| A Life
With A View... |
| Returning
To The USA |
| By Jesse Pennington |
| So, what do
military brats and missionary kids have in common? When they return
to their home turf…the great USA…we feel “left out”!
“How can
this be?” you might wonder. Shouldn’t you feel relieved and secure
to be “home”? I guess the problem is defining just what “home”
really is.
When you spend
most of your youth growing up in places like Europe, Africa, the Middle
East and elsewhere, you only get to visit “home” so often.
When you do, you begin to realize the cliques that are formed by the kids
in the neighborhoods. It’s even worse amongst your relatives sometimes. |
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You try very
hard to fit in, but don’t seem to know exactly what to laugh at, or when.
We just don’t get the jokes because they're based on common knowledge of
local happenings that we just aren’t privy to. A delayed or faked laugh
that is out of place feels like a huge finger pointing you right out!
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I remember wondering
what was so special about a T.V. show about a Beaver? Why would I
leave anything at all to a Beaver? Why was everyone so excited about football
and baseball? Where were the bloody soccer matches after all!
Why do they laugh so hard about the Little Rascals when Cantinflas was
so much better! Hot dogs were great eating but boy did I miss the
Schwarmas! |
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| Then, after
a time of feeling left out and like I had a third head, I actually begin
to feel sorry for them. Imagine calling a three-hour car trip to Niagara
Falls an “international vacation”. Watching them prepare for a car
trip across town you would think the destination was Hong Kong the way
they acted.
Their idea
of a cultural experience was visiting Amish country for a few hours on
a Saturday. Heck, most of these people never get more than 50 miles
from home! Where they lived was not the end of the world… but you
could see it from there!!
A pitiful lot
they are! You say Flamenco and they imagine skinny pink birds! You
say Jhilava and they think of volcanoes spewing forth some kind of goo.
You talk about Pele and El Cordobes and they give you blank stares… how
dare they! I can’t wait to fly back “home” again. |
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Offshore
Resources Gallery
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| At last, the
return trip back across the pond and not a minute too soon! Ah, the smell
of calamares and the ocean. How sweet the pleasure of seeing people that
are not grossly overweight and that actually know how to dress. And listen…
they can communicate in more than one language too! Empanadas anyone?
Ah, but now
that I was back again I remembered the other culture clash that got kicked
back into gear. Of course, I had conveniently forgotten about this when
I was back “home” with the less fortunate and uncultured friends
and relatives in the good old USA. I was now back in another land and another
culture… still the outsider!
As an American,
I was both admired and feared. Many of my local friends hung around me
because I was the token foreigner and their badge of honor. They were cool
because they were close friends with one of “us”. Others shunned
me because I was the outsider and didn’t belong “inside”.
So you discover
soon enough that the secret to success (read survival) in this world
was a simple matter of knowing how to play the American card, and when! |
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| How many times
I would look at my local buddies trying to “act American”. I would
watch their efforts while internally laughing out loud. They were trying
so hard to be cool…that is “American” by definition… but simply
had missed the timelines by about 10 years or more! Hey, even today
you can revisit the “Flower Child” or “Hippie” days by simply
traveling in some parts of eastern & central Europe, Latin America
or even Asia. But please be careful not to spill the beans about
Woodstock being over now… they just don’t take kindly to that sort of rude
awakening!
Oh, and did
I mention the other little cultural war that went on for us military brats?
When you are living overseas on a military base it’s only natural that
everyone inside the military community was family. Everyone else
were “civilians”…i.e. Martians! And let’s not even bring up the
“locals”. This was another species altogether! If memory serves,
my other “brat” friends came up with interesting nicknames for the locals…like
the Spaniards were “Moes”, the Italians were “Ginnies”, the
Moroccans were “Rag Heads”, ad infinitum. |
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Offshore
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| Escape
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| Hey, who cares
if this is their land. We’re here now and they should learn to accommodate
us, shouldn’t they? What would this country be without us around to help
manage things?
But wait
just a minute! I knew that I didn’t really feel that way about the locals
at all.
In fact, we preferred to live off base and amongst the locals whenever
feasible. My mom was an Italian from Rome after all so I really couldn’t
count myself as a full-blooded Yankee. No, I had to learn how to live in
all these worlds almost simultaneously. No wonder I learned to relate to
Cher’s song “Half Breed”!
I actually
began to understand what my local friends meant when they talked about
the “ugly Americans”. My buddies and I could pick them out at 50
yards, without fail. The easiest thing to spot was the way they dressed…
dreadfully! The maps, cameras and pitiful attempts to speak a few words
of the local language were another give-away. If all else failed, just
wait for the attitude…”what do you mean you don’t speak English…doesn’t
everyone?”
One very
vivid memory I have was from a small fishing village where we lived in
Spain called Torrevieja. My sister and I were quite literally the only
American kids in the entire town of 20,000. So we needed to learn the language,
accept the culture and get accepted as soon as possible! The Navy had developed
a sponsoring program to help newly arrived families get settled in to a
local community. My folks were hosting a couple one evening for dinner
when my buddies and I came running in from the street. We ran through the
door, chattering in a very rapid Andalucian dialect, and headed right for
the kitchen to open the fridge and raid it at full tilt. Then I heard the
wife of our guest family ask my mom whether it was customary to allow local
street urchins to just run into your home and go into your fridge like
that. She was clearly alarmed that this might be something she would have
to adapt to in the name of getting along! Mom, being the gracious soul
she is, pointed me out and said…”it’s okay, that one over there is my
son”!
So, here
I am, no matter where I am…the outsider. I’m an Ex Pat on foreign soil
as well as at home in the USA! What a pickle, right? But no, don’t feel
sorry for me! I love my life! I have been blessed to experience life from
several vantage points. I have been blessed to grow up without any real
prejudices for other people or cultures because I had to survive alongside
them. I had traveled, lived and seen more by the age of 18 than a great
majority of folks ever do in a lifetime!
Wouldn’t you
know it though! I come back to the US for college, meet and fall in love
with a local girl and get married! What did she see in me? I guess it was
the culture, the travel, the languages, the mystique… maybe even the looks
(wishful thinking here!)? So now that I’m married I’ll settle down
and stay “home”, right? Wrong!
As it turns
out, my wife loves culture and travel even more than I do! She is
always ready to go anywhere and dearly loved the four years we spent in
Mexico City on company assignment…that is a whole other story by itself!
Did I mention our third child was born in Mexico?
She actually
speaks respectable Spanish and waits with baited breath for our next move.
Being “home” is all well and good, being around family, friends,
et al. Yet, somehow this changing of the season's thing has lost its appeal
for us. Having to maintain at least two wardrobes and being able to use
the garage as an extra refrigerator just has lost its overall attractiveness.
I guess it’s just age? Then our families only add fuel to the fire by constantly
asking when we’re going abroad again… they need a new vacation spot! You
think I’m kidding? Heck, we saw more of our relatives and family
while living in Mexico than we do now… only 35 minutes away!
So here we
sit at “home” again. Yet our daily conversation always is dotted
with dreams and desires of the next adventure somewhere in the world. What’s
the point of being tri-lingual and multicultural and being “stuck”
in the middle of the Midwest? I’m already bored with local “ethnic”
restaurants. It’s good and all but so far from the real thing…maybe it’s
the water? Well, tomorrow is another day and we’ll see what the winds might
blow in our direction.
Here we go
again? |
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