Of Bears and Penguins

The First Post from the East Coast

I stood on the top of the stairwell in Temple University’s 1300 Residence Hall, where I could see the fireworks all over the city, and past Philadelphia into New Jersey. The East Coast: a place that seemed nearly fictional to me, that I had never been and only read about it school books. I am on the East Coast now, in places I have only read about in books.
I’ve never watched fireworks without the benefit of family or friends. I’ve never spent the Fourth anywhere but Texas or Missouri. Until a few weeks ago. Out here in the East.
One of the last papers I had to write for a class in London was on the topic of what it means to be an American in a foreign culture. I came across the paper a few weeks ago. I had forgotten what I had written, but I believe it was the seed of the reason that I found myself sans family or friends or familiar faces on the Fourth.
It was shortly after the 2004 presidential election; I watched my country from across an ocean. I wrote about the obstacles in front of our nation. I wrote that to be an American in a foreign culture, for me in that one moment, meant that I was going home to work toward making my country better.
I don’t think of myself as particularly patriotic.
I don’t have an American flag affixed to my car or to any article of clothing.
Ditto for a yellow ribbon.
But I have listened to two of my English colleagues express their gratitude to America for aiding their country in a war fought far too long ago for me to feel any great connection to it.
And I have lain under perfect skies and watched stars fall over the Midwest.
Thrown rocks into the Mississippi River.
Stood in the Gulf of Mexico.
Rafted down the Klamath River in Northern California.
Winded my way through Idaho and Eastern Washington.
Driven through the Five Nations of Oklahoma more times than I can count.
Watched two bear cubs scamper across a field in Alaska where the sun refuses to set in the summer.
Dipped my toe in Wolf Creek at Wolf Creek Pass in Colorado.
Made my way through the deep South of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, where they make sweet banana pudding and wave confederate flags as though nothing were out of the ordinary.
I have eaten in a pretty good little Mexican restaurant in Southern Michigan.
And longed for the Piney Woods of East Texas, basked in the Hill Country and stretched out in Texas’ northern plains.
I’ve seen a lot of this country.
I know it not.
The America I know is one where I have both the liberty and luxury to see these things.
The students I am will teach this fall will very likely never have been outside the Baltimore City limits, nor even out of their neighborhoods. Their America is one of projects and poverty. The students I am teaching this summer are nearly in the same boat, except that some of my students this summer have traveled to Puerto Rico where they have grandparents and aunts and uncles.
For the past two weeks I’ve stepped into a classroom full of first graders who look at me with expectant eyes. I cringe if they sit on the floor, because I know that I’ve swept mouse droppings off of it before they got there. I watch them sweat and fan themselves because the air conditioning is broken, and then I give thanks because I have colleagues who are teaching in schools where there is no air conditioning to be broken.
On the hottest days, despite the students’ valiant efforts they tell me they are hot and tired and hungry. I tell them that we are about to go to Boston during the read aloud because we are reading Make way for Ducklings. We’re not here in old, hot Philadelphia anymore I say. They lean forward. We’re in Boston, a city north of here, in the fall and it is cool and leaves are falling off the trees. We’re in Boston and it’s not hot and now we’ll see what’s happening to the ducklings. Slowly their hands which had been fanning their faces drop into their laps and we go to Boston.
The next day I repeat the idea that when we read books we can go anywhere. One of my students raises his hand nonchalant and with a sly smile on his face. I call on him and he says, “Yesterday I went to Boston.” I’m sweating in Philadelphia and it takes me a moment to catch what he is saying with a smile on his face. “Yes,” I exclaim, “High five, you’re thinking a step ahead of me. We did go to Boston yesterday and we are going again today.”
So it is as I walk through my classroom past my students who are hot, past my students who are hungry, past my students who are hurting and sleepy and unlikely to be at school two days in row that I think of my America.
I think of my America as the bus that takes me to school turns onto our street and drives past piles of trash four and five feet high in the road. Like pictures you might see of any other place but America. Pictures that belong to poor countries, but surely not America.
Two Americas: One spoken sweet land of liberty of thee we sing. And the other America: the one we neither sing nor love and yet this other remains a mirror covered waiting to show us what we neglect as a nation while we are off saving the world.
These two Americas clash before my eyes each day.
I find myself again an American in a foreign land.