Room at the top of the world tonight

We took a little trip to Memphis last week, to renew my green card (so Patrick can't threaten to have me deported anymore). We used to make that run all the time, back when I was a brand new immigrant, just another bra-less Canadian hippie chick, coming to take all the good two-dollar-an-hour waitressing jobs from decently underwired Americans.

I'm not the stranger to these-here parts that I was then, but crossing the Mississippi river still feels mythic to me, every time. My passing fling with America has turned out to be the enduring romance of my life.



I had to report to the immigration office bright and early Thursday morning for my biometrics, a word that means fingerprinting and leads me to believe that there are Trekkies working high up within the Department of Homeland Security. What do you think the probability was that the guy in line next to me would be from the same New Brunswick town that I was born in? As it happened, one hundred per cent. If my life were a movie, I swear, no one would buy it. It's just too far-fetched in places.

I walked out 30 minutes later, a shiny new extension sticker on my card, and we headed straight to the zoo. I brought the kids there once, in 2006.



The years are going so fast.



That time, we stayed at a Super 8 motel on the sketchy side of Memphis. This time we stayed at a very chic downtown loft apartment, belonging to one of Patrick's clients. People are incredibly nice to us. If we measured our net worth by dollars alone, it's hardly been a skyrocketing climb over the years. But we've accumulated other kinds of wealth: children, friends, careers, history. I felt very rich that night, watching the boys swim in the rooftop pool, the mighty Mississippi shining beside us in the moonlight.





When I looked down from skygazing, I realized that Patrick had been taking my picture. I pantomimed sucking in my tummy, and smiled at my once-upon-a-time gypsy lover, thinking of the free-wheeling vagabonds we used to be. You'd never know it, to look at us. I'm sure in the eyes of the few twentysomethings who shared the rooftop garden with us, we were profoundly middle aged. A mom with her hair in a bun, sitting on the edge of the pool, watching the children, a dad wearing reading glasses, reclining in a chair, holding up his iPhone.

"Lord of all you survey," I teased.

He smiled back. Sometimes it feels like we are kids in a game of make-believe together, only pretending to be grown ups, the kind of people who are on top of things, whose papers are all in order. But sometimes it feels like the wishing star fairy came down while we were sleeping and made us real.

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Beautiful Mess

I've lived in America for thirteen years. I still have days when I think, that's it, we're through. Who could live with a country like this?

Then I wake up some mornings to the smell of pie baking, and she's gone and dressed all the little brown kids as pilgrims, and the little white kids as Indians, and it's all so sweetly absurd and sincere, that I fall in love all over again, and go on believing all the promises I know she'll keep breaking.

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Cannonball

I should have started work an hour and a half ago, but Mondays...what are you gonna do? So a quick update before I get down to it.

Summer is officially underway. The kids got out of school June 5, and their nanny started last week. She shows up at 8 every morning, and I run past her to one of several coffee shops that are serving as satellite office space this summer. I write all morning and come home at noon. Leaving aside the utter lack of financial security or benefits, crushing pressure, and strangling attacks of self-doubt, I have to say that it totally beats a straight job.

Any of you keeping up with me on twitter know that we have made our vacation plans: we leave in two weeks to drive 5,000 miles to Newfoundland and back. It's utter madness. But it's been thirteen years since I left home, and there's a part of me that wants to feel the distance, know the revolutions of the wheel and the distance spanned. Something feels right about making this trek while I'm writing my way back to the beginning of my American life.

Expect stories. And send survival tips.


Back to it.

P.S. I'm giving away a wonderful summer book for girls of all ages on Noteworthy this week. Go enter.

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Forcefields Down

It was just she and I in the waiting room of the optometrist's office. We sat down one seat apart and pulled out our mobile devices, electronic umbilici, connecting us to our children, mothers, mates, friends, colleagues, calendars. The connections we've chosen to nourish.

What if we were stuck here by ourselves, I wondered. Just us, the receptionist, and the Bass Angler spring catalog strewn on the chair between us? Would we make contact? Small talk? It was late in the afternoon. Small talk with strangers costs energy. I was glad not to have to spend any. I checked my email, mapped my son's bike route to a playdate, read Facebook updates.

"Okay, Kyran, come with me." I startled. I am old enough to have grown accustomed to being called by my last name in waiting rooms. It felt too intimate. Fresh, was the word that came to mind, followed by, who are you, the Queen Mother? Get over yourself. But I was cool to him, trying to patch the hole in the wall before it got larger. PLEASE TURN OFF CELL PHONES the sign in the pre-exam room said. Forcefield down.

"You're a writer," he observed cheerfully, looking at my chart. There's about a three minute script that follows this opening statement, and I should get down on my knees every time and praise Jesus, Allah, Shiva and William Randolph Hearst for my lines in it. Today's performance was so lackluster, I should have been sacked on the spot, and an understudy brought out from the supply closet.

"I'm sorry," the assistant said finally, after a series of one-word answers. "I just think that's so interesting."

"No, it's okay," I stammered, totally chagrined. "It really is. It's a great gig." I peeped out through the hole in my wall and smiled, but the pre-exam was over.

"The Doctor will be with you in just a second."

***

"Is this better? "This?"

Dr. So-and-So didn't mention the writing. Usually this means they don't know/don't care. Sometimes it means they already know everything. From time to time, I encounter a stranger whose end of the conversation is so conspicuously absent of certain standard small talk questions, I know they've probably read the blog.

I doubt Dr. So-and-So has, but I wondered, because his conversation was pointedly political. Bookended by discussion of summer vacation plans, punctuated by refrains of "this better or this," he let me know exactly where he stood on the automobile industry bailout, taxes, Mexico, and government in general. Did he know he was talking to a bleeding heart liberal? Because it sort of sounded like maybe he did.

