A Gift Outright

If this is Monday, it must be Boulder, Colorado...

Another summer excursion to America, home of my memories, family and friends. My passport home, I suppose you could say, as it's been awhile since I've actually lived on these shores. When I pause to think about it, which isn't often, I'm surprised anew to acknowledge that I've now lived outside the US for many more years than I earlier lived here. 24 years as an American and now 33 years as American abroad. Curious, no?

This time, for some reason, it seemed even more apparent to me when we were standing in front of immigration at JFK on Saturday afternoon. It was all so familiar, as I've been standing in those long, steady queues for decades now. But there was an air of distant familiarity this time. Of course, I know the routine, the forms, the US security guards standing around us guiding us in those snake-like lines. The gaggle of multi-culturalism that has become so much more pronounced within America, and as represented by the diversity of folks with US passports in this line. The casual nature of we Americans in our dress, our language, our open informality...

But, for a moment, looking up at those colorful stucco, artistic vignettes of American life above the entry to America, I felt the distance that is a form of time's passing. The years measured in numbers seemed more pronounced this time. The daily intimacy of my life in Nepal colliding, momentarily, with the reality of the United States. As I stepped up to the counter and the friendly immigration official, I could feel the ebb of my Nepali world, almost as if I was stepping out of the sea onto land returning to a creature I had been before setting sail...

There are dozens of such images when I come back to America. Usually precious, precocious images of past worlds and fresh imagination. A joyfulness to be 'home', a sense of surprise that so little has changed while whole lives have been created and destroyed during the interval. Going out of Eileen's on Sunday morning to find an AT&T office to get Joshua's sim card for my Kathmandu phone. The gardens of Stuyvesent Town in full bloom, kids playing on the lawns, iMacs filling the glass-walled library, Yankee caps on kids, parents and grandfathers. Young lovers arm in arm strolling the streets. Beth Israel hospital with five languages on the doorway (English, Spanish, Chinese, Hebrew and Russian).

Young taxi drivers from the Punjab and Lahore taking us to and from the airports. The view of the East River from Eileen's apartment. Cardboard boxes sitting outside the apartment doors full of the commercial vitality of this country. Amazon. Land's End. The Gap. Eddie Bauer. Justice. Apple. A shopper's paradise stretching from coast to coast. A credit card and a cardboard box. That simple...

Then, as if we are new immigrants to the America way of life, the black woman at the LaGuardia United counter takes ten minutes to advise us on the necessity of Leah getting her frequent flyer card. "Honey, this whole country works on status!', she whispered to us, almost confidentially. "Find the best program where you get the quickest upgrades, free trips and extra baggage. Why wait in line when you can go silver or gold? If your daughter is traveling with you all the time, she should be collecting miles, too!"

These American airports are a revelation after a year in the Kathmandu domestic airport. More shopping and restaurants stretching all the way to New Jersey. Thousands of people on the move. Steady, heady walking through these airports purposeful and confident. While the image of the domestic airport in Kathmandu is of people sitting, waiting and hoping that their flight won't be too delayed, knowing that their day will be spent mostly getting from one place to another.

Then sky-bound, no longer the steep, rugged Himalaya below me, scattered subsistence farms on terraces with snow-covered mountains like a wall separating Nepal from Tibet -- but estates with swimming pools surrounded by forests or townhouses along the Long Island harbor with speeding motorboats and anchored yachts as the jet curves out West away from suburbs of Westchester and the magnificent Hudson river. America below me, rich, lush, generous and almost endless land.

"A gift outright..." wasn't that Robert Frost's expression of this American land when he spoke at JFK's inauguration in 1961.

A gift outright...

As her sky opens and swallows us amid the clouds and memories of my world below...

It's lovely to be home...