A Stranger In Our Midst

Seven years ago, three years after my mother went to glory, I paid a visit to the village where I once lived. Specifically, for purposes of this posting, to the diner where we hung out. It felt as if I had never been there before; it was just another joint where I could get a meal. I knew every inch of it, knew every inch of the beach just two feet away, but I was just another customer in another diner. It made no “back home” impact on me.

I suppose when you know you have gone for good, what you've left goes with it.

Oddly enough, during the time after Mom passed, I never slept in my room. I made up the living-room couch and stayed there. Don’t know why; I just did it. I didn’t feel my room was mine anymore and I was pretty much a guest in someone else’s place. Maybe a psychiatrist could come up with an answer in a few seconds. Could be I knew we would be selling it and it would no longer be ours after 49 years.

Here's something I thought was funny, and so did the person’s friends; he did not. I knew an Irishman, a Dublin native, who moved over here. He was always touting the values of this and that in Ireland, over the United States. Ten years later, maybe a bit less, he went back for a visit with the idea that they would embrace their fellow native from the States. He returned in a foul mood and, as it came out later, his fellow countrymen had treated him like an American tourist.

He took out citizenship papers shortly thereafter, realizing that he really was an American.