Earlier today, I posted a twitter update expressing my alarm over extremist elements in this country breeding hatred and violence, prompted by yesterday's murder of a doctor in his church, allegedly as an act of protest against abortion. Depending when you read this, that thought may still be displayed in the sidebar. It's hyperbole to suggest that events leading up to the Rwanda genocide in 1994 are comparable to what's happening here with ultra-conservative broadcasters, record sales of firearms and one, deranged act of violence. You could argue I was spreading a little terror on my own.

The fact is, I don't listen to those radio shows. I don't read those websites. I don't know personally know anyone, pro-life or pro-choice, arms or no arms, who thinks socialists are coming for their guns and that a person who shoots someone like that is anything but unhinged. I don't hang out, online or in the flesh, with any of the people referred to as the "subculture."

I don't like that word, "subculture." It's too close to "subhuman." It's the dehumanizing of others that allows events like Sunday's murder, and genocide, and all of man's cruelty to man, to happen. And our marvelous electronic umbilici that connect us ever more with those we choose, keep us ever more apart from those we don't choose. Make them ever more "other."

Someday soon we won't have to go to an office to have our eyes examined. We won't have to make small talk with strangers in the waiting room, or the assistants, or doctors. We will be buffered even more than we are now from people whose appearance, mannerisms or beliefs make us uncomfortable. We won't have to push through our own pre-occupations to smile and connect with someone we don't know. We won't have to be confronted with the humanity of someone whose politics are threatening to our own values. We won't have to realize that they still love their families and take vacations and crave lobster like we do. There will fewer and fewer occasions for us to stray outside our chosen communities, to question our own certainties, to find what binds "us" to "them." Unless we try.

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Flies in the Annointment

For the first time in three presidential elections since I've been in the U.S., I accompanied Patrick to the polls as an "international observer" and watched him cast a ballot that his parents could never have imagined.

It was thrilling. We went home, turned on the television, and pretty much stayed glued to it until midnight. The kids, too, camped out on an air mattress on the family room floor. My nine-year-old called out the projections as they came in, state by state.

"All the blue is in the north," he observed early on.

And therein lies one of two flies in the annointment.

As jubilant as we are over Obama's win, I'm deeply disappointed in the South.

I know there are people all over this country who voted Republican for the right reasons, but I've been here too long to kid you or myself that the uniformly red overlay of the old confederacy is not largely about race.

It'd be like trying to tell you the Confederate cause was essentially about states' rights. There are people here who will tell you that with a straight face. And in the next breath, deny that they are affected by the racial baggage of this region's heritage.

All of us -- black and white -- are shackled together by that legacy of denial and shame. As long as we keep trying to get away from it, and each other, nobody is getting anywhere. It's like watching partners in a three legged race try to outrun each other.

I think I will have more to say about that in the days to come.

The other disappointment is in the various votes that rolled back civil rights for same-sex families, including a proposition in Arkansas that denies such families the opportunity to serve as foster parents.

I have such strong feelings on this topic because of the value I place on marriage as a legal and societal institution. People who love each other will find a way to be together, believe me. What possible justification is there for leaving them outside, no roof over their heads?

You want to know what weakens and violates the sanctity of my marriage? Denying it to people who love each other as much as we do.

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Not enough.

My friends and neighbors have been early voting for weeks. I've been vicariously experiencing their encounters in line, their emotions as they cast their ballots, their great hope for the future of this country. I've been so caught up in it, I felt like I was really part of it.

I almost forgot that I'm not one of them. Until this morning, when it hit me.

If you ever stayed home on prom night, if you ever missed your ride to somewhere wonderful, if you are always the bridesmaid, never the bride, then you know how it feels to be me this election morning, driving past everyone else lined up to cast their vote. A lump lodged itself in my throat at the first polling station en route to school, and it gets lumpier by the hour.

America, I'm so proud to be here today.

But for the first time in over ten years, just being here doesn't feel like enough.

Cherish your vote today. I'll hold your bouquet.

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Through the Glass Darkly

I don't write much in the way of opinion on politics or religion here. Partly because I have a sick need for everyone to like me (OR EVERYBODY DIES). And partly because we live in a time of such polarity, a stated opinion tends to assign people to one camp or the other, and I think my humanity and yours transcends that. I want people with many points of view to always feel welcome here. God forbid I should ever occupy a space, on or offline, where my only discourse is with people who think and believe as I do. Don't even get me started on Olberman, Kos, Fox News or "Christian" talk radio.

But believe me, I do have opinions. And in my opinion, if Jesus of Galilee were to run for office in this election, Sarah Palin would be standing at the podium with a hammer in one hand and a box of nails in the other, ranting about every traitorous tax collector, radical and prostitute he ever broke bread with.

(No, I'm not comparing Barack Obama to Jesus. In such a vacuum of leadership, both sides need to be on guard against messianic craving. I just think people who live by the sword of religious self-righteousness should be prepared to fall on it.)

Earlier in the primaries, I took comfort in believing that even my personal worst case scenario, a McCain presidency, would be okay. I don't believe that anymore. I believe Senator McCain crossed over to the dark side of ambition and power when he chose his running mate. Every new, desperate day of his waning campaign only deepens my disappointment, and strengthens my conviction that Barack Obama is the man for this precipitous moment in the history of this great country, a country that is a little more than two hundred years old, an adolescent in the life of nations.

America, it's time to lose the swagger, and come of age. Barack Obama is not and can never be, the end-all, be-all. But in him, I believe we have both the substance and the symbol to bring us — a moment late, a little breathless, but finally — into the new millennium.

I sat in my car yesterday, listening to undecided voters on the radio voice their fears about Obama. So much fear. Fear of retribution for the racial sins of the nation. Fear of losing a foothold on the middle class. Fear of annihilation. Fear of everything new, uncertain and unknown. I was literally moved to tears. My mothering heart went out to these frightened people. I wished I could sit with them and tell them all I have learned — and have had to learn over and over —about making decisions from a place of fear. What a dark and shrinking place it is from which to live, how once you consign your world view to that small and airless room, you find all the windows face out to your worst fears.

