The Mule Skinner Cell Phone Blues

This picture of Kostas and his donkey were added to this post in
July 2017, four years after the this original story was published.

 

Kostas is a fixture in the village, he has lived here all his life.  He had been a successful shop keeper and business man until a stroke left him partially paralyzed on one side of his body.  It left him impaired in other ways too, I suspect.  The doctors told him not to drive any more, but Kostas could not slow down; he already had a donkey and still needed transportation. By then, he had also discovered that miracle of modern telecommunications, the cell phone.

Our first encounter with Kostas came one afternoon during “siesta time.”  Street sounds here, are amplified and reflected off of the solid walls and narrow streets, to give the odd sensation that the sound of church bells, motor bikes, or even footsteps, are coming from inside the building. One day we were roused from a nap by the clatter of iron horseshoes on stone pavement accompanied by a loud uninterrupted barrage of Greek expletives moving in the same direction as the horseshoes.  We looked through the shutters to see this man who looked like an unmade bed with a week’s growth of beard stubble on his face riding a donkey sidesaddle, down the middle of the street, talking on a cell phone.

It was like nothing we were remotely accustomed to seeing in Mayport, and what a surreal, anachronistic image it was to see this little donkey clipping along smartly, by 19^th Century standards, with Kostas on her back, his one good arm flailing wildly, addressing his cell phone with the intensity of a Wall Street floor trader; a 21^st Century mule skinning business man, still closing deals in the streets of Vourliotes from the back of a donkey, Greek style.  I’ve been trying to get a good picture of him for weeks, but like Donald Trump, he can be a hard man to catch.