Ptolemy's updated profile for the Harvard College alumni records, November 4, 2013:

Themistocles George Michos. Home Address: 465 Tenth Street, Apartment 301, San Francisco, CA 94103 (415-703-0101; Mobile: 415-990-5850). Occupation and Office Address: Retired. 465 10th St Apt 301, San Francisco, CA 94103-4361 (415-703-0111). E-mail: michos@gmail.com. 

Web/Social Media:niledelta.blogspot.com. 

Spouse/Partner: Dare Taylor Michos. 

Children: Three. Grandchildren: Two.

Military/National Service: SP3, US Army, Mannheim, Germany, 1956–57.

My wife and I are blessed with good health. We recently celebrated our 55th wedding anniversary. Our children and grandchildren are well and happy. I have been retired from the law for about five years.

We recently concluded a thirty year avocation of collecting contemporary art. In the course of that activity we owned a small apartment in Berlin Mitte, and we gained a substantial reputation among gallerists and curators internationally as knowledgable collectors. Berlin has been a big part of my life since my first visit in 1953 on a mission for Phillips Brooks House.

We have taken one to three bicycle tours in Europe almost every year since 1996, most recently last June from a 20 passenger canal boat that sailed north from Amsterdam to Texel Island and returned. Otherwise I am reduced to an unprepossessing weight lifting regimen and stationary cycling in a nearby gym, many of whose frequenters have muscles on their muscles and do twenty pull-ups just to warm up. They are kind enough to look past me, and I smile a lot.

I recently concluded a term as a trustee of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and as a Board member of my men's club in the City, the Family, founded 1902. I am now chief historian for the club, and periodically I mount small art exhibitions and do archival and preservation work. I am also scanning my personal correspondence and photographs to computer files, all the while pretending that someone might be interested in the future.

I belong to a men's book club that started with reading Joyce's "Ulysses" at 100 pages per month and went on to read the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Paradise Lost, all of Dante, Mann, Dostoevsky, Stendhal and Tolstoy and is now settling down to simpler, newer things, although the next assignment is Henry James's "The Golden Bowl," which I am told is not for beginners.

This Sunday we leave for the Venice Biennale, followed by three days in Rome for Michelangelo and mosaics and then 20 days on a cruise ship from Rome to Dubai. We are scheduled to spend Thanksgiving Day in Petra. Unless we are captured by Somali pirates, we will cruise next February from Tahiti to Sydney.

Ptolemy photographed with his aunts and uncles (his father's two sisters and their spouses) at the ancestral village, Koniakos, Doridos Province, Greece, in August. 1953.

What is artistic creation today and what causes it?

     An article about Peter Doig's current exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, entitled "No Foreign Lands," in the Financial Times dated August 10, 2013, by Jackie Wullschlager contains the following passage:

     "In 2000 Doig had been bowled over by another radical Matisse, 'Bathers and a Turtle', particularly its balance between large abstract planes and trio of figures.  Reprising his Canadian canoe paintings in Trinidad [source of paintings in the show], he further simplified their composition into a tripartite structure like Matisse's, with horizontal bands of sea, canoe and sky.  He called the tropical series "100 Years Ago" because, as he says, in Edinburgh's catalogue: 'That is our language.  So much has happened with painting in the past 100 years that one can profit from and take nourishment from as a painter.  Acknowledging that is extremely important.'

     "But to do so, Doig knows, is also a risk.  Modernism was about fragmentation, memory, a sense of interiority that still resonates today. It was not about the image overload and virtual relation to reality that determine visual experience - and therefore artistic creation - now."  [Italics added.]

Grace Cathedral sponsored dinner at the Crosby Hotel, San Francisco Tenderloin district, July 31, 2013

Elektra Christensen	11:04 PM (10 hours ago)
to Andrew, Andy, bcc: me

Dear Volunteers,

Many thanks for your efforts which created another excellent meal and for your spirit which fed a community. Our chef and cooks put together the ingredients that our shopper selects for our recipes. A driver delivers the food after it has been reheated and servers set up the room, serve the food, and share in the fellowship of a meal with others. It is with your commitment each month that we accomplish this.

Chef Nicole and her volunteer cooks prepared a pseudo-Seussian treat for the residents called Green Kale and Ham, a mishmash of potatoes, onions and ham with kale flavored with ricotta and cheddar cheese. They also prepared a whole honey-glazed ham, a summer salad, and a lovely blueberry cobbler topped with almonds and granola. The food was delivered a little late, but once it did arrive it was so good that many people went back for seconds, and all the trays were completely cleaned out by the end of the night! One resident in particular asked us to pass their compliments on to the cooking team. The servers did a wonderful job as well, doing a great job with handing out good portions to everyone and sharing a delightful meal. Thank you all for your hard work!

