Looted for Love - NYTimes.com I grew up in the East Village, in New York City, surrounded by art. Most of it was contemporary, but there was one piece that was old - really old. It was a fragment of an ancient marble column, and we used it as a doorstop. I'd never seen marble like that outside of the Metropolitan Museum - marble that changed color with the time of day, almost as if it were blushing. After looking at the marble for 30 years, I finally asked where it was from. "An old boyfriend stole it for me in Greece," my mother said, surprising all of us and blushing herself. "I was working on a cruise ship," she went on, "singing songs like "I Can't Say No" from "Oklahoma." Jan, the first mate, stole it for me during a day trip. I was convinced that the F.B.I. was about to burst through the door and arrest us for taking the missing part of the Acropolis. Wasn't she horrified by the theft? "I was thrilled," she said. I thought it was terribly romantic. It was 1967, and the ship was the M.S. Bergensfjord. Among my mother's things in the basement, we found the ship's schedule, a hilarious, "Mad Men"-ish collection of activities - cocktails, theme dinners, more cocktails. And there was the day trip to Corinth, when Jan stole the fragment. My mother and Jan broke up not long after the Greek stop. When the cruise ended, they returned to their respective countries. Her acting career took off. She married a different Norwegian, my father. As the years went by, the relic began to trouble her. I started to think, You know what, this isn't mine. I've always wanted to give it back. Soon after we talked, she got the chance to do so. I had to go to Greece for work, so we decided to make a family trip out of it. My mother, husband, 1-year-old son and I flew to Athens with the relic in a carry-on. A sweltering suburban train and bumpy taxi ride took us to Corinth. We tramped up a dusty road, past postcard sellers, under the midday sun, until we reached the Corinth archaeological site - a cream-colored building with a green door, where, we were told, we should take our artifact. Our knock was answered by a suave, gray-haired British man, Guy Sanders, director of the American School's excavations there. Inside, my mother opened her purse and took out the piece of marble. It felt as if we were about to engage in some kind of drug deal. Sanders held it and said, "It's part of the base of an Ionic column." Unfortunately, we knew little about it, other than that Jan had said it was from the third century. By taking it away, Sanders explained, Jan deprived it of its history, and thus its value. People think, what's one shard, one stone, when there are so many? Sanders told us. Of course, if everyone took a piece, there would be nothing left. And yet, he said, it was worth giving back. Maybe it would turn out to be part of something bigger. Sanders walked us over to the Archaeological Museum of Ancient Corinth. My mother took the marble out of her purse again. At first, the museum staff was confused. But when Sanders explained our story in Greek - the cruise ship, the boyfriend, the theft and our desire to make it right - they suddenly got excited. The head guard asked my mother to sign a certificate of return, as the director and other staff members gathered around. We were shocked by how emotional some of them seemed. Sanders explained to us that Corinth was still traumatized by a particularly horrific 1990 theft in which armed thieves almost killed the museum's security guard. The F.B.I.-like Institute of Field Archaeologists eventually traced the stolen relics to Florida, and many of them were returned to the museum in 2001. But the theft illustrated how vulnerable these remote historical sites are, and how hard they are to defend. For these archaeologists, Sanders said, our quest to return the marble meant that there would always be people who wanted to right crimes of the past. The museum's director looked at my mother with tears in his eyes and said, somberly: "We don't speak English so good, but we want to say, we are very . . . what is the word? Proud? A redheaded woman by a filing cabinet stepped forward and said: "Happy. We are very, very happy. And just like that, a hunk of marble was home after a 40-year vacation in New York.