Word: motheral
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...grandmother spoke only Greek. Stelian and Michael had a second language they could use when they did not want their schoolmates to understand them (as Dukakis even now uses Greek with his aide Nick Mitropoulos when he does not want reporters to know what they are saying). His mother told Michael the Greek myths when he was a child. He thought there was something special about being a Greek, and there is. Precisely because he lacked the rub of real Greeks around him in the playground, being Greek was internalized as a concept more prescriptive than descriptive. When he first...
...mother and father met because of their Greek ties. Euterpe Boukis' brother told her there was a handsome Greek in a visiting company of college players who had acted Euripides' Hippolytus. She met, briefly, the man who played the lead role and who was on his way back to college. He marked in his mind this schoolgirl for his bride, a typically Greek way of deciding, and came back for her after he finished his studies. Panos Dukakis was an Anatolian Greek (from the region of Troy), and his parents were from Lesbos...
...Swarthmore, says, "He was born to rule." He was always the Inevitable Michael. Things fall into place for him as by plan; he does not have to make any frantic effort to pass marker after marker on his privately charted marathon. Whether his actual first words were, as his mother likes to remember, monos mou, "all by myself," they have become the memory that gives her son his identity...
...older brother, who did first all the things that Michael rapidly did better. But Stelian was soft, gentle and more social, vulnerable. He was partly a boyhood role model for Michael and partly a competitor to be surpassed (as friends have been since Sandy Cohen's day). Their mother admits that the boys, though close and loving, were intense in their rivalry, and Michael, the younger, was the eventual winner in every arena...
...stars came out of that town." But in 1951 the predominating star was a senior people already thought of as the Inevitable Michael. He was president of the honor society, good at sports, a trumpeter in the band. "Whatever it was, he ran for it," according to his mother. When he was rated only as the equal of his girlfriend, Sandy Cohen (Bakalar), in French, Michael found out this was because of her superior accent, and he practiced his pronunciation. He did not like losing, even to friends. He signed her yearbook, with a parting flourish, in French. The accent...