I think Sarah Palin and John McCain are trying to herd as many people into that bunker as possible. And I'm still not going to tell anyone how they must vote. But please don't cast your ballot—for anyone—from in there.

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Yes, you can.

One evening four years ago, I wandered into the family room where the television happened to be on, and someone I'd never seen or heard of before happened to be speaking. I stood listening for a few minutes before I yelled for Patrick.

"Get in here, quick."

"What?"

"Just come."

He came in, alarmed now. "What?"

I hushed him, pointed to the screen. "That man," I said, "that man is the next President of the United States."

That man, of course, was Barack Obama, and I hope with all my heart that the prophecy of my goosebumps comes to pass.

I've been debating for several weeks now, how much to say about that here. For one thing, I can't vote in this election, so it seems a little out of line to tell anyone else how they should cast their ballot. And even if I were a citizen, if I had a platform of millions, instead of hundreds, I couldn't tell anyone how to vote. Every person must vote their conscience. This I believe to the bone.

I keep that belief tucked next to my faith that America will come around to the right thing finally, though that faith wavers at times, as it has this past week or so. I've found myself slipping into fear. Fear that slightly more than half the electorate might not believe as I do, share the values that I do, think the same as I do. I've watched more television news in the past month than I have in the past four years, and there's a direct correlation between that and the fear.

It's time to change the channel. No matter what happens in this election, we all have to wake up and live together the next day. It's not as if the losing side gets voted off the island. The ideas represented by Sarah Palin and her most ardent followers scare the hell out of me. I'm guessing mine would scare the hell out of them. But I bet if we met each other as people and neighbors, not idealogies, most of us would do alright.

Ideas are important. Ideals, too. Don't get me wrong. It's good to ask yourself what you stand for. But then it's just as important to ask if that idea is something that works offscreen, in the context of living, breathing humanity. Is it a value you can embody at ground level, in one-on-one, face-to-face, encounters with real people? What if this were an island? What if you were stuck there with people who believe differently, act differently, think differently, and you had to make it work? How would that change the way we get behind ideas?

Because this world really is an island. We really are stuck with each other. And we really we have to make it work.

I won't tell you how to vote. I know you can and do think for yourselves.

Craig Ferguson does too:



P.S. Obama people, Dwight Yoakam's version of "Let's Work Together" would make a kick-ass campaign song, don't you think? McCain people, you didn't see that. ;-)

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Talladega Knights

"I heart the State Fair. To me, it is a microcosm of America. The lights. The crowds. The excess. The crassness. The sweetness. It's teenage farmboys in wrangler jeans and straw hats. It's a little goth family eating pink cotton candy from a bag. It's a fat black baby sucking on a bottle of coke. It's two Mexican guys in shearling coats lined up at the Old West photo booth. It's rednecks with mullets and white boys with dreadlocks."

We went back to the fair on Friday. There's nothing to say about this year's excursion that I didn't cover in this essay from last year. It's comforting to know that some things remain constant and true from one year to the next.

However, I don't remember seeing this before:



That's right, kids. The carnivorous, rabid mutant donkeys are on our side.

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A Tale of Two Cities, Part I

When my parents came to Little Rock for our wedding in 1997 (more on that very soon), one of the first things they wanted to do was visit Central High.

In 1957, fifty years ago this week, nine black teenagers attempted to enroll at Central, opposed by a hostile mob and the National Guard. Federal troops were sent by President Eisenhower to enforce integration. My parents were also teenagers at the time, living in small towns in New Brunswick and Newfoundland. I don't know that either of them ever met a black person before they reached adulthood. There was a literal and cultural ocean of distance between their experience and what was happening in Little Rock, and across the American south. But Central High was as meaningful a landmark of their growing-up years as John F. Kennedy and Sputnik.

And they wanted to see it.

"Okay," I said, dubiously, "but it's down in the 'hood."

Central High, a magnificent art deco building of yellow brick, is planted squarely on the south side of I-630, the freeway that neatly slices this city into black and white. Or rather, the freeway was thrust to the north side of it, in the seventies. I've heard that local rappers call the 630 "the wall". It's a good name for it. The Wall runs east-west, an artery to get white collar workers from downtown offices to gated communities and big box stores in the western suburbs. For a couple of blocks to the north, the racial divide is slightly blurred (police responding to a break-in at the home of friends in that area told them they lived in the "transition zone"). But beyond that, north is white. South is black. It doesn't take a sociology degree to extrapolate on which side property values fall and crime rates rise. Steeply.

In 1997 the National Park Service opened the Central High Museum and Visitor Center. The city was still grappling with a gang crisis that had been the subject of a 1994 HBO documentary, Gang War: Bangin' in Little Rock. I remember scoffing when an acquaintance warned me against driving in a certain neighborhood. He was a good white liberal, a socialist and an expatriate, and I assumed he was being faecetious. Because who better to pass judgement on racial attitudes in the south than we who had never had to dwell in proximity to a sizeable, marginalized, minority population?

"I'm deadly serious, sweetheart," Nick said, his lilting Scottish accent diluted only slightly by his years in America. He drove his point home with tales of his own close encounters with random gunfire on the streets. Streets that were a short, wrong turn away from Central High.

Nonetheless, my folks wanted to see Central, and I drove them to it. My Dad was content to look around the campus, but my mother wanted to stay and visit the museum, so we dropped her off and I picked her up later.

"Why do they call it the Hood?", she asked innocently, gazing through the passenger side window at the once-gracious, turn-of-the-century homes that surround the school. I think she thought it was the official name, like something you'd see emblazoned on banners attached to lampposts. Welcome to the Historic Hood District.

