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August 7, 1997 Alex said something about her mother in a recent Meta Baby mailing which struck home. Right to the center of a matter which circles around my mind off and on and is fairly central to my existence. She encapsulated what I felt like being foreign in my own country very neatly, and how I felt that others saw me with these words ... This is what she wrote: My mother had spent her childhood roaming the planet with her Navy father and fun loving mother. Her arrival to Concord was not a matter of getting off a train, or out of a car, but a journey to the other end of the world. She had been living in Japan for years, but only in the proper Gaijan sections, of course, while the American Military cleaned up the mess it had made during World War Two. . . . You can imagine what a shock it must have been for her when she arrived in Concord, where everything is small and exquisitely repressed. To them, she must have seemed so sophisticated, and yet so utterly distasteful. Interesting, but foreign, and therefore threatening. As for my mother, I'm sure she was too preoccupied with the concept of wearing shoes indoors to notice. I imagine that this is what my classmates felt towards me when I returned to the United States, on the edge of adolescence, from a childhood spent in Belgium and France ... "Interesting, but foreign, and therefore threatening ..." No wonder I didn't make any friends. At least not easily, and then, only with others who seemed different, interesting, foreign, unique, threatening. I wasn't concentrating on the concept of wearing shoes indoors, but I was wondering at the concept of acting like a teenager before I'd even reached my teens at the tender age of eleven and a half. I was trying to figure out why I couldn't ask anyone over to play with me, I had to ask them to 'hang-out'. And I was struggling to master the words to the Pledge of Allegiance and trying to understand what those words meant to me, if anything. If they'd stopped to notice how scared and alone I was, maybe they wouldn't have felt so threatened themselves. |