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a lamb and a goat

When people talk about “coming of age” they’re often thinking of their first sexual experiences. But my “coming of age” was closely tied to a lamb and a goat—technically, a kid.

It was the week before Easter and I was eleven years old. Easter is the most important holiday in the Greek Orthodox Church, with the Saturday night service preceding Easter Sunday being the holiest ceremony of all. We had been observing the forty days of Lent by not eating any animal products or anything that had had blood in it—no meat, no dairy, no eggs. We could eat shrimp and other shellfish but not “fin” fish. Mostly, we kids subsisted on a diet of peanut butter and honey sandwiches, vegetables, and a few Greek staples like taramosalata.

One afternoon, my father disappeared in our trusty Ford LTD station wagon. When he returned, he summoned me.

“Let’s go to the barn and get the wheelbarrow,” he instructed.

I followed along while he wheeled our blue, beat-up wheelbarrow from the garage-sized shed (which we called “the barn”) back to our car. The rear window was already lowered, and now he reached inside to unlatch the tailgate. Inside were a couple of burlap sacks. Wriggling around on top of the sacks were two animals, lying on their sides.

“What are these?” I asked him, still not sure what to make of the situation.

“These are baby animals,” he replied, without a hint of sarcasm.

There were a lamb and a goat, hogtied. First, we lifted the kid and put it in the wheelbarrow. It was thrashing around as much as it could, voicing its displeasure with all sorts of bleats and shrieks, the likes of which I’d never heard before. We wheeled the goat into the backyard, deposited it on the grass, and went back to get the lamb.

When both animals were in the backyard, my father said, “Go get a knife.”

Thinking nothing of it, I raced inside to get a knife and presented it to my father. In one swift motion, my father cut the ties that bound the goat’s legs. Up it sprang, and off it ran like a shot. He did the same with the lamb and, again, I was surprised by the speed at which the animal jumped up and scampered away.

Somehow, I hadn’t yet made the connection between the animals in my yard and the meat that I had eaten all my life. All I knew was that Daddy had brought the farm home.

We called the rest of the family outside. The two animals raced around the yard with we kids chasing after them. My mother, concerned that we would catch some kind of disease, shouted to us repeatedly not to touch them. When she wasn’t shouting at us, she was shouting at my father, expressing her displeasure with the situation. My father, meanwhile, could not have been more pleased.

We called up the cousins and invited them over to see the animals. Fifteen of our cousins lived nearby and were present at every family function we hosted. I was the oldest of the pack and the leader. The fifteen of us ran around the yard, trying to catch the lamb and the goat. Every time, we came up empty-handed. We threw balls to the animals, trying to teach them to play fetch, but they just ignored us and bounded away.

The aunts and uncles, along with my grandmother, watched the scene and laughed at the chaos. All the while, my mother continued to shout at us, “Don’t touch the animals! Don’t touch them!” as the lamb and the goat baahed and bleated and tried to keep as far away from us as possible.

It was starting to get late, so we all went inside for dinner—we weren’t allowed to eat outside because my mother was afraid the animals would bite one of us. When we were all stuffed to the gills, the cousins went home and I went out to check on the animals. It was dark and I couldn’t find them. I ran inside to get my father and he came with a flashlight. We searched all around the yard. My mother was shouting at us for letting the animals escape. Finally, we found them, huddled on their knees down in the dirt, hidden away between a couple of trees and the stacks of firewood that lined our back fence. I guess they were cold and had sought shelter.

Every day