It's one of those quintessentially New England-y days out there, nothing but grey skies, whipping winds, and raindrops so big you'd swear they were tadpoles falling from the heavens. Weather like this laughs at your puny umbrella, an invention for calmer, more rational climes, that only seems to make you more wet when you use it here on the streets of Boston. Some people hate days like this, but I find them strangely comforting, as if the whole world has been swaddled by mists and misery so thick that the soaking cold howling ick is somehow at the same time warm and inviting. Maybe its the fact that we're forced to huddle indoors and seek such warmth, or that the foul weather narrows our horizons until simple acts we take for granted under brilliant cloudless skies become challenges in their own right. Get to the car, drive down the road, get out of the car, go buy coffee, pick up the newspaper - daily routines suddenly take on an epic quality, when Nature is coming after you with gale-force winds and rain that is just looking for an excuse to be hail, sleet, or snow.

This weekend my wife and I ventured back to Jersey to see my folks, and although the drive down was miserable (nasty weather is less comforting when you're hurtling through it at eighty miles an hour, I'll concede) and the return trip horribly slow and traffic-plagued (Hell is a place called Connecticut, I've learned), the time down the Garden State was worth the travel headaches. There was a Greek festival going on close to the family homestead, at St. Thomas' Greek Orthodox Church in Cherry Hill, a.k.a. "Little L.A.", on account of its utterly decentralized suburban sprawl, remarkable even for New Jersey. Aside from there being multiple lambs on spits and more pastries and Greek delicacies than you could shake a stick at, the church itself has these fantastic frescoes, painted in a El Greco-like style that's almost more secular than sacred, at least compared to the art that I've seen in other Greek churches. I have pictures, to which I'll link here once I've loaded them onto the site. It's the little artistic flourishes which make them so odd for Orthodox religious artwork, like a shepherd boy sitting on a rock and playing his pipes, while the infant Jesus (swaddled, no less) and his mother take shelter in cave. Or the depiction of the fish swimming in the River Jordan, where John the Baptist baptises an adult Christ. You almost don't believe what you're seeing. Wonderful. The wild thing about all of this is that I made the realization that I'd been to this festival before, as a high school student, more than fifteen years before, and had completely forgotten about it. I remember how alien the Greeks - the real, living Greeks - seemed to me, the devout Latinist, at the time. After reading all that mythology and history, after only knowing a world through conjugations, declensions, and memorized vocabulary lists, I was without warning thrust into the raw innards of Mediterranean civilization. The smell of oregano and garlic mingled with roasted meat, strange-smelling cheeses, olives laid out in a drab green-brown rainbow of varieties, honey-drenched pastries with long and unpronounceable names, with wailing, oh-so-not Top 40 music filling the air and the ubiquitous sound of a language that I couldn't make heads or tails of at the time, but would come to love with all my heart and soul in the distant future. Athens 1996 merchandise, I remember clearly, because at the time (the late 1980's), the Greek government was making a serious play then to host the Centennial Games, before Atlanta walked away with the prize and left Greece to defer its Olympic dreams until 2004. How strange how time loops the loop like that on you. Here I had returned, after all of these years, the smells now familiar to me, the language no longer a mystery, the Greeks themselves part of my family now. I'm even working on a project for the 2004 Olympics!

After the festival, my wife and I joined my brother and his friend Billy for a trip down to Atlantic City, our favorite haunt along the Jersey Shore, although still on our bad list after trapping us in the parking garage of Caesars for three or more hours during our last visit, over the July 4th weekend (I think Cher was in town, on her farewell tour, and the resultant traffic jams completely clogged the exits even long after the show had ended). I guess Sodom By The Sea felt bad for our troubles, for this time around my wife and I both doubled our money and then some, which we then spent on overpriced drinks and a handful of appetizers at the Hard Rock Cafe, which is always a disappointment. But the company was good, and it's always fun to spend money that isn't really yours, and besides, we caught a glimpse of a real live Cypriot (again with the Greeks!) boy band - One - who competed in the Eurovision 2002 musical competition and placed sixth or seventh, I believe. They must have had a concert at Trump's Taj Mahal, which to its credit books a lot of international pop stars, and stopped into the Hard Rock afterwards to bask in the adoration of their fans. Dave and Billy thought the idea of a Greek boy band was pretty funny, and so did we. Needless to say, we didn't ask for their autographs.

Finally, before we headed back to Boston at the end of the long weekend, we stopped off at the always-enticing Reading Terminal Market, which I've mentioned here before. The nominal reason for doing so was to pick up a custom-ordered sugar-free white chocolate brain (1/4 scale), from Chocolate By Mueller, who oddly enough specialize in anatomically-correct chocolate body parts, such as hearts, ears, noses, and brains. I won't go into the gory details of why I had ordered a chocolate brain, but I will say that the recipient was very pleased with the gift. So 'nuff said! While we were at the Market, however, we naturally indulged in myriad other delicacies, including a couple of hoagies from Rocco's, which are bar none the best damned sandwiches in the world. And I also managed to blow the rest of our Atlantic City winnings on spices from a wonderful spice shop that's also been there since forever. I'd run out of their curry powder a year ago, and it was definitely time to re-supply. I wish we had something comparable to the Reading Terminal Market here in Boston. Quincy Market and Fanueil Hall are just outdoor malls, and although Haymarket is an honest-to-goodness open air produce, fish, and meat market, it lacks the Amish and Mennonite lunch counters and bakeries, the offerings of Rocco's, the greasy cheese steaks, the stalls filled to toppling with used books (used books? at a market? The Reading Terminal Market has everything, and always has). It's always the first thing I miss, whenever I return to New England.

So a good weekend, all in all, and a nice escape from my daily worries as expressed here. But I guess it's back to the grind, eh?