Rooting

Flag of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland

When I was in the fourth grade, our teacher asked the class one day, “Where do you all come from?” It was a natural question at the time because in the New England where I was growing up most of us in the class were born into immigrant families.  As we went down the aisle, everybody had a ready answer. “Italy. Italy. Ireland. Italy. Poland. Canada. Italy.” When they got to me, I answered, “Germany.” There was a stunned silence, and I had one of my earliest experiences of feeling like an outsider.

Later, on the playground at recess some kids decided to beat me up. “Italian” kids.

They were no more Italian than I was German.  We were all born in the United States. But despite the fact that we were taught that America was a melting pot, we all learned to identify with the country of origin of our parents. Much of Connecticut, where I was born, identified with Italy and in time I would come to have more Italian-American friends than friends of other backgrounds. In 1949, however, the war was still part of the present, and while it infuriated me that I could be blamed for Hitler while these little shits hitting me in the face could get away with not acknowledging a parallel Mussolini connection, there was nothing I could do but take the blows.

When I told my mother and father what had happened on the playground that day, instead of getting sympathy, my father was annoyed. “You’re not German,” he said. “You’re Scottish.”

Flag of Scotland

He didn’t need to explain. I knew his father, my “Grandpa,” was born in Dumfries and that I bore a Scottish family name. And that his mother, although technically an “English-Canadian,” was from Scottish Canada, from Nova Scotia. But when I was born, the first child on both my mother’s and father’s sides, my German grandmother had swooped in and made me her special little prince to spoil. I was fond of my Scottish-Canadian grandparents, but had an especially close relationship with the woman I called Großmutter - she lived close by and was part of our everyday lives - and that connection would come to determine my identity more than the family name ever could.

Flag of Nova Scotia

In time I would come to embrace three countries, Germany, Canada and Scotland, as somehow “mine.” I absorbed the loyalties that lingered in my parents and grandparents, began thinking of Nova Scotia as our other, summer, home, and immersed myself in the history, language and cultures of all three. I felt powerfully rooted and those roots gave my life meaning. As years went by, the roots grew stronger.  The German connection got two booster shots - a junior year abroad in Munich, and a stint in Frankfurt and Berlin in the army. In time, I grew a new identity when fate determined that I would begin my adult life among the flower children in California in the 60s. Never rebellious enough to identify as a hippy, the move to California both outlined my New England ways and gave me the most enduring of my many identities, that of a Californian. And the rooting didn’t stop there. I would come to spend twenty-four years of my life in Japan, and could declare - and mean it - that I now had three homes: San Francisco, Tokyo and Berlin. And several identities: Scottish, German, New Englander, Nova Scotian, and ex-pat American of Japan.

Land of the Mikado

The notion “Jack of All Trades/Master of None” holds true for multiple national identities, I think. I identified so closely with Berlin during my time there in the Cold War, in large part because I developed such close ties with a great aunt and uncle who lived there, that I found myself planning to emigrate and become a German. And yes I still identified intensely with Nova Scotia where, at 16 I had had an accident and ended up in the hospital in Antigonish. My aunt and uncle, whom I had driven up there with, had to leave me behind, and one of the priests from St. Francis Xavier University began visiting me regularly, taking pity on the “boy from Conneck-ticut” who was alone and far from home. One of my major paths-not-taken in life was deciding to pass up the chance of making St. FX my college choice. I developed a powerful crush on Father John, and it was a near-miss.

Father John would often bring other priests with him. Antigonish was, along with Cape Breton Island, a Scottish Catholic Center, and the Gaelic-speaking priests had a direct connection back to Mary, Queen of Scots and to Bonnie Prince Charlie, whose failure to put the Catholic Stuarts back on the throne meant that Scotland would go down in history as a Protestant country. Lying there in the hospital with bagpipe music on the radio every afternoon and with the sound of Gaelic in my ears, though, I found my horizons extended just as they were by means of the Italians I came to know and love in Connecticut. I credit these moments with the formation of my conviction that no single religious institution could ever hold sway over the way I would come to understand the meaning of being rooted in identities - plural.

When a 20-year-old madman named Adam Lanza went into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, I dropped my California identity and ached for the people of Connecticut. When another madman, named Gabriel Wortman, just recently went on a rampage and killed 22 people in Portapique, Wentworth, Debert and Shubenacadie, in the very heart of Nova Scotia, I observed the tragedy at some distance, at first. But then the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation projected the blue and white colors of the province onto Niagara Falls, and I kind of went to pieces.

If I had to pick just one...

Loyalty to a geographical location is a mixed bag. I’m watching how well Germany is responding to the Coronavirus pandemic these days and wanting to put on the black, red and gold cap I picked up when I was in Berlin in 2014 and I got to call my friend Luis in Buenos Aires when Germany took the World Cup from Argentina and rub it in. And as I watch how poorly the United States is coming across to the world these days, I want to hang my head in shame. I am not above falling prey to patriotic sentiments, no matter how well or how poorly these feelings are justified. It's both fascinating and embarrassing to note how easily one can be manipulated by jingoists into joining the crowd. 

On the other hand, there is something steadying, and maybe even uplifting, about knowing where you belong, by being able to articulate a sense of connection, a primal, tribal means of preventing yourself from being tossed around like a rudderless ship. As I turn eighty, I’m ever more conscious that we’re here on earth for but a limited time. When all is said and done, I think, there are worse things than having a place to call home for the duration.

What set me off, if anybody is interested, on this rumination on my tribal connections, is a Netflix Series called Outlander. It's not the worst binge I've engaged in.  I’d give it a B- as a work of art. If they had made it as a movie, and trimmed it radically, I might even want to give it an A. But, as is inevitable with TV series, they need to pad it to keep it going, to give the actors and writers and other crew work. And to keep eyeballs on the tube, so that advertisers can make a living. So it veers over into soap opera subplot overdose and abundance of coincidence.

Outlander is the story of an English woman who goes back in time to the Scottish Highlands of the 1740s, as Bonnie Prince Charlie is seeking ways to put himself back on the British throne. It’s a pretty good look at life among the highland clans. Beautiful people in the leading roles, a Scot named Sam Heughan, born incidentally not far from my grandfather’s birthplace in Dumfries and Galloway, and Irish actress Caitriona Balfe, who plays his “Sassenach” (Gaelic word for “English” - i.e., “Saxon”) love interest. Lots of quite explicit sex; you could even call it soft-porn, although those much younger than me  who are sure to have trouble believing that in the world I grew up in even married people in TV dramas had to sleep in separate beds, will see it as routine love-scenes. Lots wrong with it - like the far too fancy furniture and tapestries for an impoverished locality like the rural Scottish highlands - but for anybody interested in English and Scottish history, very much worth a go. I’m barely into Season 3 and I understand it goes for a couple more. I’ve stopped several times because I get annoyed at the swashbuckle and the violence, but I keep coming back for the history.

That’s the problem with having an ethnic identity: the history sucks you in and you get hooked.

But it’s a time when staying behind closed doors is the better part of valor, and besides walking the dogs, what’s a body to do? 

Music is good.

And so is history.

And so, apparently, is using the time to figure out who the hell you are. Even if you’ve worked at this before, this is a chance to do it broader and deeper.

If you haven’t already gotten into the process, I recommend it highly.