On Having Been an American

For a time, I was an American.

It was not a citizenship so much as a weather. For instance, in the few years after my parents’ divorce, late at night when nobody else would be home for hours, I would be Paul Newman and Robert Redford in The Sting. I was an American then in an American bed, an old sheet around my duvet that smelled of weeks of me, a deep smell that had a grease to it. Asleep finally with the television flickering in my attic room. Dust and the radiator on high.

I never liked sleeping when I was an American.

At school I was that American kid. When I watched Looney Tunes, I was an American watching Looney Tunes wearing Looney Tunes sneakers and a Nike sweater and the Anakin Skywalker haircut from The Phantom Menace. When I ate pancakes, they were thick, sweet American pancakes. I knew what Aunt Jemima meant. I had heard of Abraham Lincoln. Dutch children did not know these things. And before long I pretended to know the things an American would know. Although I didn’t.

I read the American Harry Potter, sent to me by my Irish aunt from Chicago. I formed an opinion about Al Gore and George Bush when I was ten. I understood Fievel Goes West and the trials of a mouse in increasingly un-mouse-like places.

When a new boy in class asked me where I was from, I said I was from Fairfax County, Virginia. He never asked me another thing.

I was an American. But I had absolutely nothing to do with America. I could see the Virginia house, but not as a house anyone had lived in. The pictures on the walls were only of my parents as children. My friends were animals who died or went away. I recall a garden party where I was given a shiny green bicycle with training wheels by a grandparent I never saw again.

To say I am an American is to say I will always be a child. I was a child when we left. One gentle plane ride later there we were. My mother’s native land under sea level. And over the years my Americanness went quiet.

I became Irish. This came roughly at fifteen and has lasted until now because my father and my name and my family were Irish. Yes, we were living in the Netherlands, but I did not speak the language. I could not handle the classroom loneliness.

Being Irish meant having a story. I learned the “Fields of Athenry” and was given Roddy Doyle and shown Colm Meaney’s oeuvre. Ireland was a place to be from in my mind. I had found a people to understand and a poetry to read and an accent to attempt and values that matched my father’s values and a national myth that involved liberty and Guinness.

I am thinking about these things this morning because I am going to be a father. I believe I will read Shel Silverstein and watch the Muppets with the child. We will speak Chinese in our house and read Kipling and listen to Andy Irvine and Paul Brady and eat the vegetables from my father-in-law’s garden, which he plants just as the Inner Mongolian snow thaws and the ashes of winter blow away.