September 17, 2021:
It's tempting to lay blame for that experience at the feet of Professor Falstaff. But that would be unfair. We were adults, albeit green at it. We were exploring our mores, our places in the universe. Professor Falstaff focused on exploring one of the more beautiful coeds, but his absence from the rest of our dynamics was not the underlying issue. At bottom, we didn't yet know ourselves. That really was the rub.
That, and, I think, alcohol. In retrospect I believe the conflict which ultimately estranged us was over the fact that she wanted to party, while I wanted to read. An artifact of ADHD, surely. My awkwardly slow reading. But we were students after all. That's what we were there for. Not the Disco Bar in the Plaka in the winter of late 1979.
And so I read. Braudel and Aeschylus and Joyce. Huddled at the Fotis House inside the thin sleeping bag a friend had loaned me, freezing cold in the worst winter of my life.