Becoming American

Richard
Becoming American
Starbucks, January 18, 2009

Rachel’s from England and went to Leeds University many years after I did. By coincidence we both found ourselves working at the Phoenix Science Museum, and then we moved on. We were “office friends”—didn’t spend time together outside work. But we came from the same England, a culture of making do with meager means. As a Christmas present one year, her mother gave her an electric power cord! Hearing her accent, references, and ironic delivery, I would miss my country, rather than feel, as I often do with Brits in the States, that we’re competing to be the only cheerful, funny, and secretly resentful person in the room.

Now she teaches biology at a local community college and during her time off explores wild parts of the American West. She emails links to photographs from her trips. Her latest post began like others: shots of vast, empty desert with Chinese water color mountains painted in the distance. In the foreground, looking out expectantly, was lanky Rachel, her hair flying, squatting beside her two big mixed breed dogs. And there was her boyfriend, with a couple of days’ stubble, standing in front of a tent beside a stream. The brilliance of Arizona’s light, the big blue, cloudless sky, the shadows cutting the dry, red soil and jagged rocks could not contrast more starkly with the soot-blackened buildings and narrow alleys of northern, industrial, working-class Leeds where we’d lived. We were warmed by the alienness of the West, but Rachel fell in love with it.

Today, after the camping pictures, came a series of photographs arranged, flip-book style, to unfold a narrative. You could see a giant score board spanning an open football field, and crowded at one end were several thousand people, decked out in red, white, and blue. I thought they must be attending a sporting event, but I couldn’t make out which kind. In the next snap a uniformed honor guard marched in a line behind a flag bearer. And then there was Rachel, smirking at the camera as she held a certificate of citizenship.

The image went through me. She’d become a citizen in one of those mass ceremonies; one million people have been similarly inducted this year. The shots continued: Rachel in the parking lot with a group of friends, a classroom with notes from well-wishers written on a white board, and finally a snap of the initiate cutting a cake in her office. I clicked off the site and didn’t reply to her email.

I wanted a cake—public acknowledgement of being inside! I have lived here for twenty-five years, and yet Rachel beat me to citizenship. I didn’t want a cake. How many times have I made noises about filling out the forms, even gathered them only to lose them in a pile on my desk? I like myself better in the States—and yet I’m English. My people understand irony and understatement, have a history of labor politics, believe that the group is as important as the individual. I fear floating along in life rather than deciding my course, but maybe there’s identity in being indeterminate, neither one thing or the other. Would people bake a cake for that?