Interesting Story

We went out to visit K's aunt and uncle at their cabin on the lake (not the big one, some smaller reservoir lake to the south and east of Cleveland) and for supper we drove into town to eat at this little restaurant. The restaurant was owned by a Greek family and when the mother of the family, who immigrated to the country when she was 12, found out that my wife's family was Greek, she sat down and started talking to K's grandmother in Greek.

Now, from past instances and comments, I pretty much assumed that K's grandmother would evade any attempts to try to get her to converse in the language of her parents. She grew up speaking Greek and her mother never learned English, so obviously, she grew up a fluent speaker of Greek in addition to being a native English speaker (she's without any trace of accent more exotic than working class Cleveland). When asked about speaking Greek she's just always said that it's been so long since she's had anyone to speak it with that she's forgotten most of it. She even avoided the poor little Greek lady stranded in a hick town near where I live when they attended an Orthodox church there a few months ago. The lady knew they were Greek the instant they walked into the door and tried to strike up a conversation and was disappointed when K's grandmother said she just didn't remember much.

This time was different for some reason. When the lady pressed her, K's grandmother started responding almost entirely in Greek. The short affirmations and exclamations that come as a reflex during small talk still came out in English, the language she's been speaking exclusively for decades, but the actual sentences came out in a fairly fluent Greek. The restaurateur was impressed and said she spoke the Greek of the old country and not like a speaker of a second language.

Honestly, I was a little jealous for K and a little sad for her as well. I have nothing of the recent immigrant heritage she has, especially from a culture so fiercely nationalistic as the Greeks. Greeks two or three generations removed from Greek soil still often identify themselves as Greeks first and Americans second and most of them have met their ancestors who came here from other places. I don't have that. My most exotic proven ancestor is an American Indian woman who would have been my great-great or great-great-great grandmother and she obviously left no cultural influences on my family and by my generation left only a suggestion of her complexion behind. My grandmother could have passed for being half and half, and my aunt and mother have been asked about their heritage on a Cherokee reservation, but it ends there. There are no songs, words or snatches of phrases or foods that came from her people that weren't worked into the regional culture as a whole before she came around. My other ancestors, except for the possible black ancestor, who remains more myth and rumor than anything provable, are all Western Europeans, Scottish, Dutch, and English and all who arrived before the US existed as a sovereign political entity.

K has that complexity of culture that my family lacks. Greek words occasionally sprinkle conversations, especially when they're cooking or talking about church life. Greek dishes are frequent components of our regular diet and E was baptized in a church where half of the church literature and liturgy are in a language that's entirely Greek to me (because it is, duh.)

The reason it made me feel a little sad for her is because as she listened to her grandmother's conversation, she was lucky to catch the occasional word or phrase. K's mom rebelled against her Greek heritage as a teen and wouldn't speak Greek. She wanted to fit in with the other kids and didn't take the pride in her heritage until it was too late. Because of that, she doesn't speak any Greek other than random words and phrases and parts of the liturgy spoken in her church. K wasn't exposed to Greek being spoken at home and knows possibly a little more than her mom, but not enough to converse with others.

I was born so distant from any ancestor with a "foreign" upbringing that I never would have been able to watch them speak another language, but K can sit there and still see her grandmother's connection to her unique heritage and know that there's a gap there that she'll probably never bridge.

I'd love for E to be able to claim his Native roots and to speak the Dutch and Gaelic of his distant ancestors, but doing so would be false. His Indian blood runs thin and the Dutch and Scottish lines became thoroughly American before my great grandparents were even a twinkle in their parents' eyes. His personal connections to those cultures are no more real than any random person who took an interest in tartans or speed skating. From me, he'll only honestly be able to inherit the rural Southern heritage (minus the nasty bits, of course), and I can only encourage K to pass on what part of her Greekness she managed to receive on to E to keep him connected that part of his past.