Ursula Le Guin wrote in The Dispossessed, “You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.” I first read that book when I had been living in Morocco for nearly five years. It would take me another two before I was ready to take the plunge of going home. I made use of lessons I learned decades earlier, when my family returned to the States after having lived in Kenya and Jordan.
The first time I returned to the United States I was 12 years old. I did not think of myself as a child, but I definitely knew I wasn’t in control of anything. I felt I should have been, but wasn’t. One day I was sent to the Grand Union with a pocket full of coins snatched from the change jar. My mission: to acquire a half gallon of milk. It certainly sounds simple enough and I can almost hear you saying, “Yeah. So? What’s the problem? Is there a story to this? Where’s the conflict?” Well, up to that point what little walking around money I possessed had not been in US currency. I had bought falafel and green almonds from street vendors. But I had never been to the movies by myself. Never been to a book store without someone holding the purse. Never really lived anywhere that I could be sent to the store to get a half gallon or quarter pound of anything. I’d watched my parents negotiate shopping at the IGA (for meat, cheese, and paper goods) and the Grand Union (canned goods and vegetables), but apparently I had not vicariously picked up as much strategy as the job required.
So there I was with a half gallon of milk from the cooler at the back of the store, and my pocket full of change. Someone with a cart full of groceries very kindly let me go ahead of them. I had planned to take that line-waiting time to figure out the change situation, but now I was face to face with the checkout woman and in the throws of Math Anxiety. The milk probably cost something like 63?. Looking back, there were all sorts of problems with my initial plan, not the least of which was the tactical problem of juggling a handful of coins while holding a carton of milk. It would have been no easier if it had been the bottle I was expecting. (The fact that the milk was in a carton added to my confusion since I had only ever seen milk in bottles before, either the traditional milk bottles with the little snap in paper insert, or re-purposed wine bottles with a twist of newspaper in the neck to keep the most of the milk inside and the flies out.)
So there I was, with a fist full of unfamiliar coinage, and a woman tapping her cash register keys, and another woman, with a full cart and melting ice cream, probably wishing she wasn’t being so poorly repaid for her kindness. “Sixty-three cents,” said the cashier, a little bit louder the third time just in case my problem was in my ears and not between them. I smacked the coins down on the counter. “Take what you need.” I’m sure she snapped her gum as she picked out the coins she needed. Then I had the joy of retrieving the extra change, the metal rim around the counter preventing me from just sliding it all into the palm of my hand.
So there I was, with a half gallon of milk, a lighter pocketful of change, feeling stupid as I trudged up the sidewalk, back to our house. What was so hard about this was not the newness. I understood about how to adjust to a brand new country with new customs. What was so hard was that I had expected it to be familiar. Other people expected that I would know what to do in common, everyday situations. I had expected this to be home. And I found out that, although it might be the country and culture of my birth, it was still just as foreign as the alleys of Jerusalem had been the first time I saw them. I had not yet read The Dispossessed, but when I did, it was illuminating.
The last time I returned to the United States to live, more than half my life had been spent since attempting to buy milk at the Grand Union. I was on the cusp of another transition having turned 30 and given up the expatriate life. Even with Le Guin’s words in mind I found the disparity between expectations and reality… I guess “jarring” is the correct word.
There were habits I didn’t know I had, and ways of interacting with people that surprised everyone involved. Handshaking in the States is almost exclusively the purview of meeting or leaving significant people. It does not happen between casual friends. We shake hands with our car dealer as the relationship is embarked. Subsequently we shake hands when the deal is made. In between questions burst out of the air without preamble. We don’t shake hands with our doctor, certainly not after the initial visit. We don’t shake hands with everyone at a meeting; we just enter the room and sit down. We don’t shake hands with our car pool riders; we just get in the car and start talking. After seven years of one sort of prescribed interactions, I found it hard to adjust to a new one. And that in spite of the fact that I had coached new teachers fresh off the plane from the States, in how they needed to interact with their Moroccan colleagues. Intellectually I was aware and viscerally it didn’t matter. At work I compromised. Instead of shaking hands I made the rounds, chatting briefly with everyone in the office.
Shopping was a somewhat different issue, although handshaking entered into that as well. Apparently you don’t do idle chit chat following a handshake just before asking “Where do you keep your lime juice?” Rather, you just go up to the young man and pop the question baldly. The real problem was how to choose between 3 different types of lime juice, or 8 different types of toilet paper. Never mind that each different brand of toilet paper has packaging options, whether the rolls are grouped by the dozen, or eight, or four, or singly. I longed for the choice between the red crepe paper style of toilet paper or the off-green tissue paper style – both needed to be roughed up before use, and frankly newspaper thus treated was softer.
There were some things that were made easier by the American way of doing things. I didn’t have to go to extraordinary lengths to figure out how much meat to ask for at the butcher. It was pre-packaged into amounts in the cooler case. I could just look and imagine how many portions by volume. Prices were marked and, except for cars, that was the price. I am still fascinated by the number and variety of writing implements available and can be found wandering back and forth in that section of Staples or Walmart just looking at the pens and comparing styles of nibs, colors and qualities of ink, click or cap. Other stuff I’ve become brand loyal – not out of any true sense of affiliation or joy in use, but because it cuts down on the confusion of choice . There is the soap that I buy. The same is true of paper towel, soup, pasta, floor cleaner.
I understood there were a couple of things at work to create this dissonance. One, of course, was the difference in customs. The other, and the one that played nicely into my strategy of pretending the US was a brand new country and cultural situation for me, was that I had never really been an adult in the US. I had left for the Peace Corps a year after I got out of college. Although I had certainly been shopping and been involved in meetings, by stance was that of a kid (as I thought of myself) and not that of an adult. So all my public interactions as adult-to-adult had been learned out of my “native” culture. I won’t (right now) get into all the other things in this world that are made more gnarly by the external expectations not resonating with the internal reality. I’m sure you can imagine them.
I have entered the US multiple times between and since these events, but always as part of a temporary return or absence. Vacations, in one direction or the other, are different. For those I have always had the sense of a suspended stasis that I first noticed when I was in college. Then, wherever I was, it seemed as if I had never been anywhere else. There are a lot of places where I think I should feel at home but don’t. That is as much because I don’t feel at home in my own skin as any external influence. Do I feel at home here in the US? Not really. But I do at Bee Berry Woods. That is a tale, as they say, for another day.
This is the first of a series of (intermittent) posts on transitions.
