Homer, my Greek-American friend, travels from California to Athens once a year in order to stay in his house in Plaka and connect with his roots.
This year, at the end of my visit, which I try never to miss, he instructed me to choose a book, a present, from a crammed shelf. My task was a hard one, but I eventually chose Inventing Paradise, written by that great philhellene, American writer Edmund Keeley.
The book covers the period 1937 to 1947 and considers the relationship between Greece and other famous philhellenes such as writers Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, both of whom outstripped most other people in their passion for Greece.
Keeley suggests that Durrell and Miller, in their Greek travels, and in their interaction with legendary figures poet George Seferis and the Colossus of Maroussi, George Katsimbalis, were constructing a sort of Paradise for themselves.
Most visitors to, or foreign inhabitants of, Greece, try to do the same. I certainly did. Here I was in an enchanted land of stunning landscape, an area loaded with history, myth and legend, the poet Drosinis's blue beloved homeland.
I was coming to an understanding of the pain involved in emigration, yet this magical place was half of my children's heritage. I embraced customs and a way of life new to me with the enthusiasm of the mature innocent, and all the time Greece was making a serious takeover bid for my romantic spirit and idealistic soul.
But, inevitably, the serpents came wriggling. For example, I found Greek village fatalism hard to bear. Oti thelie o Theos, sighed the old women with monotonous regularity: Whatever God wants, while I ground my teeth in an effort not to shout God helps those who help themselves.
The mistreatment of animals and the wanton neglect of the environment appalled me, as did the education system to which my children had been sacrificed.
Then there was the implacable routine of village life, so strange to one descended from pioneer stock. The pioneer invents the day, while the peasant repeats an age-old pattern. My mother-in-law would get up, say, on 29 August, the Feast Day of the Beheading of St John, and know exactly what she had to do. And she did it.
The fasting,