I explained that it was slang for "neighborhood", and that it was synomynous with "ghetto". As we drove past boarded up doors and broken out windows, I told her what happened after Ike's troops and the international media withdrew from Central High. After one of the nine, Ernest Green, became the first African-American to graduate from Central High, the city's public schools were shut down to prevent further integration from taking place the next academic year. One year from the day the nine entered Central, Little Rock citizens voted 19,470 to 7,561 against integration. The district's schools were closed until a newly constituted school board reopened them on August 12, 1959, a "dark day," in the words of then Governor Orval Faubus.

I explained to her what "white flight" was, and how after integration, there had been an exodus of white familes to the west, and that the establishment of most of the city's private schools coincided with this era. I told her how Patrick's mother grew up around the corner from Central High, graduating with the class of '57, but that I couldn't show her the wonderful, rambling house that Patrick so warmly remembered from his childhood, because it had been torn down after the family moved his grandmother out. The neighbourhood was well into its decline by that point. I told her about gangs, and crackhouses, and drivebys.

My mother's face was crestfallen. I might as well have told her the moon landing had been faked, and we were still in Vietnam.

"What was it all for, then?" she asked. "What's changed?" I remember her voice sounding very young and small.

I turned onto the overpass to cross the ironically-named "free" way—the Wall—and headed back north. Exit here for White, here for Safe.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know."

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Tempest-tost

Mexico, 1996

The first time I attempted to come to the United States to see Patrick, I was turned back at the border. It was a wretched autumn day in 1995, shortly before my twenty-sixth birthday. I was travelling on a one way ticket, I had no cash, no job, and no idea how long I expected to stay. It hadn't occurred to either of us that these circumstances would raise an eyebrow with anyone. As the immigration officer at the Toronto airport verified them, my hands and voice shook. Not because I was making any effort to deceive him, but because I was the middle of coming completely unglued.

"Come with me, please" the officer said, and I was deposited in a waiting room, under an enormous circular wall plaque of a bald eagle, that looked like it might swoop down and eat me. I thought I was going to be sent to the gulag. My departure flight came and went. By the time I was called into an interview room, I was ready to click my heels together however many times it took to go home. The interviewing officer never got past the entry menu on his computer screen. In desperation, I blurted out my story: I was running away from home, but would turn around and go back if only he would let me.

He stared at me a long moment across his desk. Then he silently and slowly handed me back my passport, took me by the arm, and walked me back to the Canadian side of the airport. I found a bank of payphones and made two calls. One was to Patrick.

We still refer to the entire episode as "the Toronto fiasco."

Very shortly after, Patrick left Little Rock for Mexico. I had a letter from him in December. On January 16, I woke up very early in the morning, kissed everything beloved and familiar goodbye, and boarded a bus.

Five months later, we came across the border together, having completely run out of pesos. We had decided, because it was closer, that we would drive to Arkansas, stay with Patrick's family a while, and he would find work just long enough to get us back to San Miguel as soon as possible.

My first night in the United States was spent in a fleabag motel in Laredo, Texas. After coming through customs, we drove through the town in search of a cheap dinner. Huge signs everywhere advertised "GUNS BEER AMMO" in handpainted letters. After eating a fast food meal that seemed to be of obscene proportions, Patrick dropped me back at the motel, and said he was going out to buy cigarettes. You might think I am joking, or exaggerating, but I was literally afraid he would be shot if he left our room. As far as I knew from television, every United States citizen was armed to the teeth, running around shooting each other over imported vehicles, and blowing up each other in their own federal buildings (bear in mind this was pre-Columbine, pre-September 11.)

We never did make it back to San Miguel. Patrick got a job, we got an apartment, got married, had a bunch of children. I haven't the slightest regret about that. It has been good to settle.

Upon returning from Ireland last winter, I revisited those early years in America, in this post. I won't go into them here, except to say that my initial terror soon gave way to bemused detachment, and I might have stayed there, except that I became a mother to three United States citizens.

When my firstborn was very small, and I would think about sending him to school here one day, I obsessed over whether I could, in good conscience, let him recite the Pledge of Allegiance, as all American school children do. This is amusing to me on so many levels now, but at the time, the dilemma was every bit as serious as my perceived threat of random gunfire in Laredo. It wasn't until after my second child was born—when it began to dawn on me that my offspring were not me— that I realized he is the American, whatever I think about it. It's his country, his pledge.

I was beginning to warm up, little by little, to the idea of America as Americans understand it, not as the rest of the world unfortunately experiences it. I was learning about the America of Thomas Jefferson, Woody Guthrie, Martin Luther King Jr., and Katharine Lee Bates. I was starting to appreciate Leonard Cohen's take on it, as "the cradle of the best and the worst." You could peel back the onion skin forever and ever, and never get down to one, singular truth about this country. But my appreciation for the complexity of it was still intellectual.

I don't know when I crossed the emotional borderline. I only remember when I noticed that I had. I was driving my mother's car through my hometown, on September 14, 2001. I had been home for my father's funeral, and was stranded, once again, on the other side of the border from Patrick. On the CBC radio, there was a live broadcast of ceremonies in Ottawa to observe the fallen of September 11. They opened with the Canadian anthem. Then someone sang the Star Spangled Banner.

I wept with a heart that was broken. And I knew it was no longer "their" anthem. It was mine too.

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

—excerpt from "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus,
inscribed on a plaque inside the Statue of Liberty

Have a glorious fourth of July. Let freedom ring for all. Be peace.

---

To read more about my American experience, see the label below for "america". Also, read this wonderful tribute by my friend and fellow Commonwealth expat, Georgia.

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The Do Not Cross Line

I mentioned that my eldest child attended cub scout day camp a couple of weeks ago. He has been scouting for two years, during which time I have been working on my badges in

• tongue-biting
  
• conformity ( probably not going to get this one)
  
• marital blame and recrimination
  
• marital guilt-tripping

It has been character building for both of us.*

It was actually my idea to enroll him in scouts in the first place. As is often the case, I was seeking closure for unfinished business from my own childhood: in this instance, abandoning Brownies after two weeks (I just wanted the cute uniform), reneging on my duty to God, Queen and Country.

