Galbraith Crump is a distinguished renaissance scholar, the author and editor of multiple volumes, a professor of English for many years at Kenyon College, and a mentor to many an aspiring adult. From 1983 to 1988 he was an editor of The Kenyon Review. Galbraith Crump’s wise and moving memoir A Slant of Light will be published later this year by XOXOX Press. This vignette is his. — DHL
This is a simple story about a salad, a salad long remembered, a salad that flavors my memory sometimes when I least expect it. That happens usually but not always on a sunny day, a day of some promise, a day when salad is somehow called for. Today was such a time. I had fixed myself a plate of spring greens, with tomatoes, olives, and seasoned with dried herbs, store bought olive oil, and juice squeezed from a plastic lemon. It was the best I could do on the moment and a poor substitute for the real thing. Still, as I sat at the kitchen table covered with a blue and white checked tablecloth made of some form of acrylic material, I began once again pondering what it was about that other salad that gave it such importance in the life of my wife and me. What follows is an attempt to answer that question once and for all.
To begin with the real thing was a Greek salad, horiatike salada, a country salad, served to us at a tiny family restaurant on the island of Kalymnos. It had all the requisites of a good country salad, a little garden lettuce, ripe tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, Kalamata olives, a thick slab of feta cheese, dressed in lemon juice and olive oil, sprinkled liberally with freshly chopped oregano. If you have never eaten such a salad in the sunshine on a Greek island, with the sea not a hundred yards away, I am sorry for you and would advise you to put that on your list of things important to do as soon as possible. But none of what I have just said explains why this particular salad has so haunted my gustatory imagination. We ??? my wife and I ??? ate many such salads on Kalymnos during the months we had the good fortune to live there many years ago. And we certainly had such salads on Crete or on the mainland, made such salads for ourselves hundreds times during our life together since. None of them could expel the memory of that salad and that day. So now I am determined to define what it was about that salad on that day that made it so memorable.
To begin with we had come from a swim in the brisk water of the bay that lay between Kalymnos and the tiny island of Telendos that had been separated from the main probably a million years ago by some shift in plates or minor upheaval of the earth. The taste of salt was still on our lips when we climbed the hill toward a little whitewashed house that proclaimed itself a restaurant by means of a hand-painted sign hung from an olive tree in the garden. It was late in the tourist season and Kalymnos did not attract many tourists in those days. It was still the island of sponge fishermen, those gallant men who dove deep in the waters of the Aegean or farther west in the Mediterranean off the coast of Libya, though the trade was in now decline and a few of the captains were considering some other form of livelihood. At any rate, late in the season as it was, we were greeted by a young woman who clearly was the wife of the farmer or fisherman who owned the place and thought to make a little extra by serving food. She was a slender woman with black hair, which pulled tight against her head glistened in the sunshine. She smoothed the plastic covering of the single table on the porch and smiled as we sat down. We ordered bread, salads, and one of the small bottle-capped retsinas typically served in the island tavernas.
We could see into the kitchen from where we sat and watched her preparing our salads. An old woman, her mother-in-law, no doubt, sat in the shadows, her hands clasped in the lap folds of her black dress. The two women talked softly among themselves and, at one point, the old women stood up and walked out of sight. Then we saw her in the back garden picking a handful of what looked like fresh herbs. These she brought back into the kitchen and lay before the young woman fixing our salads, who proceeded to chop them up with a broad bladed knife.
In a few minutes the young woman came out of the kitchen and set two large plates of salad before us. The old woman followed her holding out a basket of bread and a bottle of wine for the younger woman to place on our table, then turned and retreated to the shadows of the kitchen.
“Kalli orexis,” the young woman smiled as she smoothed her apron and watched us begin to eat, then also returned back into the kitchen.
That the salad was delicious you already know. What made it so unusually good I have yet to make clear and am still, as it were, to find out. For a start, we had watched our salads being prepared specially for us, perhaps the only patrons that day. We had watched the old woman go into the garden and pick oregano for our salad, watched her daughter-in-law chop it finely, releasing its aroma in the air. The tomatoes were still warm from the sun of the garden as they glistened on our plates. And the olive oil was made from the farm’s own trees. Country women would never buy olive oil in the market. When they travelled from island to island they always brought their own oil. We had seen them many times on shipboard carrying a heavy tin of homemade oil. We had at first been amused by that ritual until we learned by experience that the best oil was always homemade. And the oil on our salads was unquestionably made from the olives harvested from the trees on the hillside behind the porch where we sat under a pure blue sky. And the lemon juice? It, too, came from their own trees still hung with a few golden fruits and blended beautifully in the dressing with herb and oil. It made a creamy nectar that brought bees from the thyme filled fields to hover over our plates, intoxicated by the aromatic brew.
The restina had something to do with our pleasure in this lovely salad. And the bread, rough peasant bread baked that morning in the oven of the local baker just down the road, the crust sharp enough to cut your finger. And the weather. And the company. All conspired to make this salad on this day the most memorable salad we had ever eaten. We both agreed. And we thanked the young woman as profusely as our Greek would allow, paid the few dracma she asked in recompense for a wonderfully rich meal on her porch. As we were about to leave, the old woman shuffled toward us from the kitchen, grasped my wife’s hand in hers, pressing a sprig of thyme into her palm.
As we walked back down the hill to catch a bus that would take us over the mountain to our apartment in Pothia, the principal town of the island, my wife held the thyme up to my nose to sniff. Its aroma was a sweet dessert to what we both agreed was a perfect lunch under the island sun.
The salad was so good in fact that we resolved to return to the tiny restaurant the next weekend after another morning swim. And when the day came and we boarded the bus to take us back over the mountain, our bathing suits and towels in a string bag, we giggled in anticipation as we settled on the broken seat of the rickety bus for the short, bumpy ride. And I think we even hurried our swim, or maybe the wind had a bit of a chill that morning. Anyway, we soon changed out of bathing suits and started up the hillside toward the whitewashed house among the olive trees.
Alas, the hand painted sign no longer hung from the tree. There was no plastic covered table on the porch, and the doors to the kitchen were closed. Our disappointment was palpable. The restaurant had closed. Its season was over. And for us it who would soon be leaving the island, it was clear we would never have a salad there again. And perhaps we knew we would never again have another salad like it. Not in the whole wide world. We were quiet as we walked back down the hill on our way to the bus, the fragrant grasses scenting the breeze as they brushed against our legs.
Now I am alone, and as I sit at my computer trying to describe what it was that made such a difference those many years ago, I can almost smell again the fresh chopped oregano, taste the homemade oil and newly squeezed lemon juice, savor the tomatoes still warm from the garden. Almost. Yet, though I know without question I shall never have such a salad again, I will always savor the moment, the fleeting moment when time and place and company combined to create a perfect salad.