Enshrined in all of these stories, elevated (if perhaps a bit higher in my own mind) was Greece. I read encyclopedia articles about Greece and books of Greek myths, assimilating all the most exotic and images from throughout the centuries, conveniently failing to notice what belonged to the modern age. In about 4^th grade, I began teaching myself Greek from a book, with some help from my mother, who still remembered lots of the basics. I was clueless what “genitive” and “accusative” meant though. I can still remember the thrill of looking up at the dome of the Greek Orthodox church in Charlotte, NC where my grandfather was a cantor (in Iowa, we were nominally Presbyterian at the time), and actually being able to sound out some of the letters. My grandfather also gave me a small censor with the words ΠΙΣΤΙΣ ΕΛΠΙΣ ΑΓΑΠΗ ΕΛΕΟΣ on it – Faith, Hope, Love and Mercy. Thinking of the fascination they held for me, I can understand why the Arabic script holds such deep meaning for a Muslim, especially in a country where another alphabet is used.

But the greatest event was the music I heard from the tiny collection of Greek records that my mother had picked up during her years as a record shop manager. Some were nice, others failed to impress, but there was one record that came out miles ahead of the others, and in particular, four songs by a group called the “Duo Stamboul.” The name of the record was ““My Greece – Music of Athens Today.” The third song on that link, starting at 5.00, is the first Greek recording I ever heard.

“Today,” it turned out, was around 1953 but a 4^th grader’s sense of history is not all that honed, and perhaps I was suffering from a bit of “immigrant’s time warp” in reverse. It is proverbial that for an immigrant who leaves the Old Country in, say, 1940, the Old Country becomes frozen in the mind exactly as it was on the last day he or she left, regardless of how much it had changed during that immigrant’s life up to that point.

And needless to say, I had no idea what “Stamboul” meant.

So, in my mind, Athens was a place that consisted of sea, blue skies, temples, people who talked like Foula and Marianthi and ate lots of yiaourti and halvah. And though I’d seen some pictures of people there dressed just like us, in the Greece of my dreams my playmates and I wore gowns just like the ancients. Because they were different, and whatever the real country of Greece was or wasn’t, the “Greece” in my mind was, above all else, Not Iowa.

One might guess at this point that I wasn’t the kind of kid that felt comfortably at home in small town Iowa life. One would be right. I was always a different kid; my almost-earliest memories are about doing things alone, watching spiders, patrolling the window wells for toads, walking down my mother’s long row of fragrant iris, smelling them and even imagining myself inside the flowers. I envied my little brother who seemed to fit in so easily, though I can see now that that was mostly my own perception. Other kids noticed the difference as well and didn’t withhold their opinions. Having a funny last name, and one that rhymed with “queer” to boot didn’t help much. It wasn’t long before I had my very own brand of cooties, one which could be transmitted merely by a look at the hapless victim. It’s almost funny now, but the effect was that I withdrew, and learned that attention just brought more trouble. So I purposely began doing what kept me from being noticed - failed spelling bees and not singing aloud in music class… I came to despise competition, especially things in which I might excel. I remember actually feeling embarrassed and guilty for getting an “A” in a solo festival. I preferred to succeed privately, and in things where I didn’t worry about being worse (or especially better) than someone else. So I learned all the songs of the “Duo Stamboul,” syllable-by-syllable, understanding nothing. (Evidently my grandfather found them a bit too hot and steamy; when I asked him to write them for me he said “those are Turkish.” And I didn’t realize that even if they were, he must have known Turkish!) Love for music and language did eventually win out over reticence, but to this day I’m uncomfortable with “competitive” music, at least when the competitive aspect is more important than the beauty of it.

I know of Greek-American families (we weren’t really one) of considerably more modest means than ours that sent their kids to summer camp in Greece. We went to Camp Wapsie YMCA Boys’ Camp, and it was always a combination of fun and awful. Looking back though, I’m convinced that it was just as well that I didn’t go to Greece when I was young. My version of Greece was almost complete fantasy but I needed it at the time. It had also never crossed my mind that Greek elementary school kids could be just as cruel as their counterparts in Iowa, and having my fantasy world shattered in that way might have been truly devastating. Since much of my personality had been trapped around concerns of acceptance or non-acceptance by others, it was better to wait until I’d begun to find myself.

My chance to go to Greece finally came in high school, when I first became aware of foreign exchange programs and the AFS program. The AFS students always seemed to be part of the popular, high-achieving crowd, and I belonged to neither. I did apply but they didn’t accept me; and besides, one question on the interview left me cold: “You’ve put down ‘Greece’ as your preferred country on your application, but if you got sent to Lower Zangalia, what would you do?” I answered “I guess I’d learn to speak Lower Zangalian!” But the whole point was to get my ass to Greece finally and to be honest, the whole AFS crowd seemed to cliquish anyway. There was still that other program, YFU, which you had to pay for but at least you could choose where you went. I was stocking shelves at our local Hy-Vee supermarket, arguably one of the most lucrative jobs an Iowa high schooler could have in 1974, so I applied and spent the next month and a half waiting in agony. And I can still remember being there in Aisle 2, stocking tomato paste, when my mother walked in and said “Hey, how would you like to go to Greece?!”

Before long a letter arrived from a high school boy in the small town of Chrysoupolis, near Kavala; he would be my host brother. I was immediately disappointed that I wasn’t going to Athens, though my first look at inner Athens with its polluted air and gloomy streets lined with drab cement apartment buildings dispelled that disappointment rather quickly. And here I can admit to a bit of shallowness – after all I was 16 and fully aware that sexuality was not the one of the majority – my disappointment at not going to Athens was also not a little assuaged by the fact that he was absolutely beautiful. Handsome enough, in fact, that it worried me just a little.

Our initial descent into Athens truly did fulfill my Greek fantasies though – a brilliant white city flowing through a valley between the mountains, and coves of such breathtaking shades of crystal clear ultramarine-through-turquoise that I could hardly believe it was real. Coming through the gates of the old Athens airport (not the new old one, the OLD old one), getting my first glimpse of the yellow and black signs in Greek characters, and expectant families crowding on the other side of the gate to meet their host students, I realized that despite the initial exotic atmosphere, it felt much more familiar than I’d expected. The next day, I gazed out of the windows of our to Thessaloniki at light gray mountains, occasional shepherd's huts, fields with mysterious spiny plants that were completely pale powder blue and distant white villages with red tile roofs. Watching this new world go by, backed by the popular laika music playing in the bus, I was flooded with a sense of having come “home.” My fantasy Greece was beginning to fall apart but in among the fantasy was enough reality - some that I'd been completely unaware of until then - that even though I had no idea what my life would be like by this time the next day, let alone in two months’ time, I knew I was in the right place.