It turns out my son is not feckless at all like that. Here we are, moving up to Bear rank in the fall, and the full immersion experience of day camp did not one thing to dampen his enthusiasm for scouting. On the contrary, day camp has probably secured his devotion to scouting through his eighteenth birthday, on which date I am going to put him on a plane to my mother's home in Canada and confiscate his U.S. passport for four years. He doesn't earn it back until he has grown his hair out, pierced his tongue, and learned to snowboard.

His soul was bought with archery and b.b. guns. Real arrows. Real guns.

To help you appreciate how thrilling this was for my son, you need to understand that we prohibit any kind of gunplay in our home. Not even water pistols are allowed (although the boys do have water shooters that do not imitate handguns or automatic weapons; "ray-gun" styling is acceptable). I do not prevent my children from playing with their friends' toy guns when they are visiting in someone else's home, but I am very comfortable explaining that it is not something we do in ours. My kids are the gunplay equivalent of social smokers.

Our family weapons policy has evolved over the years. When my firstborn was a baby, and I was still relatively new to the country, I was fanatical. Not only did we not permit toy guns; we didn't even talk about them. A gun was that-which-cannot-be-named. One day, when my son was two, he built an L-shape with some Legos and pointed it at me. I squinted at him.

"What's that?"

"It's a pffffer," he said. He didn't know the word for gun.

I promptly confiscated it.

"No pffffing," I said, firmly.

As he grew older, and our social network began to widen, it began to dawn on me that denial was probably neither a realistic or effective approach. We live in America, in the South. Parents who don't want their children to have sex, or smoke cigarettes or use drugs and alcohol, need to talk to their kids about sex, cigarettes, drugs and alcohol. I needed to talk to mine about guns. Early, and often.

Let me back up a bit and explain that I am not against guns, per se. And when I say guns here, I am referring to handguns and automatic weapons. Guns designed for killing and wounding humans. I have nothing at all against skillful and responsible hunting of animals for food. My Canadian brother-in-law is a hunter, and my six-year-old nephew accompanies him during rabbit season. I have no more problem with this than I do with taking my own sons fishing. We only keep what we eat, and it is an occasion for them to experience and participate consciously in the natural environment. The fish is a hunter also.

Understand that I come from a place that is mainly rural. It's true I have got zero tolerance for the gun lobby, but you do not want to get me started on the anti-hunting movement, either. I wish all the zealots would just cancel each other out and let the rest of us go along being reasonable. The food chain is a circle, not a hierarchy. My father's ashes are part of the riverbed that hatches the trout his grandson catches. And those trout descended from the ones my father brought to our table.

I think my attitude toward guns is representative of the majority in Canada, and this is one of those areas where I still identify with being Canadian. Canada is not a country borne of revolution (it was more by committee, which bequeaths its own issues, but that's for another day). The beloved Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution sounds nuts eccentric to most of us. Like some archaic law from the 18th century that hasn't made it off the books yet. The entrenchment of bearing of arms as a right, not a privilege, seems about as relevant as prohibitions against witchcraft.

If only it were as harmless.

In the past week, two fatal shootings of children by adults took place in this state. The first killing was of a twelve year old boy in West Memphis by a police officer. The child was running away with a toy gun that the police took to be real. The second killing was of a nine year old boy by a man whose house he and some other children had been throwing rocks at.

This is why we do not confuse guns with play in my home. It is not so much that I worry my children will confuse the two, but because the society we live in is, itself, confused. In a country where an armed police officer could find it plausible that a twelve year old child was also armed and dangerous, in a country where unreasonable people have guns within arms reach, in a country where it is necessary to post "no weapons" signs on elementary schools and public libraries, I feel it is simply not appropriate. I keep toy guns out of my children's hands in protest as much as from a desire to teach safety and responsibility.

It's largely about the context. In in another society, in another time, I might view plastic pistols and M-16s the same way I look at plastic swords: an acceptable prop for a child's warrior play. Not in this present one. And as much as I respect responsible hunters, and soldiers who fight for a just cause, and police who really protect, I would happily ban real guns as well as the toy ones, if it would guarantee that another bullet would never enter a child's body, ever again.

However, it wouldn't and it won't. My children have to grow up in the world as it is, not as I wish it would be. So I have drawn and redrawn my line. I never thought, when my son was two years old, that in six years, I would stand behind him on a shooting range, listening to a grown man in shorts and knee socks barking out orders like it was a private militia camp in Utah. I can't say I was entirely comfortable with it (though the shorts and knee socks were arguably the most disturbing aspect). But I didn't feel like it was contradicting or compromising any of the values I've tried to impart at home. If anything, I hope the yellow Do Not Cross tape, the safety goggles, even the guy with the General Patton complex, all conveyed the seriousness of this sort of play to my son. He's an intelligent, cautious child. I trust, given good information, he will make responsible choices when it comes to guns.

How I wish that were enough to protect him from them.

---

*I want to make very clear that although the Boy Scouts of America gives me plenty of grist for humor on my blog, and although I object to their exclusion of honest homosexual people from leadership, and the wearing of shorts with knee socks by full grown people, I think it is a great organization with mostly admirable values, where the good far outweighs the objectionable. And besides, my son loves it.

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They go on over your legs,not on your head

Living in America is like spending the summer with your crazy rich cousin. Who happens to be Britney Spears. When you talk to the folks back home, everyone wants the scoop. Everybody demands an explanation for the latest shenanigan. They rattle the newspapers at you and ask just what the hell she was thinking. And how bad is it, really?

