Lemme at 'em

Lyrics: "Sentir...que es un soplo la vida, que veine anos no es nada, que febril la mirada, errante en las sombras, te busca y te nombra" - Carlos Gardel

I flew from Miami to Boston to Paris on a Saturday. On the way, I slept little, made friends with my neighbors, and ate the sandwiches my father had prepared for me, a food-exchange ritual we have engage in every time I have traveled in the past three years.

I was as usual surprised at the kind of clothes people don on trans-oceanic flights, which caused me to dwell on my own attire (sweatpants, sneakers, tee, baseball hat). Interestingly enough, I thought about the baseball caps I wear regularly: my white Boston Red Sox one, and my red Swiss flag one, purchased at Balmer’s Youth Hostel in Interlaken, CH despite the price hike. I thought about the simple message I was sending going abroad with my baseball caps: I’m an American.

This past summer, at the Great Wall of China, when our small group was getting ready to toboggan down the side of the hill, a guy – white, late-twenties, slightly arrogant – approached us with the confident swagger and smirk of a die-hard athletic fan, drawn by my Red Sox hat. He was from Manchester, HN, and aside from strange, slightly hitting-on moments, we had a pleasant conversation, interestingly enough because he made a Red Sox comment that I, despite my relative derision of baseball [see previous post about Dontrelle Willis], could reply to [it was a small miracle]. My knowledge of random New Hampshire trivia may or may not have also kept the conversation afloat [Thanks to Katie, I was able to shamelessly mention the Fishercats!]. In any case, there I was, in China, signaling that I was American so blatantly that I might as well have had a cross-forehead tattoo of Britney Spears. For someone who during the summer of 2006, in Switzerland, would pretend to be Russian or Spanish or anything but American, I surprisingly didn’t mind this representation, mostly because since then I have learned to dissociate certain negative opinions about certain “American” things from my actual feeling as an American, despite the fact that I consider myself more Cuban, Russian, and to a certain extent Mexican, than American. Conclusion: the feeling of belonging somewhere – unlike genetics – is not a zero sum equation. I can’t make a whole with 5 genetic halves, but I can create a single identity with four or five or infinity different feelings. Excuse the self-quote for a moment, but this is how I described my family in my college essay, “From each country we have enriched more than our palate; we have gathered the only wealth that can truly be defined as human – an acceptance of the ineffable interdependence between hope, hardship, joy, pain, and survival – and harbored it in our hearts as more than just memories.” And that is how it felt for a moment on that airplane.

And so there I was, preparing to face the French with my Red Sox ha squarely pulled halfway over my eyes. Lemme at’em. It also occurred to me that even if I wear my Swiss hat, I would probably still be demarcated as an American. Who, other than US denizens, wear baseball hats with as much frequency and poise? In my Swiss hat, I would just be filed into a slightly different category: “American who has traveled” as opposed to “American who likes baseball. Typical.”

We flew into Boston Logan, and I could see the New England homes, nestled on uneven ground, the water, darker than in FL, the small inlets dotted with little white boats, and that random small island I always see when landing at Logan, covered in orange, and red, and yellow – the colors of the autumn I missed. I realized then that “home” really is a relative term. It can mean your childhood house, it can bring thoughts of your parents, it can be wholly concentrated on a single person’s love, on meeting your neighbor every morning when you get the mail. And in that instant, despite the many versions of “home” I’ve felt over the years, Logan was home. This airport, which has always been my gateway to Boston, the city I love, this airport made me smile with familiarity, with expectation. I knew I’d be back in February, and I could always depend on it being the beginning of months of surprises, of discoveries, of explorations of the MFA, of walks down Mass Ave, of my slightly unhealthy fixation with Nantucket, of winter and spring and fall. Trevor came to see me at the airport, and just spending a couple of hours chatting by a Dunking Doughnuts was enough to make feel more comfortable heading off halfway across the ocean on yet another leap of faith.

