Travels to a Different Time: Travels of My Mother: 22June1971: Rhodos, Greece: Such Kind and Pleasant People: Two Can Live For $5 a Day!

Dear Barbara:

Rhodes is a heavenly place. It is so clean, the Greeks so kind and pleasant. The fruits and vegetables are lovely. The tomatoes and cucumbers are something else. We have a few melons and oranges in our room. On Monday we are going to the island of Symi for a week stay. It is a two-hour boat trip. After Symi we return to Rhodes then go to Crete and then to Athens for a flight to Spain.

The weather is hot and dry during the day and cool at nights. We need to wear a heavy wool sweater and blankets at night. The sea is many shades of blue and green. We have a constant companion Heidi a doctor from West Germany. We both love her and do everything together. She wants us to come to Berlin to visit her before we return to Montreal. No definite plans. Robert is such good company.

24June

Discovering more and more about this place. We are very brown and healthy. I can’t get over how nice and kind people are here. Everything here is for the tourist. That is their living. One can live here for $5 or less a day. Going for a swim before breakfast and we have breakfast on our balcony.

Love Mom

“Reggie The Egyptian Rescue Dog” : The Final Cut: Off To See Our Friend President Biden at Camp David! Chapter Forty Two (42)

Bless the power of Allah and modern medicine for Dillie the Westie’s prompt recovery and in a few days after snapping out of his coma he is back with us and sufficiently healthy to attend our weekly tea with Mr. Gordon Lightfoot and stinky Bosco. Dillie is a bit slow and has stitches on his head but our animal doctor, Doctor Murray, says he will soon be fit as a fiddle.

Mr. Antonio was not so lucky losing his life to the Bulgarian thugs. Forensic analysis concluded the fatal bullet was from a Gromyko Special Edition 9-millimetre pistol manufactured in the Soviet Union of yesteryear and exclusively used by the communist era Bulgarian secret police, the Special Service. The arrested Bulgarians were all former Special Service members. Igor, their leader, the one who I sunk my teeth into, takes every opportunity to tell the world when he catches me he will skin me alive. JUST LET HIM TRY!

Ollie is fine although preliminary indications are he suffered some hearing loss from the potato masher explosion.

The Mookster is in tip top shape.

Kit Kat is staying with the Portuguese Consul General in Toronto.

Penny is in Beamsville awaiting delivery of a new Oodlecopter from Ferrari to replace the wrecked copter.

Dunny Funkheiser, Ollie’s master, unfortunately lost an arm in the explosion. A reattachment specialist thought it was fruitless to attempt the surgery. Once the wound heals Bob is purchasing a Douglas Bader 2000 special mechanical arm for Dunny. Being a man with a sense of humor Dunny quips he is on his way to being the six-million-dollar man.

Our friend Joe…ooops, President Biden, has invited us to Camp David for a week where a navy veterinarian will give Dillie powerful restorative medicinal cocktails and as we are going to a camp are we going camping?

Dillie, Fay, Bob and The Mookster and yours truly board our private jet to Dulles Airport in Washington where the Presidential helicopter whisks us to Camp David in Maryland. It is no campground but a luxury retreat. We are walked to our suite once occupied by Anwar Sadat, an assassinated President of Egypt!

We are advised there will be a special dinner with an award given to Dillie and I for the fight against international terrorism and crime. The Mookster is being debriefed by the CIA about what he has gleaned from his intelligence contacts concerning my kidnapping. That dog knows diplomacy for sure and has contacts the CIA could only dream of.

Bob and Fay gussy up and the Navy veterinarians bathe Dillie the Westie and I. We are smelling so good. Dillie gets his daily Maryland booster vitamin shot. A golf cart comes and picks us up transporting us to the main lodge for dinner with President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Kamala sounds Egyptian! But no she is an American. President Biden is in the room and his German Shepherds try and assert their power over me but my Rat Pack growl and Dillie’s wickedly stern glare sends them cringing. NEVER MESS WITH AN EYGYTIAN STREET DOG!

Joe picks me up and gives me a hug and jokes where was I when Trump tried to overrun the Capitol Building! Then Vice President Kamala Harris asks me to jump up on her lap where I stay while the adults have some Schramsberg California bubbly wine.

We dogs have a dinner of Maryland organic chicken with mashed potatoes from the garden of the wife of President Biden called Jill. The humans have oysters, filet of sole and some dessert called Baked Alaska. Joe has a chuckle saying that no Alaskans were harmed in the making of the dessert! There is coffee and Bob and Joe have a cigar with a glass of Pappy van Winkle American Bourbon.

