'Sailing' by Christopher Cross came out the summer I traveled to Europe at the age of 20. I was halfway through my Berkeley undergraduate education and experiencing a mind and body meltdown. I wanted time off from school. Instead of having a semester to think for myself, I had only the summer and a backpack with which to explore.

I spent nine idyllic days on Mykonos, making friends with the natives. Their day job was to transport tourists on their fishing boats from Plati Yialos (the main beach with small hotels on the sand) to the island's three separate and distinct southern beaches: Paradise (mellow mainstream), Super Paradise (quite nude), and Elia (blatantly gay).

Most of those days I spent on the boats sailing from beach to beach, smelling sun tan lotion and souvlaki, watching bikini clad and completely bare hedonists find their spot on the sand or up at the bar where the beer was cheap and cold.

Day after day, I was a treasured guest on ancient boats handed down from one male member of the family to the next. I loved the back and forth motion, dropping people off, picking people up, moving them to another beach, all the while drifting my hands and feet along in the cold ocean rhythm. Long hot hours in the sun, feeling the stiffness of salt water dried onto my appendages, zoning out amidst the many mingled foreign voices I couldn't understand and didn't need to comprehend, I found peace. I dropped my Type-A personality overboard.

For the first time in my life I knew what the word relaxation meant. I floated along with no cares or responsibilities, no books I had to read or papers I had to write, no bills I had to pay or hours I had to show up and smile, even the meals miraculously appeared before I was hungry.

As unwound as I'd ever been, I started to fall for Georgos, the captain character. I'd been told he was like a king of the island. In his early 40's, with a macho gruffness, his face was weathered, his teeth not all present under the thick long moustache he kept unkempt, his entire body was like a moving sculpture made out of milk chocolate. Every day I'd quietly watch him entertain his passengers; standing on one hand, dancing around the boat, pulling all sizes and shapes of people onto his lap, nonchalantly steering the boat on its familiar voyage with his bare foot on the tiller. Male and female tourists alike favored him as their captain, and waited until they could get a ride on his boat. I too, after just a few days in his presence, could only be found on this aging Adonis of a man's stern. By the end of the trip when he cooked octopus and crab and kept filling my glass with Ouzo, I slipped into bed with him. Like the sea urchins he caught and shucked for lunch one day, he was prickly on the outside, but raw and vulnerable when alone in his home, his love for me complete protein for my soul. The next morning it was as if the whole island knew that Georgos had found his woman. He asked me to stay and when I left the island two days later pushing myself forward into uncertainty, no one could believe that I would leave him or Mykonos.

'Sailing, takes me away to where I've always heard it could be, when the wind is right you can find the joy, feel the sense again.'� When I returned to the states after another four weeks traveling alone in Europe that song was a big hit. Every time I heard it I was transported back onto the boat with its peeling paint and primitive man.

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