Point of View: Estia It Is, Then

After all these years I still don’t know the rules of anything really, and was somewhat tongue in cheek taken to task by a doubles opponent this past week for having served out of turn during a tiebreaker.

I pleaded ignorance, which is one of my strong suits. I’m always pleading ignorance and it’s served — ha-ha — me well by and large, though slowly, ever so slowly I am being led by the hand into the technological age, out of the darkness of ignorance into the light of clarity. Clarity is not one of my strong suits, though I do rather like claret. Maybe that explains it.

We’ll be drinking some soon, at Estia’s Little Kitchen, celebrating our 29th wedding anniversary. Can you believe it? Twenty-nine years. Time has been kind.

“Two happy lovers make one bread / a single moon drop in the grass. / Walking, they cast two shadows that flow together, / waking, they leave one sun empty in their bed. . . .”

That’s from Neruda, from one of his 100 love sonnets.

It sounds even better in Spanish: “Dos amantes dichosos hacen un solo pan, / una sola gota de luna en la hierba, / dejan andando dos sombras que se reunen, / dejan un solo sol vacio en una cama. . . .”

I sense too that there’s been a sacredness attending us, even when we are, as is frequently the case now, gripped by the mundane, the fundamentals if you will, as our dog Henry’s energy wanes.

Interestingly, when I asked the other night who invented us, Ella, our 5-year-old granddaughter, said, “The ground.”

Estia it is then, a restaurant named after the Greek goddess of the hearth whose sacred fire was tended at Delphi, the center of the earth, its navel, the omphalos.

“It is Hestia’s glory that, alone of the great Olympians, she never takes part in wars or disputes,” Robert Graves says in his “Greek Myths.”

Estia it is then — the perfect place to celebrate an anniversary.