This short reminiscence of Dad's reallly connects with another I just entered onto the blog the other day, "The Melting Pot". To me, both stories, and likely others I will post here, are evidence of the extremes and ambiguities of human nature. Back when my father's family first came to the United States, from Greece, and Italy, and my mother's family from Ireland, the new immigrants, many of them, so wanted to be part of the American Dream, that they virtually excised their original cultures in key ways. My Greek Grandfather actually changed his last name to something he viewed as more "American", such that my father had issue when he became a soldier in WWII, he had to take legal steps to change it back to Gochis. How many first generation children never learned to speak Greek, or Italian, or Gaelic, because they wanted to be fully American? Some kept their cultures rather resticted to their homes. Outside they felt the need to be prove their American adaptation. This was an uneasy attitude, and so many of the same immigrants' behaviors told the children at the same time they ought not be too American. The same grandfather who took what he perceived to be an AMERICAN name, also despised it when his children dated outside of the Greek nationality, and again, in full contradiction, married an Italian American. There was a love, and a resentment, for the country to which they had, in many cases escaped. The love overtook the resentment, at least in the public square, then. They bought into the requirements of citizenship. They ascribed, perhaps with some of that resentment intact, but truly to the ideas of the American Experiment. That was then. Now, the resentment has superseded the desire to be an American. The invitation to illegal immigration which has overrun our shores, people who, in many cases, might be perfectly wonderful, but who have no interest in becoming American, or, because of policies dooming the nation, is toppling American history. This new immigrant, has no idea of the unique nature of the American principles of the rights of man and from Whom they derive, because our own leaders are rewriting history to depict America, which no one ever said was perfect, but strove to perfection, as the most evil of any society that came before, or exist now. It's disheartening. My father died 18 years ago so the extreme of hatred for the country, though he predicted it to me, and friends, he did not live to see. He saw it coming all the way back in the 1960s.
No nation in the world succeeded as long as America did bringing in peoples from contrasting places of different values and made them "one out of many". The many had to maintain a central philosophy. But therein is the rub. We haven't. "It's a Republic, if you can keep it," said a Founding Father, who likely is now called an abundance of vile names. One can only pray that the fall of America will somehow be intercepted by the intercession of a Higher Power.
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My source from New York told me I was to be visited by three "Graces". This oracular fount is a senior family member who has been present since early in the last century, when three brothers, one of them my father, left their ancestral digs in the Kalamata region of Greece and ventured into the promise of golden American streets, thence, to prosper and multiply.
They multiplied. Some flourished. Some did not.
Helen called. She is a first cousin, the daugter of Uncle Steve, my father's brother. There was to be a family wedding, she announced, and she and her sisters, Irene and Demetra, would be in Los Angeles for the occasion. Would I be at home?
I have not seen this cousin for perhaps forty-odd years, though I do recall that then she was indeed worthy of her name-sake, the one who centuries ago sparked the Trojan War, tall, blonde, blue-eyed, and imperious. I mention this, specifically, because the girls of our geneology border in morphology on either side of comely.
I had no visual memory of the sisters, Irene and Demetra, and certainly not the bride to be, Melissa, the inspiration of their hegira. Demetra, as you may know, is the mythical goddess whoses daughter Persephone was kidnapped by the God of the underworld, Hades.
I make no invidious comparisons, but this I can say, Melissa upon my meeting her, was indeed comely and charming.
Helen is still tall, now generously ample, assertive and perhaps still imperious. Her golden, youthful luminosity has naturally faded as it does, but still lives in the many pictures the girls brought from their halcyon days. Indeed, I tell Helen. She was beautiful. Helen preens.
We reminisce over white wine. We exchange stories of our heritage's mythologies. We disagree on some key facts regarding family heroics. Irene, of placid disposition, and thus aptly named, recounts with a misture of pride and amusement, "Papa used to love to tell how he returned to Greece, with his rifle, to assure the marriage of his sister, another Demetra. It seems that the promised suitor was somewhat reluctant to honor his promise of marriage."
My recollection is that it was my own father who performed the act of family honor.
"It was in 1912 or 1913, " I say, "just before the war with Bulgaria, or Turkey, I can't be sure. He cemented the marriage, but got drafted into the Greek military, a corollary benefit of the pilgrimage.
We talked of lifetimes. Forty years is a long, long time, of marriages and children, or the dissolutions of relationships and the finality of death.
All three sisters are widows. I have heard that Helen had four husbands. She recalls only three. In our initial phone conversation I remarked to her that I had met her first husband.
"Which one?" came the query.
"The arranged one," I reminded. "The one your Papa wanted."
"Oh, that one," she replied. "I forgot about him."
It is a curious fact. My fathers and his brothers were almost tyrannical in their chauvinism. They were xenophobic, distrustful of this complacent new world to which they had come, with its short skirts and bobbed hair. And yet, of the ten females and six males of their aggregate progeny, only two married Greeks.
I knew that Melissa, of this fully modern age, would not marry in the Holy Trinity Cathedral on Normandy Avenue. There would be no exchange of laurel wreaths and the ceremonial processions ad chants.
"When is the wedding, Melissa," I asked.
"Tomorrow," she replied.
Now, you may well ask, what is the significance of this family trivia?
The short answer is, the "melting pot", who dissolves therein and what is the alloy that is produced?
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