I had dinner with friends recently, who were much younger than me, but we talked about a common experience: Their parents had come to America and worked very hard, my parents had come to America fifty years ago and done the same; they appreciated their parents and their grit and sacrifice, I include my parents in the Greatest Generation that Tom Brokaw talked about and that was certainly braver than our own.
And yet my friends had a communication problem with their parents (nothing serious, just the usual generation gap, immigration-style). And here I am middle-aged and unless I assure my parents when I visit that I will get a real job someday and with benefits, they still won’t believe I’m really grown up (which means, sad to say, they never will).
They are fearful of our career choices, for sure (How much money does it make? You’re going to do what in television? How long are you going to keep going to graduate school?). But they might be even more fearful that the ties that bound us to them and our heritage are slipping. How many of us speak Greek? How many of us send our kids, or will send them, to Greek school? How many of us go to church, except for weddings and funerals and Easter? (As our priest reminds us every Easter while we hide behind our candles on the steps of the church). How many of us go to Greece regularly, will ever visit the native village, will be content now with marriage only to a Greek and have many Greek children that will all go to Greek school and speak Greek and visit the relatives every summer in Greece?
More than you think, Baba and Mama. Kids are going to Greece to visit, and discovering the chorio and loving it, and loving the music, and loving the food, and taking Greek studies in college, if not Greek school. And they are packing all the new Greek restaurants and clubs that are sprouting everywhere in America where they can share the buzz with all the other kids (of all ages) who are discovering that being Greek is cool, hip and a unique birthright we got from, who else? the Greatest Generation.
Dimitri C. Michalakis
