The dog rests her head on my lap and leans her bony jaw into a tender layer of muscle in the central portion of my upper thigh, sending a brief twinge the full length of my leg. I set my glass of retsina on the porch rail beside me, flinching sharply as a bolt of sunlight ricochets an angled course through the golden liquid, an echo of the nerve twinge in my leg. Retsina is a Greek wine with a distinctive—some would say overwhelming—flavor of pine, a flavor that betrays an ancient nostalgia for a time when wine was stored in amphorae sealed with resin from Aleppo pines. It’s what might be called an acquired taste, although I was hooked by the very first glass.
It is exceedingly unlikely that there are any Aleppo pines nearby; they are indigenous to the Mediterranean, and poorly suited for an ornamental backyard landscape, especially here in the Pacific Northwest, with its embarrassment of riches of native evergreen species. The closest tree to where I sit now is just past the far end of the porch rail that supports my glass, a tortured and hideously asymmetric blue spruce, completely denuded of branches on one side, with its shaved trunk less than three feet directly outside the window of the spare room in our second-floor apartment. In the last few years it was able to grow past the third-story roofline, and it has resumed its conical habit—an iconic Christmas-tree shape—for the top few feet. Scar tissue encrusted with bulbous globs of glassy pitch, frozen in mid drip, mark spots where immature limbs were carelessly pruned too close to the main trunk; and for a moment I imagine the rarified aromatic qualities of a wine poured from amphorae sealed with blue spruce resin.
Retsina is somewhat hard to find, not something that you would typically run into in the wine isle of the local big-chain supermarket. I first learned of it from song lyrics more than two decades before I had the opportunity to taste it. It makes a brief appearance in Aja, a popular Steely Dan album released when I was in high school. The second track on side two of the original vinyl version of Aja is titled “Home at Last,” and evokes imagery from the Homeric tale of Odysseus’ epic journey home:
Who wrote that tired sea song
Set on this peaceful shore
You think you’ve heard this one before
Steely Dan songs frequently include subtle and cerebral irony, which is why I have always been a fan. In the chorus of “Home at Last,” for example, the protagonist sings:
The danger on the rocks has surely passed
Yet I remain tied to the mast
Could it be that I have found my home at last?
Home at last
The idea here—or, probably better to say my interpretation of the idea here—is that we sometimes end up in uncomfortable circumstances that we have created ourselves, perhaps out of desperation, and then get stuck there, feeling trapped, caught in the inertia of the status quo, unable to extract ourselves from our own protective emotional resin. Even when we have run out of excuses, and even in the clear presence of far better alternatives, we remain “tied to the mast.” It’s a compelling truth that is paradigmatic of several extended periods of my own life. In the second verse of “Home at Last,” there is an allusion to the year Odysseus spent with Circe, the goddess-enchantress who turned his men into swine and then lured him into her bed chamber with food and wine; but most likely it’s an oblique reference to one of the song writer’s own failed love relationships:
She pours the smooth retsina
She keeps me safe and warm
It’s just the calm before the storm
Call in my reservation
So long hey thanks my friend
I guess I’ll try my luck again
Smooth retsina. When I stumbled upon retsina in a wine shop just south of Gary, Indiana, an area, it turns out, with a sizeable local Greek population, I bought a bottle of each of the three varieties on the shelf. The first sip was a shock. Although it has a warm and exceptionally satisfying finish, smooth is not an adjective I would use. In fact, perhaps the opposite of smooth; astringent, bracing, sharp like the sliver of refracted sunlight that sliced through the glass and into my unshielded retinas. The effect is habit-forming.
Aja remains one of my favorite albums to this day. Aja is also the name of the dog whose head rests heavily against my thigh. The dog wasn’t named after the album, nor is her name pronounced the same—the album is pronounced like the continent, for the dog the initial A is pushed with a relaxed tongue and open throat, as in awesome. Aja, the dog, was named after a Yoruba goddess, the goddess of the forest and protector of forest animals. It was my wife’s idea, and likely related to our regular excursions to the many nearby heavily forested hiking trails—so different from the agriculture-dominated wetland prairie and oak savanna of Northwest Indiana, where I was tied to the mast for over a third of my life.
It turns out there are some interesting parallels between Circe, the Greek goddess-enchantress, and pourer of smooth retsina, and Aja, the Yoruba forest protector. Circe lives in a mansion surrounded by a dense forest, and she has extensive knowledge of herbs and potions, which, in combination with a magic staff, she used to turn Odysseus’ men into animals, and would have done so with Odysseus himself if he wasn’t forewarned. Aja is also a master of potions, it turns out, and she is credited with having taught the original herbal healers their craft. In my limited research, I haven’t come across any tales of her turning men into swine, but I suspect, from what I’ve read, that she has the power to do so should the situation warrant: she is an Oresha, a subordinate spirit-being manifesting specific facets or characteristics of the divine.
Aja, the canid with her head pressed into my lap, is not a goddess. Nor does she possess any special skill with magical herbal potions, at least as far as I can tell. She is a medium sized dog, lean and muscular, with short fur that, depending on the light, ranges from deep mahogany to rich honey, with a warm quality not unlike the retsina in my glass, returned now to my hand momentarily for a long, deep draught. She’s a Black Mouth Curr, perhaps, although her actual pedigree is a mystery; she’s a rescue dog from the shelter just up the road, and an import from Texas, a place about as far from the island of Aeaea as it is possible to get, and only slightly farther from Yorubaland. I give the golden rolls of skin and fur on her neck a gentle nuzzle with my fingertips, finish my glass, rest my eyes on the dusty gray-green needled surface of the blue spruce, and wonder at my good fortune as the last residual traces of retsina fade into memory.
I know this super highway
This bright familiar sun
I guess that I’m the lucky one
