Saturday night the wife, the child, and I wandered up to Seattle for the forty-seventh annual Saint Demetrios Greek Festival. The friend D. was celebrating his fifty-first annual celebration of his birth into the world. The overlap of the two events and many worlds they encompass—Greek, non-Greek, terrestrial, celestial, and so many more—made for an interesting evening.
We had Greek food—gyros, Greek fries, roast lamb sandwiches, Alfa lager, loukoumades, baklava. We watched Greek dancers. We watched the child dance on stage with other children. We listened to live Greek music—vocals, clarinet, accordion, drums, guitar. We helped look for chairs that were becoming available, in order to commandeer them for our table. We watched the friend D. open his various gifts, mostly books—
The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders,
The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald,
Our Ecstatic Lives by Steve Erickson.
We wandered as our group of people grew to twenty or so, a small enclave in the midst of hundreds. We encountered and chatted with a person with which I attended high school. We marveled at stained glass windows of the four Gospel writers. We viewed ikons of Mary and Jesus and the various saints. We smelled the scents of souvlaki and moussaka as it wafted through the church grounds.
We returned to the table of the friend D.'s birthday celebration and bid him farewell, as we headed back to the car for our drive home, the mystical space and time of Saint Demetrios Greek Festival still echoing in our very beings.
Alfa Hellenic Beer, a Pale Lager by Athenian Brewery (Heineken)
