Um… positivity?
… You’ve A2A’d the right guy, Diane? OK. I’m a misery guts, but I appreciate the challenge!
It was my honeymoon, last year. For her sins, I dragged my honey to my home town in Greece. I wanted her to know where I grew up.
I hadn’t been back in six years; and I hadn’t gotten to properly explore it on my previous visits back. I was trying to recapture what it was like thirty years ago, for my honey. But it kept slipping through my fingers. It seems so much smaller. Much more sullen—not just because it was in winter, but it was in the winter of Greece, resigned after years of economic crisis. The town has grown; but it seemed to me to have grown hollow.
I was dejected.
My honey instinctively knew the answer.
She took me to an eatery. Not a tourist place; a hole in the wall place, with an Asterix shopfront.
And top of the menu in the eatery is the homeliest, most unpretentious, most quotidian of dishes a Greek knows. Makaronia me kima. Spag bol. Steaming, with mincemeat, and grated white cheese.
Thank you, honey.
You can go back home, after all.