Following the Big Blond

During two weeks I spent in Greece, the English-language newspaper Kathimerini published stories on problems dealing with traffic, immigration, school dropouts and crime.

When I returned to L.A. just in time to become trapped in the mother of all traffic jams on the 405, our news was filled with stories on traffic, immigration, education and crime.

Although they were not exactly the same, they were similar enough to lead me to the conclusion that there is no place to hide anymore. Grief follows like birds in flight, back and forth from new empires to old, from old to new.

I will admit, however, that the big crime story in Athens was more whimsical in its way than ours. It involved a shooting that concluded an argument over a guest’s insistence at reciting a couplet at a wedding. For those uneducated in the rhyming arts, a couplet is two successive lines of poetry.

Our crime story had to do with a series of murders in South-Central neighborhoods. They’ve been going on for a while and are probably gang-related, not over anything as erudite as a couplet, but over nothing at all.

Similar to L.A., traffic in Athens is a major story in itself, a nightmare of cars, trucks, trolley buses and tour buses all trying to share streets built for chariots. Euclid would have been baffled by the geometry of fitting hundreds of vehicles into a space meant for six.

Traffic laws? “Yes, we have them,” a cab driver assured me, “but we consider them only suggestions.”

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We were in Greece to attend the wedding of a lovely young friend, Elizabeth Johnson. She married Erik Williams on a veranda on Santorini Island as a flaming sun was setting over the Aegean Sea, streaking the sky with glowing pastels.

Tiny lights blinked on all over the dark slopes of the volcanic island, turning the deepening silhouettes of the smaller, surrounding islands into one luminous magic kingdom. Classical music played in the background.

If you aren’t already in love when you get there, you’re in love by the time you leave. I mean the place sizzled with romance. Even my wife, Cinelli, remarked that I seemed somehow more, well, overheated than usual.

But getting back to my original premise, L.A. is never very far away no matter where you are. The cab driver who said that traffic lights in Athens were only suggestions has a girlfriend in Marina del Rey, whom he sees infrequently.

His name is Spiros, I think, or maybe Manolis. He said to say hello to Helena. So hello, Helena, from Spiros or Manolis.

I learned to say kalimera, which in Greek means good day, although I occasionally confused it with calamari. When I greeted the deputy mayor on Santorini, who married Liz and Erik, he looked at me quizzically but said nothing. Cinelli whispered, “You just called the deputy mayor a squid.”

Big deal. I’ve never met a mayor who wasn’t a squid in one way or another anyhow.

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We stayed in a five-star hotel on Santorini called Vedema. A series of gleaming white buildings that face the sea, it rounds out the dream of a fantasy island and makes you forget that too soon the sweet dream will end and L.A. will begin.

But one doesn’t journey 10,000 miles to an area deep in history to relax and have fun. One bears the indecency of more than 11 hours on a plane to climb mountains and look at old things.

I don’t mean to sound disdainful, but touring is hard work. In terms of wonders, however, it is simply not possible to remain unmoved in the shadow of the ancient Acropolis, standing like pillars of time in the pale Athenian sunlight.

Nor can one fail to hear whispers from the past among ruins that predate the Christian era by 3,000 years and make the birth of the new world seem like only a tick on time’s clock.

But if I hear a tour guide tell me to hurry along one more time, I’m liable to bust her one in the Parthenon. Eva was the worst offender. She spoke English in a thick accent and hounded us to move along, move along. “I can’t understand her and I don’t like her,” I heard one man say. He was a dance instructor from San Diego, a little pot-bellied guy who scowled. When he danced, as he did once, his belly jiggled.

“Follow the big blond,” Eva kept saying. The big blond was in a tour group just ahead of ours. I followed her down to the temple of Hera but lost her on the sacred route to Apollo.

I made it back anyhow, led by a blond of my own, and here I am prowling around, looking for trouble. So far from Santorini and so close to Spring Street.

Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.