We are all assembled for a presentation where I will receive a canine Presidential Medal of Honour for Bravery and International Furtherance of Peace. Dillie receives a Congressional Medal of Honour for Bravery. We have great pictures of the presentation which sit on our fireplace mantle in our Toronto home.

The Mookster, Penny, Ollie and Kit Kat receive the highest award for canine bravery in the United States, The Skilos Medal of Courage. Penny, Ollie and Kit Kat were hooked up to the presentation by video.

We are all invited to visit Kamala and her two stepchildren Cole and Emma for lunch the following day. Such nice children and we watch “Reggie the Egyptian Rescue Dog” while Dillie and I sit on the laps of Cole and Emma and doze off. Only so many times we can watch the film!

The Mookster is at a special ceremony at the White House for the American Association of Animal Rescue Societies hosted by Dr. Jill Biden.

The humans have a barbeque after the film and more rice and crumbled burgers and green beans for us. We are all driven back to Camp David. The Canadian newspapers say Dillie the Westie and Reggie have done so much for Canadian American relations? What could that be?

The rest of the week flies by and we go for long walks with Joe and Jill and eat like kings. We are all such good friends with President Biden and Vice-President Harris. Joe’s German Sheppard’s walk behind us fearing our lack of fear of them. The vitamin injections have revitalized Dillie and he jokes he is feeling like a pup!

Joe says he will be visiting Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau in October in Ottawa and after that would like to stay with us in Toronto for a couple of days. This is unprecedented with an American President staying with private Canadian citizens. We look forward to a visit and Bob says this will be a Canadian Thanksgiving to remember. He has plans that will make Joe and Jill Happy.

We fly back to Toronto and the media mobs us. Dillie the Westie and Reggie have suddenly become international diplomats. The Mookster is whisked to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation studios for a special feature on the Bulgarian kidnapping caper.

Bob says to us when we return home that we all need to press the stop button and relax for two months. This sounds good to us dogs! I look forward to daily long walks and lots of cold water and chicken kibble. And to sleep in without having to rush here and there. However, we have received an invitation to a show hosted by Dr. Phil that Disney insists we attend. Bob says yes but after that we relax and wait for the visit by President Biden and his wife Jill.

Travels to a Different Time: Travels of My Mother: 9July1971: Rhodes, Greece: Being in Greece is Like Being in Another World and I Love It!

Dear Andy:

We returned from Symi yesterday and tomorrow we leave for Karpathos which is seven hours by ship.

I am sitting in a restaurant at the market square waiting for Robert. It is very hot here and thank goodness for a continual breeze. The market is full of fruit and Robert can eat his fill of green grapes. The peaches are huge and delicious. Plenty of oranges and lemons. All fruit in the market is local.

If you like to swing Greece is not the place unless you go to a hotel frequented by Americans but then you lose the felling of being in a different country. I love it here as you are in a different world but there are too many tourists in Rhodes and that is NO GOOD.

Love Mum

Travels to a Different Time: Travels of My Mother: 16July1971: Othos, Karpathos, Greece: At a Village Party!

Dear Barb:

You would never believe the setting. I am sitting at an outdoor café with just two tables with a fat Greek lady clothed in head to toe in black with a black scarf all around her head and neck.

We were invited by a lady, Poppy, to visit her in a small village in Karpathos. We arrived before she was home so we sat in the village coffee shop. She arrived and we got into a bus and went to a peculiar place to swim. The women are on one side of the harbour and the men on another. The older women are behind the rocks some in their bathing suits and some in their dresses. It is another world and I love it.

Poppy’s husband then came with two donut buns hard as a brick. We then took the bus to her home and it a terrifying ride if you look down to a sheer drop. I just prayed and we made it.

We went to a Greek party in the village with many young people. The mothers and girls were sitting in one room and the men in another room. I think Greek men must think American and Greek girls are so bad. There are few good-looking men but they all have short, tidy and neat hair and many are university students.

I can’t stay in the water too long here as I have a terrible burn on my upper legs. It really hurts. With the dry heat the back has been perfect so it will be Greece or Spain for me in my old age. But the bread here is making me fatter. You really have to watch them here at restaurants as they know I am a tourist they will overcharge me and they must think I am a millionaire.

Love Mum

“Reggie the Egyptian Rescue Dog”: The Final Cut: The Second Liberation of Reggie! The Power of the Rat Pack Secret Growl and ALLAH Bestowed on Dillie! Chapter Forty One (41)

My first liberation was facilitated by a Toronto canine rescue organization Snookie’s Rescue Society rescuing me from the bad streets of Cairo into the happier and more loving streets of Hog Town which I know now is the nickname for Toronto. As a dog I love pea meal bacon a real St. Lawrence Market specialty! Meat for a dog what can I say! LOVE IT!

