the life she might have led and the lives we would like to. I wondered at how I would arrive at being well-worn myself, what I would have to see and where I would have to go. For my greatest fear is this: a life that has been wasted.

posted by Cameron Lawrence at 22:02