My childhood in in Iowa City, Iowa, was permeated with the illusion that my family was hopelessly run-of-the-mill. We were middle-class, lived in a nice house on the edge of town, Dad was a professor of music who was raised Southern Baptist in a family that traced its American roots back to the 1600s. Mom was a cellist from North Carolina who at the age of eighteen had been flown every weekend to Miami, where she was 1^st cellist in the Miami Symphony. Her mother was a Respectable Southern Scotch-Irish Presbyterian Lady from Charlotte, North Carolina (you can tell how respectable someone is by how many capital letters you need when describing them), who had eloped to New York with a Greek immigrant from Turkey. So we weren’t nearly as run-of-the-mill as I had imagined we were, or as I imagined my friends’ families were. Ironically though, the knowledge of an "other, more interesing life" did not come from television or books, but directly from my own mother, her stories of her childhood, and her family.

To be fair, there were interesting family stories on both sides but it was always my mother’s side that drew me. The stories of my paternal grandmother growing up on a homestead on a mountaintop in Montana – it was “Little House on the Prairie” but with topography – paled before my mother’s accounts of her two years spent in Greece, learning another language by playing with the Greek kids on an ocean liner (an ocean liner!) that took a whole month to get from New York to Athens. From their first night in Athens where she woke up in the middle of the night with her face burning, her eyes swollen shut from bedbug bites, to their last minute frantic trip from Chalkida to Athens to get onto what proved to be the last ship allowed out of the Mediterranean before the Germans occupied Greece, to the magical possibility of picking a pomegranate from her bedroom window, these stories captivated me.

They also seemed more real, because I knew that there was a whole cast of characters with names like Mitsos, Eleni, Stelios, Marianthi, Sotiris and Fotini, which it seemed everybody knew but me. There were words we used every day that none of my friends knew – yaya, papou, kalimera, yaourti, baklava, parakalo, yasou! -  and they came from that side of the family. It had never occurred to me that I was the only kid in the Iowa City neighborhood of Fair Meadows whose mother made her own yaourti (it was called “yogurt” in English but I’d never heard that word). Mrs. Arzumanian who lived down the street probably did too, come to think of it. I knew it was a "Greek thing," but the horrified reaction of a friend who tried it (and with sugar too, what a lightweight!) was the first hint that this was something really unusual. So my “kid in Iowa who wanted to be somewhere more interesting” imaginings always took me to Greece. It was a completely non-existent Greece mind you; one that existed only within my own skull. I’d be embarrassed to divulge all the details of that imaginary land and the extent to which handsome, dark-eyed playmates figured in those imaginings…but they were just another facet of the difference that I longed for.

My mother’s side was a family of stories; there was always a good story. My father’s family knew who they were, and a few snippets of their history did make it to the realm of discussion, but usually only when asked. When I did a family tree project in junior high school, I learned that there was an “Anna Hansen” from Norway somewhere in our background; I knew that my grandmother had carried buckets of water up a mountain. But mostly they were quiet people with the strict sense of division between adults and children typical of their culture. They were authoritarian and my father’s talk of God usually tended toward concepts of justice. As much as his parents undoubtedly loved him, I am sure they never said it. And as my DAR grandmother was dead set against her son marrying a “foreigner” and I, with my (only slightly) darker color, was little more than the evidence of my father’s miscegenation, you can be sure I never heard it from them.

Among the Greek side of the family, I would have had to been unconscious not to have felt the love there. Even at 70 our Grandfather was a leventoyeros, a “young man in an old man’s body” for lack of a better translation. He carried himself with the quiet dignity typical of the Greeks of Thrace and the Marmara Sea, but I also remember him dancing a graceful zeibekiko in his pajama bottoms in the living room one morning. When I hear accounts of Istanbul’s Istiklâl Caddesi, once known as “La Grand Rue du Pera,” and how one never went onto that street dressed in anything less than a suit and tie, I immediately think of my grandfather and his friends. Yet for all his external formality, he could talk with us as easily as he could talk to someone his own age. Visits to North Carolina were about reveling in the flood of love we received, getting spoiled, eating sweet egg bread toast and fig preserves for breakfast, and being stuffed with baklava, halva and cloyingly sweet rosewater-scented loukoumi by aunts who could say nothing in English except “goota boy, goota boy.” To be honest I found the loukoumi overwhelming and almost disgusting but they liked it, so I did my best to like it too. More than that, it was an unanalyzed but inescapable sense that to my mother, her parents and the other relatives, the loukoumi, the halva in the round tins with the strange letters on it which I longed to be able to read, the loaves of tsoureki flavored with mahlep seed and the strings of rich dried figs from Kalamata were much more than food. They were a sensory echoes of a place, a community and a cultural environment which they held dear. It was a place and community, a homeland that I longed to have a more immediate connection with, - and though I was completely unaware of it at the time - one which, as of October 1922, had forever ceased to exist.