I wake up in a cage in a dark room that stinks of vodka, cigarettes, and dirt. Living with Fay, Bob and Dillie the smell of dirt is something I can only recall from Cairo. But the dirt in this room smells like evil dirt. The men are speaking a language I do not understand but it is not Arabic. They tell me in broken English I am dirty dog but I am worth millions to them. They kick my cage and spit at me and that does not frighten me. If I could escape my cage and attack them, they WOULD BE FRIGHTENED OF ME! Never mess with an Egyptian street dog! NEVER EVER!

They have a pile of guns and grenades on a table and a bank of computers. I hear them speaking to each other in broken English about a “ransom note”. It means they will return me upon receipt of $50,000,000 deposited into a Panamanian secret bank account. If the funds are not deposited as directed in 48 hours my head will be sent to Bob and Fay. These swine snicker they’ll kill me anyways.

I am hungry and thirsty and they feed me leftover takeout food of hamburgers and fries. They give me water in a dirty bowl. I must go pee and they never take me out so I can do my business. What a bunch of low life scoundrels I say as I try and aim my pee out the cage door. These low lives are soaked with vodka and greed so they will not smell my urine.

Fay receives the ransom note and a team of Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI operative President Biden has sent carefully read it. With the help of the Mossad (The Israeli Secret Police) and the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington the location of the kidnapper’s computers is revealed supposedly protected by a Russian anti-detection programme that the Mossad had cracked two weeks ago. The computers are traced to a Russian Gun Club building on a street called Murray Ross in North Toronto. Little did these Bulgarian criminals know they were going to get their rear ends kicked in.

Fay responds to the ransom note saying it will take her a bit more than 48 hours to raise the $50,000,000 ransom.

The FBI, CIA, RCMP and Mossad would dearly like to get these Bulgarian thugs in custody. They have been blackmailing, extorting, kidnapping and money laundering globally. They want these criminals in jails very badly as they have ruined lives and done so many illegal things. The American, Canadian and Israelis will be assembling an attack force of commandos that “simply can’t fail”.

Their leader Igor cracks open yet another bottle of vodka and his gang drink it like it is water. They fall asleep in a drunken stupor confident the money will be in their bank account very soon.

In the early morning the door to the Russian Gun Club is battered down and the sleeping and half-drunk Bulgarians are captured without a shot fired. A RCMP officer opens the door to my cage saying, “Reggie you are free”. I am liberated again and before I go I sink my teeth very deep into Igor’s ankle and he screams and says words in Bulgarian that are unprintable! I am picked up and taken to Fay who sits in an armoured car outside. I am smothered in hugs by Fay. Dr. Murray my animal doctor is there and says after a physical examination I am a bit dehydrated but otherwise “Fit as a fiddle”. I need to poop real bad!

We go home. Rapper Drake had opened his private gym to all the attack force’s representatives to establish a command centre. As Fay and I enter the command centre there are cheers. Mr. Gordon Lightfoot and Bosco are there. Drake orders a middle eastern feast from Paramount restaurants via Skip the Dishes and the teams converge for a celebratory dinner and then depart.

I hear that Igor, the naughty Bulgarian, required twenty stitches to close the gash from my bite. Didn’t I tell you NEVER MESS WITH EGYPTIAN STREET DOGS! I hear that Bob will be coming home from hospital soon but Dillie the Westie is still battling for his life. We will go and visit him tomorrow after we visit Bob. I have a bath to clean the stench of captivity off me and have a restful repose.

We visit Bob at the human hospital and he gives me a big hug and I give him a few kisses and nibble his ear at the same time which means he remains the leader of our pack! Our next visit is to the brave Dillie the Westie who was injured badly with a cracked skull and is fighting for his life. As far as I am concerned, I will use the last trick in my book. It is the “custom growl” Karim, Dillie and I used when we were the Rat Pack before Karim went to The Land Beyond. I approach Dillie The Westie, the brave Scottish warrior dog and put my face close to his ear and give him the Rat Pack growl. Nothing happens. I close my eyes and pray to Allah for a miracle. I growl again and Dillie opens his eyes and gives a weak moan! He is out of a coma! THANK YOU, ALLAH! The animal doctors can’t understand what happened but I know that a power greater than any dog or man has lent us a helping hand. Call him Allah, God or Buddha if you wish but whatever this power is it this there if you honour it and express gratitude for its results.

