I think I must have been around ten years old. I am visiting an Athens multistore called MINION, with my mother. This is the big, once-a-year-maybe deal; I get only rarely to visit this shop, because it is quite far from home and probably beyond our budget. But it is Christmas, I have gathered all my pocket money (some of it coming from singing Christmas carols) and I am going to choose my Christmas present, which I have decided is going to be a toy, despite the slightly worried look of my mother who thinks I should be slowly getting interested in clothing rather than stuff I will dismantle in no time, especially if it has any kind of machine or mechanism in it, in order to make my own toys, with Mecano. We enter the multistore. Right after the entrance is the HI Fi section of the shop. And by that we mean turntables at the best (band recorders came later). Needless to say, we do not possess one at home. But this is not what is about to make such a big impression on me. As we enter, a beautiful sales lady (thinking of it, she must have been not more than twenty years old, but quite taller than myself) working behind the counter plays a vinyl 33 rounds disc. She puts the needle exactly where the song starts. She sings along. She is not trying to appear interesting, she loves this song, I can see it in the way she is far away already. As I realized later, when I had my own turntable (called for some strange reason a “pick-up” in Greek) and the disc, she had probably played it many times, because the song was the last one on that particular Moody Blues disc, and faded in with the previous one; one could barely distinguish the separating space on the disc, unless one had the pretty eyes of a young person… And there comes this song. Nights in white satin. And I just stay there petrified. It felt as if somebody had injected me with a magic fluid, which I still imagine transparent blue in colour. I find the beauty of the song breath-taking. Sad, but only enough to make one feel even more in love; obscure, but not more than one of our parties, when the slows started playing; beautiful as the girl working at the shop and barely noticing me; and mainly, puzzling: what is this thing happening to me? In the years that followed, when I started indeed buying clothes and trying to catch the look of girls, usually with moderate success, I realised what it was. It was love, banging on the door. My door. My time had come. I left the shop with a Mercedes toy car, a model that one finds nowadays only in museums. Rewindable. One could turn the steering wheel AND the wheels and it had 4 real gears. It would cost as much as my real car today, if only I had kept it. But someone stole it from me and it must have been my only toy that I did not manage to rip apart. But there was one more thing stolen that night from me in this shop: my youth. I entered a boy and left as a premature teenager.
Even today, when I listen to this song, I feel the turbulence in me rising, and my heart pounding, exactly as that day when I did not know what was happening to me, on one side my mother holding my hand, and on the other side this young girl, facing her own labyrinth, searching her own future.
With immense nostalgy, to my mother and all those who movingly, lovingly kept my hand later on:
