You can learn a lot about yourself by walking on the same streets tread upon by civilized man for 3,000 years. Talk about putting your life in perspective. Having returned from Athens, Greece, just a few weeks ago, the concept continues to bend my mind.

The trip was planned well before my mother died on Jan. 26. Still very much in recovery mode, my husband and I boarded a plane on Feb. 10 that would take us to Cincinnati, then on to New York City, where we would fly non-stop (11 hours) to Athens.

Our traveling companions were Todd’s cousin Lee Hudson and his wife, Deanna, of Greeneville, Tenn. The extent of our planning for the trip was simply to meet at our hotel, The Herodion, billed as a stone’s throw away from the base of the Acropolis and located in the ancient Athens district of The Plaka. But those weren’t the details that consumed me prior to boarding; I was still writing thank-you notes (mailed at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport) for the many lovely gestures extended to my family in sympathy for my mother.

So to find myself, the next morning, gazing at the Acropolis from the roof of our hotel, was a complete shock, to say the least. Of course, I knew we would explore the significant ancient ruins of Athens, but I could not have more completely underestimated the upshot of this emprise on my psyche.

I could never call myself a history buff. In fact, as a mother of a fourth-grader already I have felt the twinges of being a wholly inadequate student of Indiana history. (And my mother taught fourth-grade history!) Yet, there was a time in my elementary education when I did excel in the study of world history, and it was the Greeks who particularly fascinated me. A tradition of Jerry Miller’s sixth-grade history class at Caze Elementary School in the early 1970s was to reward any student receiving 100 percent on an exam with a steak lunch. I celebrated my 100 percent score on a test on the ancient Greeks with lunch at the old Western Sizzlin Steakhouse. (I still remember being more impressed with the giant baked potato than the steak.)

While I was tickled to have earned winning marks and be treated to the steak and potato lunch, I am certain that I lacked the capacity as an 11-year-old to thoughtfully consider my place in the timeline of civilized man that we were studying. Publishing a magazine today probably doesn’t give me the prerequisite of intellectual heft needed to ponder such lofty ideas, either. But boy did this trip to Athens provoke thoughts on the significance — or insignificance — of the age we’re living in and my own life.

So much in Athens, a 3,500-year-old city, is astonishing — mind-boggling. The Acropolis, which you can see from nearly any vantage in the city, has dominated Athens for more than 2,000 years. At the National Archaeological Museum, which organizes its treasures chronologically, we were stunned by the volume of art dating to the Cycladic period (3rd millennium B.C.), including marble figurines of musicians playing flutes, harps and violins!

An ancient astronomical clock dating to around 200 B.C. on display at the same museum particularly fascinated us. The complex mechanism of the clock, discovered inside the sunken wreck of a Roman ship in 1901, has been reconstructed with high-resolution X-ray tomography analysis, revealing a clock that looks not unlike our timepieces of today.

Todd, Lee, Deanna and I talked about that clock all week. Drinking Greek red wine, feasting on souvlakia and fresh grilled fish, walking along the ruins of the ancient Agora and on the island of Aegina we kept coming back to the clock and what that clock might mean for us, little specks on the timeline of civilization. Talk about putting your life in perspective.
That’s a rather heady thought to leave you with. So, let me wrap up this letter with exciting news. Right before press time we learned of two awards Tucker Publishing Group has received. First, at the Advertising Club of Evansville annual ADDY Awards, we picked up five awards for outstanding work in graphic design. Object Project, a hard-cover book designed by Art Director of Custom Design Matt Wagner for the Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science won a Gold ADDY. We also received four Silver awards for both Evansville Living and Evansville Business covers and features stories.

Just as thrilling for us was the news that we have won two national City & Regional Magazine Awards, making this the third consecutive year we’ve won a major national magazine award. City View 2007 has been named among the best “Ancillary Publications” of a city magazine, and we are also being recognized for our partnerships with local television and radio media in branding our publications. We are particularly proud of these awards because the judging criteria affirm that winning magazines are serving their communities. In late May we’ll travel to the national conference in Memphis, Tenn., where we’ll learn if we’ve won the Gold, Silver, or Bronze!

Sincerely,

Kristen K. Tucker, Publisher & Editor