The virtual biking tour of places in the world that "I've lived or loved" brings me to Athens, repository of stories I've known since Mom sat me on her lap to read me D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths. As I grew, I checked that book out from libraries many times to re-read the stories and lose myself in the illustrations. See my appreciation of the book at The Olympic Universe (08/2021).
So at age eight I was primed to be moved by Star Trek's episode about the Greek gods, "Who Mourns for Adonis?" It hooks us with a unique image: a giant hand, disembodied and translucent, emerges from the stars and grips the Enterprise. It is Apollo, alone on a distant planet, who has waited millennia for earthlings to find him and resume worshipping him. Despite that lame gold lamé tunic, the Drama Club set and a table that some prop guy lifted from a highway rest stop, actor Michael Forest is charismatic. But Kirk and crew don't bow down. They find that Apollo's power has a technological source concealed in the temple and they destroy it. Apollo weeps and fades away.
I mourned the death of the gods and their magical world. The D'Aulaires book, too, ends with an illustration of a ruined temple and the matter-of-fact observation that all things come to an end. That wasn't a message I wanted to accept at age 7. (Losing Santa Claus had been hard enough.) At 65, I'm getting used to the idea, and my faith helps me -- sometimes with the aid of poetry -- to see spirit in the material world around me, the way the Greeks saw gods and demigods everywhere.
Since the last stop on my bike tour, I've gone 680 miles, 80 of them by swimming laps. [To see my virtual visit to Istanbul and other places, including Paris, London, and San Francisco, use the arrows above and below this posting.]
Miles YTD 517, average speed 14mph || 2nd World Tour Total 17,135 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: TBA
←← | ← || Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.
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