I can't tell you how ironic it is to find my self in the position of apologist for the U.S., but I try my best to represent what gets lost in transmission. It's complicated, I tell them. There's much more going on that what the media represents: more diversity, more intelligence, more self-awareness. Yeah, Brit's a little mixed up. But she's a good kid, at heart. There's some management issues.

Georgia tells me it's the same whenever she travels back home to Australia. Enquiring minds, the world over, want to know.

Some of this righteous indignation springs from genuine concern, fear, and moral objection. But it often comes garnished with a twist of spite. If the USA is a gal who goes clubbing with no panties, the Commonwealth nations are stuck home reading a book and wearing granny knickers.

They especially revel in fabled American ignorance of world and domestic affairs. They love to cite surveys that show some enormous percentage of the U.S. population unable to locate the Atlantic Ocean or Washington, D.C. on a map—the "dumb blonde" jokes of the global village.

There was a weekly fake news show in Canada that had a wildly popular segment, "Talking to Americans." They would film Americans in the street congratulating Canada on joining North America, and state politicians imploring their northern neighbor to preserve the "National Igloo". It was hysterical, but I would wonder, who are these people? Not the Americans I know. It's true my circle of friends and acquaintances may not be a true representive sample (presumably, somebody here had to have voted for George Bush), but I've always had a hard time believing those surveys weren't, like the comedy show segment, a set-up. Ask me on camera to endorse the Ukraine's strawbale house of legislature, and I would probably go along.

Then I went to Boy Scout day camp with my son last week. Having kids is consciousness-raising for many reasons, one of which is that it occasionally forces you out of your social comfort zone. During the activity on "Collections", one of the children asked his grandfather, a heavyset white man in his fifties, what building was portrayed on a U.S. postage stamp. The man had no clue. "It's the Lincoln Memorial," I said. It was a tiny stamp, and I was prepared to extend the benefit of doubt and allow that it may have been his eyes and not his mind that was dim. But then he turned around and proceeded to entertain several of the cub scouts by talking loudly in a badly faked East Indian accent, while a couple of kids who clearly had ancestors on the Indian peninsula looked on.

Too bad the right to vote isn't a merit badge. Then everybody (not just immigrants like me) would have to earn it.

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Not Dead to Me

Everytime my girlfriend Georgia goes home to Australia for a visit; I hold my breath and cross my fingers and hope and pray she doesn't decide to stay. When she does come back, and is quiet and confused and a little angry for a few days, I understand exactly how she feels. When I am having a "moment" and am asking myself how the hell I got here, and exactly how much longer do I intend to give this mad experiment, I ring Georgia up, and she makes me tea. She is my consulate, my embassy, my foreign attache, my commonwealth partner, my writing partner, my stylist and my compatriot in expatriotism. Here she is:

THE REASON I AM STILL IN AMERICA

The reason I am still in America is the west.
The wide open skies which Indians read as they fished in the churning rivers,
after riding through mountains and into chartreuse valleys dotted with wild flowers.
The reason I am still in America is that cities like New York and Chicago exist and
house art by Franz Kline and Twombly and Rothenberg.
There is music in these cities, music that swells my heart.
Jazz is in America.
Zydeco is in America.
The reason I am still in America is because I like anonymity.
“You can be anyone and anything in America,” my father said, “People give you a go.”
I like black people.
I like their bodies and their walks. I like their attitudes.
I feel privileged and alive when they speak to me.
Sometimes I am scared of them, like in Baltimore when I walked downtown, and they are on their stoops, smoking and staring, and watching me pass.
“You better slow down or you might take off!” They slap their thighs and laugh.
Even that I liked. Later not at the time.
The reason I am still in America is because bears are in America.
I like moose.
Sometimes I miss Kangaroos but not after sighting an elk herd.
The reason I am still in America is because I have to learn to two step and salsa and because my favorite song was, Springsteen’s, The River (after which I named my child.)
Al Green lives in America.
I like the fact that no one calls me mate or Sheila or says, “good-on-ya.”
I even like y’all.
The reason I am still in America is because all my favorite writers are American.
How could I live without knowing where Carson McCuller’s heart got lonely or where Fitzgerald dined or was depressed for that matter.
I had to eat sardines on saltines like Faulkner had Lena do in the haze of the humid south.
I had to drink mint juleps in Kentucky on Derby day.
I had to be in a band that let me play the Banjo and were besotted with Harry Smith’s folk album.
You can not cry when you play the banjo.
The reason I am still in America is because I don’t like pessimism or the tall poppy syndrome that people are ill with back home.
I do not like men who think that surfing is all there is and women should bring them beer.
I am still here because I am hoping to become Hispanic by osmosis.
I want to be called Juanita and have long dark hair and olive skin.
I want to make tamales from corn that I grow.
I need to cross the Tallahatchie Bridge. I need to eat oyster po-boys near a Bayou.
I am in America because I believe that the people can still be heard here.
That democracy will triumph once more.
The reason I am still in America is because you are here.

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Tulips and Poppies, with Narcissis

Daily blogging is turning me into the Will Ferrell character in Stranger than Fiction. You know, the guy who wakes up one morning to hear his life being narrarated. Everything menial thing I do, I can hear myself blogging it--the yard work, the juice glass of beaujolais, listening to Joni Mitchell, peeling some potatoes--it's all fair game.

Perhaps it's to make me seem more interesting to myself. Peeling the potatoes doesn't seem so mundane if one can pretend it is an element of a much vaster montage. Not just peeling potatoes but introducing a note of earthiness and authenticity to the overall narrative.

Like I wasn't self-conscious enough to begin with.

What I miss about being able to go quiet for several days in a row is the fallow time. Being able to let the events and thoughts of the day break down, compost a bit, before sending up a shoot. Being on a 24-hour clock feels forced, like putting tulip bulbs in the refrigerator to trick them into thinking it is spring. They come through with the show, but you miss the context. It's rather sterile.