RKS 2024 Wine: Deep Purple “Smoke on the Water”

Wildfires rage on in Chile today. The urban area most affected would seem to be Viña del Mar a coastal resort city on the Pacific northwest of Valparaiso. Over 100 people have perished and hundreds are missing. It is too early to determine damage to viticulture but one should remember while fire is a threat to vines one must additionally fret about smoke giving the juice a smoky flavour hence making it a hard sell as the final product, wine.

Keeping our fingers crossed for the 2024 vintage we try a Leyda Pinot Noir from Valle de Leyda.

Aroma: Trying to veer away from generalizations many Chilean Pinot Noirs have a full bodied if not aggressive edge to them. This is not to detract from their quality as their nature may simply reflect winemaking styles and terroir or my limited Chilean Pinot Noir experience.

In this case this Pinot Noir is no seductive softie or a 99-pound ballerina tip toeing around the stage. Whilst many Pinot Noirs have aromas infused with light notes of raspberry and strawberry this one expresses no such fruit but more of a black cherry and blackberry character with some inference of cherry Jello. But if you decant this Pinot Noir for at least half an hour a bit of raspberry and chocolate peer up at you from the glass.

Palate: Full bodied and a bit brackish. Minimal tannins with disciplined acidity. Short finish lacking serious fruit impact.

Personality: I am wine alright but I am an elusive member of the Pinot Noir family. I am somewhat outside the boundary and at $18 please give a chance! Please!

Cellarbility: Drink by the end of 2024.

Food Match: Beef Bourguignon.

Price: $18. CDN (Ontario).

RKS 2024 Wine Rating: 85/100. Joaquín Hidalgo 93.

(Leyda 2022 Las Brisas Pinot Noir, D.O. Valle de Leyda, VPST, Santiago, Chile, 750 mL, 13.5%).

RKS Literature: France in 1775 (Dickens)

“France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down the hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards.”

“A Tale of Two Cities”: Charles Dickens, 1859

RKS Literature: Every Human Being a Profound Secret (Dickens)

“A wonderful fact to reflect on, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret: that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret: that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there is in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!”

“A Tale of Two Cities”, Charles Dickens, 1859

Travels to a Different Time: Travels of My Mother: 28June1971: Panormitis, Symi, Greece: Staying with The Pilgrims in a Monastery: Father Gabriel’s Miracle

Dear Barbara:

You and your roommates would go out of your head as Rhodes is bursting with sailors. I could have a million (at least). We met Harry and Shorty two sailors and on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Roosevelt we received a private tour and saw a side of the ship the regular visiting public will never see. They took us to the U.S.O. in town and later supper.

We leave for Symi in a half an hour. I hate packing as I can never get it all in and end up with a plastic bag carrying what I could not stuff in. We are travelling deck class and it is very cheap. The way to go. We can’t go in the dining room but no big deal as the trip is only two hours. Our hotel for 11 nights was $43. The hotel owner is driving us to the docks. Must leave.

July 2

We are on Symi in a tiny village Panormitis living in a monastery. Yep you read right. It has 200 rooms. We have a very simple room with 4 beds, 2 chairs and two-night tables. One light bulb hanging from the ceiling, A sink, a toilet and a hot plate. The head monk Father Gabriel is charming and handsome and my age. We bought some eggs and had them soft boiled like home. Robert left at 6 a.m. to go octopus fishing with a fisherman. It is noon and he is still out on the water He will be starved.

Our room is 70 cents a night. There is no other place to stay. There is a bakery, small grocery store and one small restaurant. It is so beautiful here. If you could only see what we have seen on this trip. Imagine staying in a monastery! To think such things still exist it is truly fantastic. The pilgrims are mostly widows who have lost loved ones at sea. Father Gabriel told us his story. During the war he was on a boat that a German U Boat torpedoed. Everyone on board died including his mother. He promised God that if he made it to shore he would give his life to God and so that is why he is here.

Love Mum

RKS Literature: L.A. Gringo Blames the Mexicans

“It was the Mexicans who’d done this. Illegals. Goons with their hats turned backwards on their heads. Sneaking across the border, ruining the schools, gutting property values and freeloading on welfare, and if that wasn’t enough, now they were burning everybody else too. They were like the barbarians outside the gates of Rome, only they were already inside, polluting the creek, and crapping in the woods, threatening people and spraying graffiti all over everything, and where was it going to end? “

“The Tortilla Curtain”, T.C. Boyle, Penguin 1996