Later, I arrived at Charles de Gaulle and to the surprise of each of my new AAcquaintances [a play on the word acquaintance and the fact that I flew on American Airlines, humor me for a second], I set out alone with my not-so-light suitcases. CDG is an interesting mix between the Frankfurt airport, which I detest, and the Sheremetevo airport in Moscow, which I love only because the long queues signal to me that I have returned to Russia and am welcomed.

This just so happened to be one of the final days of a French transportation strike, which made, well, transportation, incredibly difficult in and around Paris. Eventually, a nice middle-aged Australian couple and I made it onto a train and headed into the city. They were to be my companions as we made it through the mess that was Gard du Nord that Sunday morning, helping me with my luggage, and laughing hysterically after one, no, two, of my suitcases, literally rolled all the way down an escalator. Moments like this made me feel like I was trapped in some kind of amateur undercover shoot for a Japanese game show that follows idiotic tourists around as they make fools of themselves without any assistance or incentive.

On the train home, I also had an encounter with a French man. Do not let the word “encounter” build this up to any more than it was: I asked [in French, may I add] for help with one of my bags, he obliged and then, sitting across from me, asked what I was doing after I dropped off said bags. A shady French man, really? Already?

After two hours in transit, I arrived at Bourg La Reine, a suburb on the southern side of the city, woke David up, and had him drive over to pick me up. Having never met each other, it proved to be quite the humorous encounter: slightly inebriated, not shaved French youth meets slightly hyper, very Americanized twenty-one year old. And then we went home.

The roommates, which I did not meet in this order are:
1. Nina – mid-twenties Journalism student from Germany studying abroad for a year. Makes incredible garlic bread. Boyfriend: Alex; occupation: something to do with Audi.

2. Heike – mid-twenties German girl getting her Masters at the Sorbonne. Speaks Arabic and Persian in addition to perfect English and French. Her boyfriend is a dentist in Egypt.

3. Sebastian: 24-year old graduate of something having to do with “engineering, biology, computer science.” Known as the father of the house and nicknamed by everyone as Putch; me as Putchy. Completed and sold, along with David, software that he is now living off of for a couple of months. Trains for several hours a day for an international grappling competition that will be held in Paris in December. No girlfriend.

4. Julien: Also 24 years old. Also a graduate of some kind of mathy, science field. Has started a business called “Pump your bike,” the purpose of which is still unclear. One of the only people I have met who is always smiling. Girlfriend: nice, but kind of shy.

5. Thomas: 24 years old, from the south of France. Graduated from mechanical engineering but now wants to become a pilot. Along with Putch, spends hours training for the aforementioned grappling competition. No girlfriend.

6. David: 23 years old [the baby, after me]. Competes in biosynthetic competitions. Designs software for wine export companies. Studies biology and physics and engineering. Is permanently playing music. No girlfriend, mostly because of his questionable antics at parties.


Within a couple of hours, there we were, all seven of us sitting around the kitchen, cutting, slicing, cooking together. Then we sat in the living room and ate, toasted, talked. There was a great feeling of ease, of comfort for me, to have landed in a household where cooking is communal, where, without having ever met me, they welcomed me as a 7th roommate within the first hour. At night, in celebration for Nina’s birthday, we ate a delicious tart that Heike had baked with apples from the backyard, drank wine, and sang. David and Nina both played the guitar in the candlelit living room, and I just sat, cross-legged, until the wee hours of the morning, singing to mark my arrival into Paris. At one point, we all repeated, progressively getting louder:
“Country roads, take me home To the place, I belong; West virginia, mountain momma; Take me home, country roads…”

And there was that word “home” again. And after a full day of thinking about it, of wondering and preparing myself for what would be the beginning of all of a lot of hard work until June 2009, I did feel at home. This, at least for now, was home, even if in a couple of months it changed, because home was not, for once, my physical location; it was, instead, a calming down of my mind and heart, which had been wandering for a while now, a blissful satisfaction with the present instant.