Trans Tiresias and the Great Goddesses

I woke before the quiet dawn for the second day in a row. No rain, no storms, Zeus must have decided to retire early. A strip of weak light leaked in under the door. I lay alone in bed on my one pillow. I’d had a night full of ephemeral dreams, of lounging goddesses, of Tiresias and snakes, and of Jennifer. Why was I having so many dreams? Much had crawled out from the dark reaches of my memory since I landed on Lesbos, as if the island air had a high concentration of Aricept. Everyone seemed part of the percolating lava, my mother, my father, my siblings, everyone.

When I told you a year or so later that I dreamt of Tiresias while on Lesbos, you weren’t surprised. How could I not dream of a transgender Greek prophet while on a Greek island? Tiresias, a prophet of Apollo, came across two copulating snakes while walking and hit them with a stick, wounding them, and kapow, Hera transformed him into a woman for displeasing her. The great goddess made him in her image as punishment and ended up with a devout priestess. Seven years later, now a married woman who had borne children, Tiresias returned to the scene of the crime. She encountered the same snakes copulating, appreciated the miracle, and Hera turned her back into a man.

Dreamt of a great goddess at night, so of course the great goddess, my wife, called in the morning. She had an uncanny sense of timing. One of the things I was grateful for in my life was that I woke up to her face every day, and on that morning I was also grateful for the technology that allowed me to see her as we talked.

I told her I was thinking about going to a different hotel, one that was closer to the camp. She insisted I do. I was in Lesbos to help, not to hang out with Emma and her coterie of lifeguards. She said that had she been with me on the beach, it would have depressed her to not to be able to smuggle the Syrian family back to our home in Chicago. Even though she had strict boundaries when it came to work, she allowed herself more leeway in her personal life.

Years ago, in the middle of one of the coldest nights in Chicago, we were walking to meet friends at a restaurant when a shivering woman and her teenage daughter stopped us. The mother asked for loose change, explaining to Francine that her husband had kicked them out of their apartment, and they had to raise enough money for a room somewhere. They didn’t look destitute, but they were certainly underdressed for the weather. Francine surprised the woman by giving her all the money in her wallet, some forty dollars. It didn’t end there. We joined our friends at the table, she opened the menu, but then she stood up, excused herself, and left the restaurant. She didn’t have to say anything. I knew she would go back to the woman. I explained to our friends. What I didn’t know was that she wouldn’t return, and that at home I would find the woman and her daughter taking hot showers in the guest bathroom and ours. The mother, Martha, stayed in our apartment for four days before she moved back to her family’s home in Indiana. Esther, her daughter, ended up staying for six months, until she finished her sophomore year. Francine thought it was a bad idea for her to switch to a high school in Indiana during a school year. Both of them still stay with us whenever they visit the city.