Also, (and I know I'm whining now) I'm constantly on the spot. Usually by the time I sit down to write a post, I have a pretty good idea of where I want to begin, if not a burning desire to make a point. I am three paragraphs into this entry, and I still haven't got the slightest idea what to write about.

I said yesterday I would write about Rembrance Day (Veteran's Day in the U.S). My mother sent me photographs of she and my sister's family attending the wreath-laying at the memorial in my hometown. I remember those ceremonies so vividly. I should. I attended them, along with every other able-bodied resident, every November 11 until I left home. My cousin wrote that there are three WW I vets left in Canada. The youngest is 105. I remember the few Great War soldiers from my childhood Rembrance Day observances. I'm sure I thought they were a hundred years old then, but they must have been in their seventies and eighties. The World War II veterans were still pre-retirement age. My best friend's father had served during that war.

Wednesday, I was listening to Terry Gross interview Daniel Mendelsohn on the book he wrote about tracing the last days of his Ukrainian Jewish relatives, victims of the Holocaust. As they were talking, it struck me anew that these events happened in my own parent's lifetime. In modern times. They happened to modern people. It's not like looking back at the Black Death, and be able to say, whew, thank goodness we know something about germs now. There is nothing--not one fundamental thing--we know now in our time that the world didn't know then. They had vaccination and psychoanalysis and the theory of relativity and existentialism and religious reformation, and most of that century's greatest minds had already weighed in. Arguably, the only thing that sets us apart from humanity then is that we have the benefit of hindsight. We know it could happen, because it did. Does that translate into a course for prevention? I think about Rwanda and Darfur, and I wonder.

Lest we forget. That was the Veteran's motto. We wore felted plastic poppies all week to show that we wouldn't. I wonder if they are still as widely worn at home. I never see one here. I never hear about wreath-laying ceremonies here. The only way I know it is Veterans' or Memorial Day is when SALE! appears after those words in a flyer that comes in the morning paper. When it comes to the gravitas of war, Americans seem to be either deeply uneasy or totally cavalier. It is always macho bluster with them, whether they are pro- or anti-. I almost never see or hear anyone discuss war without being, themselves, aggressive.

To acknowledge--to feel-- the grief and solemnity of war is to acknowledge vulnerability. It is to give voice to our collective regret. It admits human failing. Those are the messages I got as a child from those dignified and ancient-seeming warriors who used to come and salute their fallen comrades around the town square. That was what was transmitted in the long moment of silence. Those were my heros.

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Remembrance


This is a photograph of a Memorial Day procession in St. John's, taken two years ago. It accompanied my proto-blog, a travel journal I kept of that trip. In the entry for that day, I mused about the disparity (and irony) between the way war is remembered in the U.S. and at home.

I have more to say about that later. For now, here is the link to that entry, and my training blog. Because I think we are at the point in our relationship where I'm
ready to take you home. :)

(oh, and if you feel so moved, please come back here to comment--I rarely if ever go back to that blog)

I'm off to estate sail. Check in with me later.

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That Which is Good and Right About America



My husband would say it's "John-by-god-Wayne", just to get a rise out of me, but the indisputable truth is that cheese dip best represents all that is good and right, noble and true about this great and demented country of his.

And not just any cheese dip. I'm talking Ro-tel & Velveeta cheese dip. Manna of the trailer park. Do not--I mean, don't even--email me from anywhere outside the USA to tell me that the dip your local Mexican eatery serves up is more authentic than this, like I don't know what real queso is. In the first place, unless you are emailing from Mexico, the menu at your local eatery bears little resemblance to anything really Mexican, no matter how many little painted skeletons are adorning the place. In the second place, I'm not talking about Mexican cheese dip or, more properly, Tex-Mex cheese dip (going to Mexico and asking for cheese dip will get you the same look I imagine you'd get for requesting sweet and sour chicken balls in Beijing). I am sorry to get testy, but a few months ago I posted how there's nothing like a southern peach, and y'all got all defensive on my ass, like I was turning my back on all the other fruits and nations of the world. Let us not compare peaches and apples, people. I stand by my words: there is nothing like a southern peach. Or Ro-tel cheese dip. Deal with it.

I have been scouring the blogosphere for good Irish blogs, in anticipation of our trip in the new year. The other day, I came across Cashmere Boots, a Southern Californian living in Dublin. She was cringing over a news report that Texans were experimenting with fried coke. I say, power to them. This is the kind of envelope-pushing that both put a man on the moon and brought us pancake-on-a-stick and it needs to be celebrated.

I don't have the cringe factor. Americans don't embarass me in the world way that they can other Americans. And they don't frighten me, the way they do everyone else in the world, because living here among them, instead of being on the outside looking in, gives a more nuanced perspective than one gets from the media. I learned in very short order that the country and the nation are two very separate entities, and usually it is the latter that gets projected onto the global village tv screen.

My husband would like me to demonstrate just a little more apprehension. He will rattle off conspiracy theories and civil rights violations and gets frustrated that I am not more visibly upset. It' s not that I am unconcerned about these things, it's just that I grew up in a culture that was virulently anti-american, and George W. Bush notwithstanding, I have yet to see anything as bad or as shocking as what I was brought up to believe about the place. Patrick acts like it's news that the American military-industrial complex is inclined toward facism. That power corrupts is not exactly earthshattering to me. I am still marvelling, ten years later, at how much works in this country, in spite of it.

Cheese dip, for instance. In cheese dip, I trust.

Now, in case you skipped the link above, go and watch Jon-by-god-Stewart discuss pancake-on-a-stick. Also deserving of the title of this post. Jon Stewart, too.

