Category: Americans
I'm thoroughly enjoying Fresh Air's country music week, during which Terry Gross is playing old interviews with country greats. Yesterday, I heard Waylon Jennings tell her: "You ask some good questions, girl."
She plays songs as well, mostly classics. I never cared much for country music until a few years ago, when I went to Nashville for the Southern Festival of Books. One night I went to dinner with some people from the Oxford American, and heading back downtown the driver, a local, put on an old Johnny Cash CD. Hearing him and his family sing "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" while riding through the nighttime streets of Nashville opened my eyes.
A few months ago I returned to the city and went to the Grand Ole Opry, which was back at the Ryman Auditorium because Opryland had been damaged by the spring flood. The place was packed - Loretta Lynn was on the bill - and the circle remained unbroken.
Having been away for two weeks, I now have to learn the new channels all over again. Last night after dinner, somewhere up in the 2000's, I found a talk show with a host I'd never seen before (and who, interestingly, was in his 60s). His guests were Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner.
Brooks had a wonderful nervous energy, and looked a bit like an octogenarian John McEnroe. He said he was thinking about doing a musical of Blazing Saddles. Reiner suggested that he do a musical of the 2,000 year old man. The attraction, he said, would be that you could have songs covering all the different musical eras.
Then Brooks started asking the host questions. "What is this show?" (I had been wondering the same thing.) "Are we getting paid for this?" Reiner told him he didn't need to get paid; he should look at his bank account. Undeterred, Brooks asked if they were at least getting a town car to take them from the studio.
There are some people who should just be allowed to keep living.
I was never one of those people who, before heading to Europe, sewed a Maple Leaf onto my luggage.
But Sunday night, watching the closing ceremonies, I thought about the advantages of being Canadian. It would be a simpler (if colder) life. No stigma of slavery. No "Canadian Go Home" graffiti when you traveled abroad. Universal health care. And how can you not love - and in a way want to be - the people who throw a parade of giant inflatable beavers?
But then Michael Buble appeared, singing The Maple Leaf Forever. It's not a bad song, but as he sang it I wondered: What will he sing next? His career has been built on music from south of the border. And these were Canada's games; he couldn't break into Rags to Riches. He suddenly looked rather handicapped, like Apolo Ohno crouched at the starting line in a pair of loafers. There is no Great Canadian Songbook.
I felt very fortunate to be an American.
Last week Monika said that, arriving into Houston from Paris, she had received a warm "welcome back" from the immigration officer.
A few months earlier I had flown into Dallas from Tokyo and received the same friendly greeting. It always delights me. It lends a personal note to an increasingly stringent bureaucracy and, when "back" is replaced by "home" (as it often is in Miami) it evokes a feeling of unity (almost family).
But I was a little surprised to hear that Monika had received the same greeting. Though she travels with an American passport - having lived in the States for over a decade and become a citizen - she was born and currently resides in Warsaw. She and her husband returned to their homeland after the changes in 1990.
And though she loves this country, and hopes to retire here, I think of her as Polish, and assume that other Americans who meet her do too. Which, the more I thought about it, made the immigration officer's welcome all the more impressive. He (or she) accepted Monika as an American - and entitled to the same cordiality that Americans get - because she carried an American passport, regardless of the way she dressed, or spoke, or even chose to live (though this was probably not evident). It was an example, at a busy airport in the middle of the country, of our unfailing propensity to open our doors, and hearts, to the world.
Thinking about it further, I decided that Monika was more deserving of a "welcome back" than I was. I had merely been born an American; she had chosen to become one.
Every night over the three-day weekend I heard the faint pop of firecrackers. It wasn't the noise that bothered me but the cluelessness.
Has our education system become so bad that people no longer know how to observe national holidays? Has our common sense diminished to such an extent that we commemorate fallen soldiers with sounds that mimic the shells that killed them?
Memorial Day is not a celebration, it is a somber remembrance of the men and women who gave their lives so that we could live in freedom and, apparently. ignorance.
I was talking to a young Lithuanian woman who was ending a stint at a local hotel. She had worked very hard in an unsympathetic environment; her boss was downright mean to her. But she didn't complain; in fact, she was happy about her experience, grateful for the lesson learned. "I'm no longer naive," she said, with an enthusiasm that was as real as it was impressive.
Her impression of Americans was that we are lazy. "Take it easy, man," she said, mimicking her co-workers in an accent both accurate and biting. Even phrases like "thanks much" - which to her astonishment she heard on TV - she took as signs of our slacking off. She would tell her co-workers that they could study, get a degree, improve their lot, but they had no interest.
I told her that Fort Lauderdale was not typical. She said she'd found the same thing (among nicer people) when she worked a few years ago on the Jersey shore. "It's also a resort," I said, and assured her that there are places - big cities, college towns - where ambition and an effort toward betterment prevail. But in general I had to agree with her.
Before returning to Lithuania she planned to visit the Everglades. I highly recommended it, though I warned her that the beauty was subtle, it didn't knock you over. She was a little concerned about alligators. I told her she had no reason to be, that they are extremely lazy creatures.
"They're American," she said, with a playful laugh.