Lamb at the Oakland Greek Festival, up by the Mormon temple last weekend
“Greece” radiates meaning: classical Athenian, Socratic, hemlock-laced meaning that overwrites the real place, thumped out like club music and yachts in the harbor, and then there’s also always the whole “birthplace of Christianity” thing too. But mostly, at the Greek Festival, it’s lamb. Lamb sliced and piled on bread, lamb cubed and grilled. Lamb chops. Lamb.
A lot of us point to food when it comes to figuring out who we are, but the Greek Festival would also like you to go to church and buy a burial plot (for a limited time, two for one!). Inside the truly awesome cathedral, an absolutely gargantuan painting of Jesus’s face spread out on the ceiling over a field of gold surrounded by paintings of jewels, and my husband--raised in a religion that also likes to put gold and jewels around its gods--tried to explain awe to our nine year old. Already a classical Marxist, he wasn’t buying it. Our five year old wanted to know who everyone was in all the paintings and my ability to sound out Greek letters failed except for “Barbara.” My kids are 1/16th Greek, which we count like there’s a blood quantum, but the last cousin who lived there, Io, moved to Kansas sometime last century. We’re just Californian, linguistically certified (you should hear how my sister and I say our As).
Blue and white stripes were displayed in the decor and on all our bodies, and the wind was howling, up through the golden gate, up the hill, but it couldn’t turn the roped-down blue and white sails of the decorative windmill, on whose curved interior walls there were photos and explanations about the history of the Greek church and community in Oakland, which goes back a century and involves eminent domain and 980 (take it down).
Having forgotten to make plans to meet up with other families, it was just us: two parents and two kids, fries, some calamari, a lot of lamb, and a glass of a really good Assyrtiko blend, all holding our napkins down against the wind, with strangers doing the same.
The organizers had seemingly gotten ahold of my father’s old cassette tape, “Miscellaneous Greek Music,” which he had recorded off of some radio program, since that’s what was piped out for the first couple hours. We bought a god’s eye bracelet for my daughter, which she immediately broke and so went to sit sadly in shrubbery until Greek donuts were promised. The children got bored and restless after lunch and shopping and sweets and the dancing wasn’t going to start for another hour, so we waited just long enough for the live musicians to replace the recording. I danced with my daughter to their escalating speed for a delightful ten minutes, and then we went down the hill back home.
Something about missing my father, something about the simulacrum of culture, something about memory and the layers of ruins in Athens. Something about a candle-light procession from midnight mass on one hill and hiking among red poppies to the Parthenon on another. Something about my grandfather changing his name from Constantine to George in 1944 like the new name would read as less Greek. Something about the festival starting in 1972, right around when the wave of ethnic studies emerging from the civil rights movement reached European-descended communities who decided to fuck off from white bread whiteness too. Something about Easter celebrations with Armenians for colonized-by-the-Ottoman-Empire solidarity. Something about braiding loaves and folding grape leaves for the annual Greek Feasts my parents threw when I was a kid, when all our friends came out, when we played the tape, “Miscellaneous Greek Music.” Something about how we did it all again the next year. Maybe there was lamb. I don’t remember.
