Aristotle's Walking Stick

We are sitting on my friend Aristotle’s deck at the West end of the Ranch, a place high on a hilltop that always reminds me of Greece, although I’ve never been to Greece except in my imagination. Everything is white and blue, glaring in the sunshine, and in the far distance, I can see the windswept Gaviota Coast all the way to the Point Conception headland. A hawk glides overhead.

“The first time I went to Greece,” says Aristotle, “was in 1957. I was in my early twenties, and this was my parents’ first return to Greece since moving to America nearly fifty years earlier. I ended up spending a couple of weeks in my father’s village, which was in a mountain range overlooking the Corinthian Canal.”

“I became friends with a shepherd boy there, and I’d see him regularly. He carried a beautiful hand-carved staff made of olive wood. I kept admiring it, and before I left, I asked if I could buy it from him. He refused. It wasn’t for sale.”

“My father died a few years later, in 1962, and shortly after that, my mother went back to Greece by herself. I picked her up at the airport in Chicago when she returned, and as she got off the plane, I noticed she was walking with some sort of cane, and I thought she had hurt herself. But no, it was the carved wooden staff that I had coveted. She had gone back to my father’s village and convinced the shepherd to sell the staff to her. Now she presented it to me…”

Aristotle brings the wooden staff outside, and I marvel at its artistry. The graceful curves and carvings animate the smooth and silky wood. Perhaps its maker, an unsung artisan and an old man now, still tends to his flock in the mountains on the other side of the world.

This staff became the centerpiece of Aristotle’s collection of walking sticks from his many travels. It holds its own as a work of art, and it makes a sturdy staff for hiking, but it also carries story and magic. When Aristotle holds it in his hands, he is for a moment the young man who first became enchanted with the homeland of his father.

And it was no coincidence that Aristotle’s mother brought it back to him after the death of his father. It’s a moving and symbolic gesture that reminds me of a poem by Diana Der-Hovanessian called Shifting The Sun, which begins with this line: "When your father dies, say the Irish/ you lose your umbrella against bad weather./ May his sun be your light, say the Armenians.“

This walking stick would help Aristotle transition into the part of his life when he would have to walk without his father. Somehow I am sure this was his mother’s loving message and intent.

And here it is, so many decades later, in his house by a different sea.

“Eventually it’s all just silent stuff,” says Aristotle…or something like that. Without knowing the particular memories and meaning associated with the objects we collect, they are simply things, and after we leave, to whom will it matter anyway?

But the stories are the currency of human experience, and I think they are worthy of sharing.

So this is Aristotle’s walking stick, and now you know it is so much more than a carved piece of wood.

And my friend Aristotle thinks no one will be interested in any of this, but I disagree.