A Word on Personal Lineage, Pt. I

Where Do I Come From?

Ever since childhood, I have always been interested (obsessed) with the idea of lineage, or more specifically, my lineage. I don't recall fascination with any one else's lineage, be it my peers, or the genealogies of historical figures (though I did intensely long to be of their descent). I had no greater, desperate hope than to one day uncover my scandalous adoption- that I actually hailed from two quite epic figures with long, celebrated histories of anomalous behavior.

As a youth, I dreamed and wondered a lot. Probably not more than most young artistic children, but to be fair, perhaps more than most in my family or neighborhood. I found nothing particularly valuable about reality (this belief continued into young adulthood) and thus preferred books over people. I lived in books like Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren, Ramona by Beverly Cleary, Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli and Matilda by Roald Dahl. These all chronicle the adventures of innocently nonconformist little girls with all of their societal rejection and misunderstoodness. "Yep, that's me," I thought.

I had always possessed a strong desire to know what kind of species I was. By at least 10, it had been, by blood, confirmed: I was a Pippi. A Matilda. I had gone through too much hazing not to be. I was autonomous, idiosyncratic- I was even curiously parentless. Ordinarily, I suspect a young child may find their natural pedigree sufficient for explaining their general origins. Not me. My parents were, in my perception, almost illusory. They were towering, incomprehensible figures that spoke a foreign, incomprehensible language; my many memories of them are mere shrapnel of noise and shapes that I combined to create caricatures of practicality and wrath.

I had a profound mistrust for adults in general, and they were no exclusion. I can partially attribute this belief to the many influences I had which confirmed the anti-adult campaign, however implicitly: Charlie Brown, Rugrats, Goosebumps, Where the Wild Things Are, The Velveteen Rabbit, Winnie the Pooh, the list goes on. Only the teacher of the Magic School Bus could be trusted. As for my independent disposition, I think it can and must be traced to my natural heritage. I am half Greek.

"I don't speak Greek."

My father was raised in a small, racist village in Northern Greece during the 40's and 50's . When my (Hispanic) husband and I got engaged, my father disowned me, not due to his racism, but due to his deeper xenophobia. Even I, in my very being, was subject to this curse. My father himself, upon moving to America, had married a non-Greek: a blonde-haired-blue-eyed non-Greek (they are divorced), of which I was the more obvious progeny, my sister being crowned with dark skin and hair and eyes. From childhood this handicap wretched a deep schism in my identity that by it's very nature was irreconcilable. There is also the language thing.

Every first-generation American child knows about the language thing; it's when you don't speak the language of your foreign family/family member. There we would be, in Greek diners in New Jersey, my Dad at a bar stool emphatically gesturing and uttering with other men, my sister and I in a booth, playing tic-tac-toe on the back of paper placemats, writing our names in cursive and speaking in pig latin. And then we would be addressed.

"Hey, mori" (do not ask what this word means) my father would whisper. I'd look up, all big eyed, high hopes for affirmation, and a man behind the counter, always offensive and fat and bejeweled with gold rings and necklaces, this man - his huge black mustache parting, would ask me a question in Greek.

"I don't speak Greek" I'd say, transitioning into an emotion that children (or adults) should never feel. My father would give a slight nod, turn his back and begin to raise a chorus to which fat man would laugh and wheeze. They would continue, totally absolved from responsibility perhaps because of their sheer Greekness (once upon asking my father about his thoughts on the afterlife, he replied challengingly, "to heaven, where the Greeks are!")*. As a child I thought his post-humiliation rave was about me; in my teen years I realized it was about my mother.

*A friend of mine once asked, "Does that mean he thinks all Greeks go to heaven, or that heaven is a place where there are only Greeks?" I remembering laughing, and also feeling nauseous, shuddering at the thought of either one.