Scopophilia

My husband and I took the kids to Rockford’s Greek Fest 2008 on Sunday, and experienced a little bit of culture. Actually, it was a whole lot of culture.

The Saints Helen and Constantine Greek Orthodox church is where Mike’s mom grew up, along with all the Greek family on her side. Her father (my husband’s “papouli” or Greek grandfather) and mother (Mike’s “yiayia” or Greek grandmother) were members, and volunteered every year for the festival before yiayia passed away.

There was Greek dancing (the zorba dance among others was performed and plates were broken -OPA!) and gyros, athenian chicken, and the ouzo was flowing like water. I got a little choked up watching everyone from middle aged ladies to cassocked priests to toddlers putting arms around each others shoulders and performing the step-oriented dances while smiling and laughing.

It was beautiful to see traditions and customs from a culture so old to be carried out and celebrated in the American midwest by people so far removed from their origins. It wrenches my heart a little to realize that I had no such enrichment as a child. My father, when prompted to answer about our ancestors or heritage, would respond “we’re Americans” and huff off to smoke his pipe and watch Rush Limbaugh.

My mother would tell me about her family’s names, and what country they came from, but that was about all the information I could get from either of them.

I longed for that sort of information to be passed on to me, as a kid. Somehow it seemed that knowing where your ancestors came here from, essentially where you came from, made a person special. The world is a fascinating place, and the different cultures that have sprung up all over the globe really do fascinate me. But living in a place where so many of those cultures have come together and been re-written, disenfranchised, or smothered with non-regional dialect and behavior gets depressing sometimes. I feel, as an American, that whatever culture we do have (hotdogs? baseball? apple pie?) is so vague and commecialized that it lacks that ancient feel, that sacredness of tradition most of the time.

Sure, I wipe away a tear when I can afford to go to a live sporting event where the anthem is sung. Every fourth of July I think of my father and his father and the veterans and soldiers and philosophers who made this country what it is by their thinking and common sense and bloodshed. But every single one of those nostalgic experiences is tempered by the knowledge that this country we live in, that allows us the freedoms we have and the quality of life we expect these days, wasn’t always ours. Someone in my family, many someones, at some point decided that America sounded like a great place to be. Somebody made the journey from wherever they were to here, and toughed it out as an immigrant with a family. Whoever those someone’s were, they had traditions from somewhere else ingrained into them. They knew a place that was before America, before capitalism, and before multi-media centers and $8.00 bottles of water and $26 folding chairs on the lawn at an outdoor rock concert.

I want to know what those traditions were. What blood flows in my veins, and why do I fight a lump in my throat every time I hear a bagpipe blowing? How in the hell did I start to crave sauerkraut on my bratwurst?

America is beautiful, and there are really only a handful of other places I’d be willing to live at this point in my life… but I’m going to do my best to teach my boys about the rich cultures of their ancestors, even if I have to treat it like a research assignment.