No place like home

A mongrel flag: Tampa!

When someone asks me where I come from, how I answer depends on my mood.  If I'm tired, I just say "Tampa." (Puzzled looks)  "Floride?"  If I'm up for a chat it's some variation of the following....

My father was born in Marietta, Ohio and grew up in St. Mary's, WV.  My mom was born and raised in Sutton, Surrey, England.  She became a US citizen when I was 4.  Ethnically, I'm painfully WASPish.

Places I've lived:

Born: Tampa, Florida, 1970 (MacDill AFB)

Oxford, England

Mobile, Alabama

Honolulu, Hawaii

Sumter, South Carolina 

Naples, Italy

Tampa (again) and DeLand, Florida, 1981-1992

Arlington, Virginia

Tampa (and again)

Zaragosa, Mexico

Tampa (yet again)

Edgewood, Albuquerque, and Jemez Springs, New Mexico

Ithaca, New York

Toulouse, Aucamville, and Verdun-sur-Garonne, France, 2002-Present

7 states and 4 countries.  Woof!

Places I've visited/lived:

England (1+ year)

Italy (3 years)

Israel (2 weeks)

Jordan (5 days)

Egypt (3 days)

Netherlands (1 week)

Mexico (1+ year)

Guatemala (3+ months)

Belize (5 days)

France (20 years)

Switzerland (3 days)

Canada (3 days)

Spain (3+ months)

Portugal (3 weeks)

Greece (10 days)

Andorra (several hiking expeditions)

Argentina (20 days), 

Uruguay (4 days)

Brazil (10 days), 

Morocco (7 days)

Germany (36 days)

Slovenia (1 day)

Czech Republic (1 day)

Austria (2 days)

Belgium (4 days), 

Luxembourg (2 days)

Ireland (3 days)

27 countries.  A fraction of what some of my friends have managed, but still pretty diverse.

My ancestry:

English, Dutch, Irish

Me ex-wife is from Argentina and has Spanish, Italian, and Quechua ancestry.

My kids were born in France and like the entire nuclear family are trilingual:  English, French, Spanish.  I always speak English with the kids and with their mother they speak French, and then Spanish.  Dinner is like a session of the UN.

They identify as French, Argentine, and American, in no particular order (though my son spent a year in Minneapolis and dreams of living in the States).  They are Third Culture Kids (TCK), as am I.  I recognize the benefits and challenges of "TCK-hood" described by researchers, and learning about TCK characteristics did a lot to alleviate some anxiety I felt about the challenges I'd faced as a teenager adjusting to life in the "normal" world.

I am also an existential migrant.  That is to say, my decision to move abroad was not for economic or political reasons, but

a chosen attempt to express something fundamental about existence by leaving [my] homeland and becoming a foreigner.

I believe my desire to live abroad results from moving back to the US after living in Italy.  This was the first time I'd lived off-base or in a community not dominated by military families.  I was 11, on the cusp of adolescence, and found myself woefully out of touch with "civilian life" and the cultural norms of American pre-teens.  I dreamed of returning to Europe, and finally did, at age 32.

I'm 51 and have lived 25 years outside the US, and the Toulouse area of France is by far the place I've lived the longest.  Whatever reservations I have about life in the US come honestly, courtesy of my dad's service to Uncle Sam.  The unforeseen consequences of military life.  You sometimes see things a little differently.  Objectively, I can't say.  But certainly differently....   

Flag-waving and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance make me feel weird.  Am I American?  White?  Anglophone?  All of the above and none of the above?  Identities shift and overlap.  Am I unpatriotic or anti-nationalist?  

American exceptionalism....globalism.... world citizenship....Jizz-boots on the spooge-tip?

My mother and sister still live in Tampa, but I have as many close relatives in London as anywhere else.

I shall probably live in Europe for the rest of my life.  Barring expulsion or some other unforeseen circumstances.  I am resolutely American.  But I'm something else, as well.

Where am I from?  Many places really.  Call me a cracker, a gringo, a foreigner....but I cringe every time my ex calls me a "Yanqui!"  Ridiculous?  Yep.  

The American South.  The south of France.  Southern Italy.  South England.  Perhaps the one constant across my peregrinations is being a "southerner" to some degree.  And a provincial.  A provincial cosmopolitan.  Or a cosmopolitan provincial.  Some words, basically.  I've barely left my house in four years.  All that moving and now I find my couch to the fridge is about all I can muster.  

20 years from now, when I live in Benin, or Vietnam, or Ethiopia, I'll look back on this sedentary period and wonder just WTF happened.  I'll reflect on it at the end of the month while I'm in Germany.

No real point to all this except to question what we really mean when we speak about who we are, and where we're from.  More and more people have trouble answering the second question and don't identify where they're from as who they are.  I find that encouraging.

I posted Tampa's flag above because it attempts to represent the city's diverse heritage:  Spain, England, Italy, and America.  Very much like my own family.  In fact, the Centro Asturiano de Tampa was co-founded by a man named Faya, and my wife is a Faya, with Asturian ancestors.  Faya is a rare name, and the guy may well be a distant cousin.  The flag meshes nicely with my own family tree's tangled roots, but damn, it is a godawful mess, innit?

Short of any fascist imagery to untangle this week, I dipped my toes into my genealogy, which is now just a collection of names and dates and places.  I'm hoping to turn all that data into a narrative, and as the blog is where I come to set down my thoughts and get things straight, I expect to do a lot of genealogical ruminations in the coming months.

5 generations of my family lived and died on the same farm in Ohio until dad broke the chain by running off to Vietnam.  And I've been running ever since.  And Vietnam is definitely on my list of places to go before I shrug off my mortal coil.

My biggest regret about the circumstances and choices of my life is the lack of roots in a specific place.  Was it Wolfe who said you can never go home again?  In my case, that's sometimes painfully true.  A nomadic life has its benefits, but it's a trade off, and just once I'd like to stroll down Main Street and wave to distant family and neighbors going back generations.  It's like being nostalgic for something I never experienced.

Maybe the grass is simply greener than wherever it is one happens to be at the moment....