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

“Reggie The Egyptian Rescue Dog” : The Final Cut: A Grisly Blast: Reggie is Kidnapped! John Travolta Asks Me for a Favour! Chapter Forty (40)

Tuckered out from our Stockholm flight our private jet touches down at Toronto’s Pearson Airport. Our pilot comes to say good-bye to us as we take the stairs off the airplane. You wouldn’t believe this but it was John Travolta. He has inside contacts at Disney and is lobbying to be my voice in any Reggie sequel and asked me to keep him in mind for casting calls! We clear customs and Mr. Antonio is waiting for us in his Mercedes van. Sweet home and a bowl of clean and cold Canadian water with a simple chicken kibble and of course the occasional treats we find in our bowls. Dillie and I love watermelon particularly sweet yellow Ontario watermelon. Of course, we love cheese and the morning is not simply a morning without a piece of toast or a bit of bagel…. sesame of course. I can’t stand those Toronto Bagels where bread is made in circles and called bagels. I think of food too much but I am a dog after all!

Do you remember that sense of dread I had in Stockholm? It sits in my stomach as we enter our van to take us home. Penny has her mistress waiting for her and they head home to Beamsville. Kit Kat has been picked up by the Portuguese Consul General to Toronto. Dunny Funkheiser, Ollie’s master is there to pick up Ollie. Ollie is very upset with something. He tells me he smells danger.

We drive on the 401 Highway with Dunny and Ollie behind us and take the Bayview exit to our Bridle Path home. Why is that black Zil with tinted windows following us? As we pass by the Edwards Botanical Gardens and are a few minutes away from our home the Zil cuts us off and three heavily armed men approach the limo and shoot Mr. Antinio in the head before can grab his Dirty Harry Special Edition 357 Magnum. There is blood all over the seats. Dillie the Westie and I are not frightened. We have no guns but we have Scottish and Egyptian bravery in our blood. It is do or die time! Pay the price of our strength and bravery you low life’s. We’ll rip you to shreds!

The Russian 1985 Zil used in Reggie’s kidnapping; Photo Courtesy of the Bulgarian Extortionists Daily

The door of our van opens and Dillie and I take our victims. I jump out and lunge at the neck of one of the attackers. He collapses in a pool of blood. Dillie can’t jump like me so he attacks biting the ankle (his speciality) of another thug who falls screaming in pain but gets up and smashes Dillie the Westie in the head with the butt of his Browning pistol. Ollie jumps in the fray and is clubbed on his flank and is rolling on the ground howling in pain. Bob is in a rage and emitting a horrific scream runs toward the evil man who clubbed Dillie. Bob is shot in the shoulder and spins to the ground. Fay has fainted. One thug throws a Potato Masher and all I see is orange and the smell of burning human flesh. I look over briefly before passing out and see Dunny unconscious on the road his arm hanging by a yellow piece of gristle. Oh Allah, God or Jesus please help. PLEASE HELP REGGIE, DILLLIE, Ollie and Dunny! HELP BOB AND FAY. A wet rag with some horrible smelling chemical is put over my snout and I remember no more.

Dillie is in the best animal hospital in Toronto with a cracked skull and an inflamed brain. He has a 50% chance of living. Bob is in hospital having lost a lot of blood but he will survive. Fay is in a state of shock and does not know where she is. She is heavily sedated and for the time being in a calmer world.

This is an international incident and it is no surprise the “The Brothers of the Correct and Only Islam”claim responsibility demanding a $50,000,000 ransom be paid for my release. There is no religious overtones to the demands as these Bulgarian mobsters simply want money. But do they know who they are dealing with!

These cowards. If I could only escape from the cage they imprisoned me in I would show them NEVER MESS WITH A CAIRO STREET DOG!

Our friend in Washington Joe, oops, President Biden, phoned Bob in the hospital and he is so very angry that three brave dogs have been put in peril and Mr. Antonio murdered. His Federal Bureau of Investigation know much about these Bulgarian extortionists and criminals who launder money for radical fundamentalists in Pakistan. President Biden will send a top FBI operative with a very thick file to help the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in their “recovery operation”. The Pope in the Vatican has said a special mass for Dillie the Westie and me. Our friends Drake and Mr. Gordon Lightfoot have offered whatever help they can give. Bosco and Mr. Gordon Lightfoot are at a bedside vigil for dearest Dylan. Drake is so upset upon hearing of the carnage he cancels a show in Rochester and flies back to Toronto.

Is this all my fault? Would it have been better if that Rottenwhiler had killed me in Cairo? Pardon me for my foul language but these Bulgarian criminals are going to get their ass kicked in.

Travels to a Different Time: Travels of My Mother: 28June1971: Rhodos, Greece: The Town is Lousy with U.S. Sailors

Dear Andrew:

We are sitting in an outdoor café waiting for some service for breakfast. It is 9:30 now and they do not open for dinner until 10. They serve orange juice in a can here. And always buns in the morning. They sure eat lots of bread here. Loads of it at every meal.

Yesterday we visited the U.S.S. Roosevelt and went down to the kitchen. They were baking hundreds of Chelsea Buns. We had them right from the oven with the first milk we have had in weeks. The town is lousy with American sailors. I think every Greek girl here in Rhodes found a boyfriend this week, They leave on July 5th which is day we are planning to return from Symi for which we leave tomorrow. If it is nice and there are things to do we will probably stay for a week. They fish for sponges at Symi. I haven’t a clue how they get them. We are travelling deck class on the ship there. That is the way kids go and they sleep on the deck in their sleeping bags. I don’t even know if they are allowed in the snack bar. The trip is only two hours so who cares.

Love Mum