For days after the 9/11 attack, the newspapers were full of lists and profiles of the almost 3,000 victims in the Twin Towers. There was a certain morbid fascination that drew me to this devastating material, but it contained an interesting perspective on our grieving country. The names of the victims represented a virtual United Nations of backgrounds – people from an extraordinary array of countries and continents, including, I should add, many members of the same faith as the attackers. It’s the same message I get from watching the credits roll at the end of a movie. “It took all these people from so many different backgrounds working together to produce this work of art!”
I spend so much time and energy being angry with and disappointed by this country that I also have to give credit where it’s due. There’s no other country in the world, aside perhaps from Canada, that has managed to integrate such a diverse population into a relatively cohesive whole. Of course, there’s still animosity and internal segregation, but we’re not tearing each other apart in the manner of other countries which have failed to bring together populations less divergent thanours. We are truly a nation of immigrants. It feels really sappy to wave a patriotic flag at a time when we seem so divided but uniting people so different in so many ways is reason to be proud.
I’ve had several encounters in recent weeks that have returned me to those Twin Towers lists, small glimpses of the wondrous ways in which this country has brought us together. I’ll be using all fictional names here.
- Every Monday morning we visit with a lovely couple who are members of a program called Village, which I’ve written about before. Its primary focus is helping people age in place, rather than being relegated to some nursing home or retirement community. As volunteers, Rosellen and I drive people to doctors’ appointments, deliver holiday dinners to homebound members and visit people who don’t get out much. In this case, Janet, the wife, is succumbing to Alzheimer’s while her husband Bob maintains as stimulating and safe environment as he can.
The past few weeks we’ve been showing each other family photos and trading what we know of our family histories. Bob and Janet’s families have long histories in Nebraska and Kansas. Their immigrant stories reside so far back in the 19th century that it seems that they’ve always been here. At least that’s the way it looks to first generation children of immigrants like us. We brought pictures of my maternal and paternal grandparents, decked out in their ghetto finery in a photographer’s studio somewhere in the Old Country. It’s hard to say what Janet is still able to take in but Bob was pretty wide-eyed encountering these exotic figures. Yet here we all were, living in the same community, having attended the same or similar colleges and universities, shopping at the same Trader Joe’s. Our differentness lies hidden from view, never completely erased, but never preventing a smooth fit in our Monday visits.
- Yesterday, I brought my car into Jose’s shop to have the cracked windshield washer container replaced. It was a routine enough job for Jose to hand off to his assistant while we retreated to his heated office to chat. He has been working on our cars for more than 25 years, but I’ve never had extended time to hear his story. For almost an hour Jose laid out his journey from Mexico to his current position as a successful small business owner.
He arrived here with his parents when he was 15, already set on the idea of becoming a mechanic, but he started out, like many of his compatriots, in the kitchen of a popular restaurant close to where we live. It was a 5PM to 1AM shift, so initially he spent his mornings as an unpaid apprentice in a garage. Eventually, he was able to replace a departing employee and quit his restaurant job to devote himself to what he really loved to do. Jose came here with no English, but he was savvy enough to know that without the language there were serious limits to what he could accomplish. Having neither the time nor the money to take formal courses, he embarked on a program of self-education. He asked people to write down for him phrases he heard so he could see their correct spelling. I’ve learned a new language in a similar way, and I know what persistence it requires.
I don’t know the story of how he wound up with his own business because the assistant came in to report that my car was ready. I recognized in Jose’s story many elements of my own parents’ immigrant experience and wondered again at how such different starting points had landed us in a similar place – retaining our differences but still being able to fit neatly into the fabric of our society.
- Marcus is an African American teacher who approached me several years ago with a flattering request: Would I be his mentor? I was glad to accept because I sensed that this would be an opportunity for mutual learning, and I haven’t been disappointed.
On the sleepy Friday after Thanksgiving Marcus came by to have coffee with us. The bag of photos I had packed for Bob and Janet was still sitting in the hall, so out they came to trigger another conversation about the routes we had taken to arrive around this same dining room table. Marcus reciprocated with an account of the research he had done on his family history, mainly through interviews with his wide network of relatives. The trail had led him back to a plantation in southeastern Mississippi. A significant portion of his family relocated to a city near Chicago where they were assured there were jobs to be had. Marcus’s father became a highly respected minister in their town, securing the family’s foothold in the middle class.
And here we were, around the same table, having committed ourselves to similar work as educators, despite our vastly different origins in rural Mississippi and Belarusian ghettos. That’s the miracle of all these three brief accounts which are particularly important to share at this moment when the incoming leaders of our country disparage both immigrants and difference, completely missing the point that they are the source of our strength, not markers of our weakness. It’s almost embarrassing to wax so patriotic, but it’s one of the few things about our benighted land that makes me want to wave the flag.
