Economics 102

I used to be able to chew gum and play baseball at the same time.

It’s different now, in my mid-70s.

When I started writing this weekly column several months ago, it required all that I had left of my brain and I had to put Oikos Gnosis aside, the book about economics I've been working on for 20 years, my Great American Novel.

But one day last week, I was re-reading parts of it and came across a chapter that caught my eye.

It’s chapter 18.

It’s about economics, its meaning, written in code.

Here’s a clue… the word “economics” comes from the Greek word “Oikos.”

The chapter takes place in 2019 in the parking lot of the TA truck stop on I-80 in Berwick, Nebraska. After twenty years of living in the cab of a truck as an over-the-road trucker, it was Benny’s last night of his final run. The next day he would be in Denver, leaving behind his home on the road.

Benny is the main character in the book. When the chapter opens, he's on the phone with Maria, the other main character in the book.

They’d met on a dating site.

Here it is:

Chapter 18

The Oikos

   Settled back in his truck with a sack of Burger King burgers and fries and a six pack of Pabst, Benny took a deep breath. After twenty years of it, his last night on the road. For an instant, he felt almost like crying. But he knew that the Oikos can be anywhere.

   He called Maria to tell her the story of the Oikos.

   She listened.

   The story takes place in 1979, he said, when he was working as an investigative reporter for a major metro in Detroit

When he wasn’t running around the city chasing stories, he said, his favorite place to just hang out and think things through was an older section of the downtown area known as “Greektown.” It’s where many Greek immigrants first went to get away from the 20^th century’s wars and revolutions in the old country, lured to Detroit where there was work in the factories.

The immigrants found work and lived in shacks on a mosquito infested mud flat. They had children who had children and by the time Benny arrived it wasn’t the same place anymore.

Lots of Greeks still lived in the area, but what everybody called “Greek Town” had become more… more, like touristy. It had shrunk to the size of a single exhibit in a great hall of art. It had morphed into a few blocks of cobblestone streets blocked off to traffic and lined with sidewalk cafés serving truly authentic Greek food. It smelled like no place else in Detroit, like a Mediterranean bakery. The shoemaker’s shop added a pinch of leather. There was a store where you could buy canned grape leaves.

On the weekends, the place was so crowded with young professionals from the suburbs seeking authenticity that it was hard to find a place to sit.

But on weekdays -- especially mid-morning before the sun got too hot -- it was pretty much just a few old Greek guys clustered around sidewalk tables, swapping stories and observations in another language, playing a board game, sipping Ouzo.

Benny liked to sit close to them so he could listen in.

They knew who he was and that he was there and they would sometimes break into English so Benny could know what they were talking about.

They knew he was a reporter for one of the big newspapers. He’d written a featured “human interest” story about Miklas’s 90-year-old widow who still ran the bakery. It was on the front page of the newspaper. Miklas’s widow cut the story out and had it framed and hung it in the front window of the bakery for everybody to see.

The old Greek guys knew the value of being on good terms with a newspaper reporter. Their immigrant parents and grandparents had settled into the tenements and row houses of the area when it was still swampy and full of bugs and rats and had made something of the place. But new, fast money seeking quick turnarounds eyed the area like wolves in a pack envisioning upscale apartment and office buildings, shopping malls and a five-star hotel… nine, maybe ten percent return on investment. Just a little slice of that could set you up for life.

But the old Greek families didn’t want to move. They were offered under-the-table payoffs, enough to go back to Greece and buy a nice house there if they wanted, maybe even on an Aegean island with the sound of the sea washing up against the ancient rocky shore at night.

But they liked it where they were. They could walk down the same streets where they played stickball when they were kids. They went through the Depression there and then the war. It’s where they watched their children grow and go off to college. Nah, they didn’t want the investor’s money. It was dirty money, anyway, offered under the table so others wouldn’t know how much they were willing to pay. Maybe eighty percent of the people in the affected area said they’d be willing to accept what was being offered. But the old timers owned the choicest spots and the investors could hardly build their plans around ol’ Nick’s shoe shop or the Miklos widow’s bakery in the middle of it all, right where the five-star hotel was planned. The Greeks knew they had the law on their side, but the developers were pulling strings behind the scenes at city hall. A front page story in one of Detroit’s big newspapers about how greedy developers were trying to screw with the Greeks would be a good thing, in their eyes.

The day Benny learned about the Oikos was a perfect fall day in Detroit. Shadows cast by the city’s brick-on-steel skyline were fading. The sky was clear. The sun was a warm yellow. A soft breeze off the Detroit River smelled like living water. Then, one of the old Greek guys leaned back in his chair, spread his bare arms out wide as if to take in all the warmth of the morning sun and the smell of the air and everything going on around him including the universe, and he said -- or like intoned looking up with his eyes closed: “Ahh, my Oikos!”

The other old guys around the table nodded their agreement and sipped their Ouzo, like priests sipping consecrated wine from a golden chalice.

Benny leaned forward to get closer to their table and asked the old-timer: ‘Oikos? What’s that? What does Oikos mean? Is it a real word?”

The old timer looked at Benny.

He looked like Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek.

“Look it up,” he said. “The dictionary will tell you that the Greek word, ‘Oikos,’ means ‘home,’ or household…

“But what is home?” he went on, gesturing with the fingers of a weathered hand like stirring a pot… “What is home?” he asked again and then answered his own question. “It’s where you feel comfortable; where you feel like you belong and can think straight… your Oikos… it can be anywhere.”

The others looked at one another and nodded and smiled like at the end of an Orthodox church service and went back to their Ouzo, board game and a different language.

Benny never forgot about the Oikos.

He taught his children about it when they were little. Getting tucked in at bedtime, they would spread their arms out wide and say, “Ahh, my Oikos!”