Or, that's still better than being what I was in Europe
I'm an immigrant. I'll never be an American in the way that someone born, raised, educated here is an American. That's OK. There are pubs in Britain I know where you can have lived in the same locality for twenty years and you'll never be a 'local'.
It seems to me that immigrants to a country have a perspective that the native-born will never, can never, possess. It may not be a more accurate perspective. It may not be a more detailed or comprehensive perspective. But it must, of necessity, be a different perspective.
Immigrants see different things in the things the native-born take for granted. When I got here I'd never seen a strip-mall. I looked at the hideously confusing, horribly meaningless array of signs and symbols and literally none of it made sense. I've had to learn to read it. And even now, if I'm tired, my eye can become hopelessly confused and none of it makes sense. I'd never ordered at a drive-through: I didn't know how to give the order; I didn't know how to read the advertising stand that details what can be ordered - all I saw were colors and shapes, which meant nothing.
I've learnt to read them, since. But back then? They were incomprehensible. I had no idea how frightening that can be.
Sabrina, to this day, wonders why I wouldn't drive anywhere without her, in the early days. Even the way America organizes and names its roads is completely different to the way Britain organizes and names its roads. Everything is reversed. The names of roads going across relate to the road you are on, not the road you're intersecting. Road names parallel to you relate to the road you're passing, not the road you are on. Something so simple. Something so completely different. I had no idea.
I remember the first time I walked into a Giant Eagle (a chain of grocery stores in Ohio; its eqivalent here in Virginia is Ukrops, tho Giant Eagle had larger locations). I remember my jaw, quite literally, dropping as I looked at the amount of food, and the variety of food, that was available. Sabrina used to think that Britain was a 'little America', where everything was pretty much the same as it is here, just on a smaller scale. It isn't. I didn't know what 'wealth' was till I came to America. Not the wealth of Bill Gates. Not the wealth of Donald Trump. The wealth of any American who can walk into a store like Giant Eagle, make any purchase he wants, and walk out with that thing (whatever it may be) as his.
The wealth of everyday America. The America of me and you, the average guy, the working joe. Wealth infinitely greater than can be imagined by a large proportion of the population of the world. I saw this, this indescribable unimaginable incomprehensible wealth, encapsulated in this one Ohio store and I knew in that instant that I'll never know what it is to be able to take such wealth for granted.
To a European such things are, simply, alien. Unreal. My mother's sister, who died about 10 years ago, insisted that America was not real. America was something that existed only in the movies, because 'no one could be that rich'. She believed this in the way that some people believe Jesus is God.
No one could be that rich.
And now I know that she was wrong. Any American can be 'that rich'. And is. In virtue of being an American. No other qualification required.
This is the Fourth of July. On America's birthday I can say with certainty that I'll never, quite, be an American. And I can say that I will, one day, be a citizen. And that's what America counts.
Happy 4rth, JU.
God bless America.