Filed under: america

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A Pilgrim's Progress



Thanksgiving is coming. I can tell, because I am spending hours and hours on ebay shopping for a new me. This new me is the sort of person whose home will not only be clean and sparkling come the 23rd of November, but whose table will be so splendidly adorned with just the right vintage set of dishes--won at the last minute for a mere 1.99--as to draw the eye completely away from the unpainted trim, the ratty second-hand furnishings, the scribbled-on walls, the overhead lighting fixture with its several burnt out bulbs, and the ballpoint pen jammed under the dimmer switch to keep the rest lit.

Another reliable harbinger of the season is the proliferation of glossy four-color sales flyers in my mailbox, assuring me it will take much, much more than a few pieces of Franciscan or Stangl pottery to make me suitably thankful this year. It will take a moving truck of new furniture, stainless steel appliances, embroidered sweaters for all of us, and --this was in the Sam's Club flyer today--a Cessna Citation jet for $2,734,000 (I bet I can get it $500,000 cheaper on ebay).

This uniquely American holiday serves as a measure of my own assimilation into this culture. What I knew about it from growing up in Newfoundland was that it comes a month or so after the Canadian thanksgiving weekend, and that it often falls on my birthday, as it will this year. I didn't know then that the Canadian version (note my usage of the "small t") is quite a pallid imitation of the original. I guess someone noticed that our neighbors to the south were getting to feast on turkey and pies and thought we ought to follow suit, only, let's do it in October, so that we will have room for turkey and pies again on Christmas. Anything for a long weekend. I believe this is what keeps Canada in the Commonwealth. Hate to lose the Queen's birthday.

Without getting into a long exegesis of British colonialism and its aftermath, I will just point out the pointlessness of a Newfoundlander adopting a American custom adopted by Canada, our reluctantly adopted government. Take my word for it, a lot was lost in translation.

My first impression of the real thing was, that's a hell of a lot of food. That was a common refrain from me that first year, going right back to my very first meal on American soil, in a Wendy's in Laredo. By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, I'd had six months of supersizing, but I was still shocked. The turkey, gravy and pumpkin pie were familiar, but I was out of my depth after that. In addition to pumpkin, there was apple, chocolate and pecan pie. Instead of stuffing, there was an enormous pan of cornbread dressing, which had chicken baked into it, and made a main dish by itself. There was the marshmallow-topped sweet potato casserole and the french-fried onion-topped green bean casserole, both of which were totally alien to me. It seemed excessive, and redundant. Why the big feast and get-together, only to have to pull off a reprise at Christmas?

I didn't get it.

I was so focussed on the food, it took me a couple more years to become aware of the sentiment attached to Thanksgiving. This doesn't come over in the Canadian translation at all. Here in America, people practically kill themselves trying to get home for the holiday. In Canada, you have a big dinner with whoever happens to be around, and since it is a long weekend, your plans might involve travel, but it's not the emotional imperative it is in the States.

About five or six years into my residency, I became initiated in the day-after-Thanksgiving shopping custom, where people practically kill themselves and each other trying to get into Target before dawn, to catch the earlybird special. One thing I have particularly come to like about Thanksgiving is that it is, in and of itself, singularly uncommercial. Nobody gives gifts, or even cards. It is, I believe, the only day on which shops do not open. It is the one pause in the otherwise relentless carousel of commercialism in this country. And if you happen to be at Target at six the next morning, you will experience first hand the release of 24 hours worth of pent-up American consumerism. It is not for the faint of heart. Still, there is a carnival vibe to it that I dig, in the same way I wrote about taking in the state fair a couple of weeks back. I do most of my Christmas shopping online or at a neigborhood toy store these days, but for several years running I had fun hitting the stores with the rest of the mob, flyers and list in hand.

I was enjoying the spectacle, but I was still looking down my nose at the silly, unrestrained Americans who were putting up Christmas decorations and wrapping presents a whole month too soon.

Gradually, I came to realize that Thanksgiving isn't some kind of premature cultural ejaculation. It's the beginning of Christmas, with the whole season culminating on Christmas Day. Where I grew up, Christmas doesn't get going until Christmas week, and then we keep it going through New Year's and--for the purists--until the Ephiphany on January 6th (or as we call it on the island, Old Christmas Day). Also, in my native tradition, Christmas Day is the Big Show. That's when you brave blizzards to get across the country to your family. That's when we do all the eating and making merry. Christmas Day in America is a celebration, to be sure, but it's more for the kids. Even the dinner menu is different. Whereas at home turkey or goose would be mandatory, here we are more likely to have prime rib. It's a completely different paradigm.

It's taken me a while to find a middle ground. It helps that I have become an Episcopalian (American for Anglican), because it means I try to observe Advent. For the benefit of the rest of you godless heathens, Advent is by definition a time of waiting; of holding back and staying quiet. It's roots, like those of Christmas, are in pre-Christian northern European traditions. It is about yielding to the darkest time of the year, and it is starkly at odds with the secular culture, which doesn't care much for darkness or quiet, and which has Christmas decorations on the store shelves the day after Halloween.

It creates an interesting tension. On the one hand, I like the waiting. On the other, I hate to miss out on the festivities. So I pick and choose between traditions. I have come to love Thanksgiving more than nearly any other holiday. And even though it is almost always just the five of us, I bake pies and cornbread chicken dressing and spread the table as best as I am able. Although the house is never clean and sparkling, and I never find that perfect homemaker-me, on ebay or anywhere else, my mother sends flowers and they cover a multitude of sins. We drive to a tree farm like everyone else on Thanksgiving weekend, and we tag a tree and pay for it, but it stays in the ground until we come back for it mid-December. Lights go up on December 1st, and the creche comes out, empty, to be populated gradually by sheep and cows and Mary and Joseph and everyone else but the baby, until Christmas. The advent wreath comes out, and I light candles and pray the prayers over it. We go to mass on Christmas Eve and stay in our pyjamas until dinnertime the next day. The tree comes down in time for our New Year's party, but I keep a bough to toss on the bonfire at the church on Ephiphany.

It has become a bit of this and a bit of that. Like my table setting. Like me.

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