patriot

I was with my father on the eastern edge of the west Texas desert. We were spending the weekend in a friend’s cabin a few miles from where the shallow Llano river has carved her way through precambrian granite, leaving sparkling serrated cliff faces at every bend. I was home for a few weeks from college, a rough first year that I had somehow stumbled thorough intact, living in a haze of culture shock, turning inward more and more as the months passed. I had found some release in wandering the empty suburban streets on foot late into the night, and in trying to get a handle of what I was feeling by putting things down on paper. There was a lot of writing that year. Dire, anguished, inward gazing little poems littered my notebooks and filled folders on my desktop. They were terrible, but they gave substance to the turmoil I was trying hard to hide between dorm rooms and classes and weekend trips into Chicago.

I had brought scraps of these into the desert with us. I shared a few with my father at dusk the first night, sitting together on the low screened porch facing the sunset over scraggly mesquite trees and rock still shimmering with heat from the early summer day. They ones I chose were poems about alienation. I was proud of these few, I had worked on them, honed them down to a perfect image of what my year had been. A first away from family, but also away from a home I could never return to. They were about growing up in a blank space between cultures, about being thrust suddenly into a life where I didn’t know the nuance, or how to navigate the details, or what was expected. About never having developed the cultural memory that bound everyone around me though references and asides and knowing glances. About being surrounded by people who blindly pledged allegiance to the accidental geography of their birth, and had no patience for the hesitation I felt about their assertions of superiority, their flippant dismissal of things beyond their immediate horizons.

After a very long silence, he asked me, his voice pained in a way that still rings in my ears two decades later, “Why do you hate America so much?”

And I could not answer him. Because I did not hate America, despite my misgivings. I just didn’t love her the way I was expected to, after spending a long and rambling childhood carefully learning to love everywhere else.