There are lots of things I don’t like about America. However, today I will not mention any of them, for the same reasons you do not talk about the many things you don’t like about your wife on your wedding day. In fact, last month I became a citizen of the United States and last week my very first American passport came in the mail. Therefore, I hope you readers don’t mind my indulging in a little ‘marital bliss’.
Actually it was love at first sight between America and I, from the first time I set foot on this land, as a tourist, part of an organized vacation group, back in the summer of … (wow, it’s scary to see it in writing) 1985!!
The trip was the classic Orlando – New York – Niagara Falls in ten days, with a Swiss-clock-like, itinerary, buses, tour guides, and all. Orlando was all right, one paper mache amusement park after the other, really, but New York, Oh … New York took my breath away, literally! I still remember, like it was yesterday, watching the tips of the midtown skyscrapers slowly rising above the horizon, and as they got taller, and bigger as our little bus from JFK airport made its way to Manhattan, feeling my breathing getting shorter and heavier, my heartbeat faster and louder… After spending the first sixteen years of my life surrounded by American myths and iconography – omnipresent in Italy after World war II – I was finally going to New York. It was normal to be excited. (Later in life I have seen the exact same reaction, by various friends of mine, no matter how old they were, when I first introduced them to New York City) However, in my case it was love … I might not have known it, then. But it didn’t take long to find out.
America charmed me from day one. At least for me, there was ‘something’ irresistibly cool about her, something in the air, which permeated everything, from buildings to food, from movies to music, from sports to actual people. It was something very hard to describe in words at the time. And spending 16 of the last 25 years as a resident of this country did not make it any easier. However, after a year in West Virgina as a high school exchange student (so much for culture shock) another year as graduate student at Boston University and twelve years as a full time journalist in Boston, during which I zig-zagged around the country on a regular basis, I am happy to say that ‘something’ is still very much there. I still feel it, every day, and, well … I still love it! Only now I am so addicted to it to the point missing it, terribly, when I am abroad.
Of course, just like it happens with a woman you love, the more you get to know her, the more her faults and flaws become evident. Inevitably, with time, the list of things that are wrong with her gets longer and longer. However, if what made you first fall in love is still there, her flaws don’t matter that much: some flaws you justify, some others you try to correct, and certain ones can even become … kind of cute!
And that’s exactly what happened between America and ‘yours truly.’ The more I observed her – for both personal and professional interest – the more that ‘something’ that locked my throat and made my heart pound, those first few days in New York, kept showing up, everywhere I went.
I am talking about that inherently and purely American “if you-can-dream-it-you-can-do-it” spirit which brings out the best in people – regardless of the economic or political climate of the moment. I have lived here since 1996, and witnessed two democratic and two Republican administrations, one of the most exhilarating booms as well as, recently, one of the deepest crisis, in American economic history. Well, that ‘something’ has always been, still is, and probably always will be, there, just like baseball, apple pie and peanut butter –one of the few American foods I could not grow to like in 16 years and, at this point, I am sure I never will.
That ‘something’ makes America reward ingenuity, creativity, and honest hard work. Of course it does not, in any way, guarantee success, but at least it convinces millions of people, including myself, that it is possible – and somehow even indicates the road – to pursue it. And, ultimately, it provides this country with a basic, reassuring, fairness. Contrary to what a lot of uninformed people worldwide tend to believe, America does not give out many gifts to her children. In fact, to be honest, she is quite an unforgiving mother. But at least, she never steals form them either. …Almost never, let’s say.
And yes, it still is the land of opportunities, the place millions of people from all over the world look at, and come to, to make their dreams come true, being them, living safe from religious or political persecution, or – say – becoming a journalist. That does not mean they necessarily will, but at least they feel they are given a chance. And in the process they bring here their food and traditions, their clothes and their music, constantly adding new colors, sounds and tastes to this wonderful kaleidoscope of a land that I now, as I have for many years, call home.
Don’t get me wrong, there are still lots of things that I don’t like about America, but – hey – after loving her 26 years and living with her for 16, she finally accepted to marry me. So, as any freshly married groom would say, today I just feel like the luckiest and happiest man alive.