Beautiful Stranger

Traveling alone...

I stopped for dinner at the Cafe Vitro just off the Plaka. I am used to eating alone and I'm comfortable with a quiet dinner enjoying local food and observing my fellow patrons. The wine and the lamb are wonderful!

As I sit drinking my wine, I notice a girl in the next booth...She is very Greek and very beautiful! This girl still has the flower of youth on her (she must be about 20)...I think about what is beautiful. What is it that the artists are trying to capture? I have been looking at sculpture that is 2500 years old that tries to capture the very beauty that sits before me. How impossible is their task! As much as I enjoy a good painting or sculpture, nothing can truly capture the wonder that is a beautiful woman!

She is with another girl and a young man. They speak to each other in English. The two girls are flirting with the young man and their conversation is typical of the conversations of young people everywhere, who are trying to impress each other. It is an empty discussion and I quickly disconnect from it. I have found truth in many places...in the company of good friends...in stimulating conversation...in the woods...in my work. The girl before me offers none of these truths. I will never know this girl and will never see her after I've left the restaurant...but there is a truth in her beauty.

As we eat and as they talk, she catches my eye and smiles at me. There are times during the meal when she raises her voice and I realize that she is talking to me (as well as to her friends). It feels wonderful to realize that she finds me attractive...that she has noticed that I find her beautiful and that she appreciates this. This is but a brief moment in a long life. I have seen beautiful women (and men) everywhere. I don't know these people and I am not responding to their souls, but their beauty speaks to me. Beauty is as much a truth as anything else and it is truth that I seek.

How beautiful must be that ultimate truth!!! If the classical art of Greece is so pale an imitation of the beauty of a young woman, how modest a glimpse is her beauty of the beauty that is God! Maybe that's why beauty captures me...it is a glimpse of that beautiful light that lives deep within me. I look forward to that ultimate beauty. Until then, I will enjoy the glimpse that I get from the pretty girl that shares a meal in some restaurant along my path home.

Best! Norm.