Shopper: Donna Alconcel
Chef: Nicole Sroka
Cooks: Dennis Nix, Glenn Visgitus, Andy Griffin, Gina Kasowski, Jessica Wilson, Kim Ranalli, Nicanor Quieta
Reheat and laundry: Bill Van Loo
Drivers: Doe Yates & Andrew Dombos
Site coordinator: Donna Alconcel
Servers: Michael Anichini, Anthony Caldwell, David Rosales, Themis Michos, David Buzby, Reid Buzby, Stephanie Taufa, Alison Park

Please let Dinner with Grace know if someone you know would like to become involved in any aspect: cooking, serving, shopping, or coordinating. Volunteers are the heartbeat of the Cathedral and the community.

Thank you and see you in August.

Varieties of the religious experience from Ptolemy's perspective

Lord's Prayer story:

The Lord's Prayer story is brief and simple:  My mother was a nice person, but she was fanatical.  She was a refugee from Eastern Thrace (Turkey in Europe) in 1922, when her family (she was the oldest of five children) was forced to repatriate from Turkey to Thessaloniki, Greece, after the Greek invasion of Turkey failed.  In Turkey, her family were a Christian minority in the overwhelmingly Moslem Ottoman Empire.  Her home town, now called Kirkareli (the Turkish translation of 40 Churches) had 25,000 Turks, 5,000 Greeks and 1,000 Bulgarians, the latter two groups being Christian.  No problem, and they often traded dinners at home with Moslem families, but...   As you know from Bayview, being a minority anything is different and can lead to what others might deem excessiveness.

Anyway, My mother made me memorize the Nicene Creed in the original Greek when I was three years old.  No sweat, as I didn't learn English, in the middle of north central Indiana, until I was four or five and then at the generosity of our Quaker next door neighbors, who must have felt sorry for me.  My brother was two years younger.  Both of us were required to say the Lord's Prayer in Greek every night before bed time until we were probably eight or nine.  I can't remember when it stopped.  My dad, who was religious but mainly through the Virgin Mary (he was totally devoted to his mother, who died when he was eleven) and who as a Greek male was perfunctorily observant, religion being the province of the women, would make our prayers his last stop before bed time.  Since my brother and I idolized our father, that embedded the Lord's Prayer even more deeply.

Fast forward several decades to my '70's and a meeting with Jesus face to face coming nearer daily, I decided one night to commence silent recitation of the Lord's prayer every night the last thing before falling asleep.  This is one of the few smart things I have ever done, since in one swift act I can dispense with my duty to pray daily, I quiet myself down for sleep and I can be with my parents again in my snug and comfortable bed, which is where it all started anyway.

Out in the world stories:

Dare and I spent Monday morning (July 29, 2013) unpacking, packing and handing out food off the SF Food Bank truck at Bayview Mission.  70 minutes of this was tiring and for younger people.  By lunch, which is a Black Baptist menu, I am pooped.  I am doing better with our Chinese clients - not cuddly folks.

Tuesday evening July 30, 2013) I spent two hours in Pod B of the women's section of the SF County jail on 7th Street, 600 yards down Bryant Street from the loft.  I was with a female trained volunteer (a saint) and a 40ish male Protestant minister in a room with about 15 female prisoners.  I thought it would be a rote Episcopal Evening Prayer service, but it turns out that we were supposed to have the women develop their own ideas of what the raising of Lazarus gospel means and not have them listen to my thoughts that Martha was a business woman.  You know how good I am at suffering a female's development of anything.  I looked and acted OK, and I had no problem with street smarts, but I was way out of my element.  I will probably not be very useful at this, but I will go back a few times to see if the Spirit allows me anything more but superficial and obvious sympathy. It was explained to me that the women seem fine because they have been sequestered and clean for a few weeks or months.

Wednesday (July 31,2013 at about 6:15 p.m. I volunteered with about 10 others to serve some dinners prepared in the Grace Cathedral kitchen to former transitionals (i.e. "homeless") who have been moved off the street and into a City sponsored Tenderloin hotel, the Crosby at O'Farrell and Jones.  We have been doing this on and off for about two years.  Striking up a conversation with these folks is difficult.  They are reserved to say the least.  Serving food is no problem until you see someone who is really hungry.  Always a shock.

I suspect that my way of going about all of this, i.e., trying to build up the asset side of my balance sheet before I meet my maker like it's preparing a case for trial, isn't the way to go.  It doesn't conform to "not weighing our merits but pardoning our offenses."

Let's hope this, including the surgical instrument scrubbing down in Guatemala last April and early May, isn't all a big blunder and that it's better late than never, even if it probably isn't.

Bayview Mission, Bayview-Hunters Point, San Francisco ,July 29, 2013