Maxine Clark Clark 1

Professor David R. DiSarro

English 101

23 October 2012

A Little Pith and Vinegar for the Melting Pot

I went for a walk in my hometown of Beverly with my family today. We parked at Dane

Street Beach and walked the dogs down to Independence Park. My daughter and I collected some

beautiful fall leaves to make a collage. I want her to appreciate the beauty of our natural environment.

We went down on the beach and saved a couple of clams by tossing them back in the ocean. She

found a cool piece of sea glass to add to her collection. As we walked along Lothrop Street we

admired the majestic houses lining the ocean while inhaling clean, healthy sea air. The whole

experience made me take stock of how fortunate I am to live in a place I love so much. One of my

favorite quotes is from the author Richard Bach who said "People are the diamonds, the place is just

the setting." I agree that our relationships are paramount to our personal growth and happiness, but I

still feel that where we live has an effect on shaping the events in our lives and therefore our identity.

This paper recounts my own immigration experience, bringing to light some of the idiosyncrasies

associated with the event and the subsequent crisis of identity I went through.

I haven't always been an American. As a child growing up in 1970's Britain I wasn't really

sure what to think of America. Like most English kids my only knowledge of America was drawn

from what I had seen on television and in the movies. We had three channels to watch, BBC1, BBC2

and ITV, and a lot of the programming we watched came from America. I grew up watching Sesame

Street just like most American kids did in the 1970s and recall asking my mother if I could go on

Sesame Street some day. Instead of explaining that the show was produced thousands of miles away,

her response was "no, they only pick poor kids to go on." Never mind that the television we watched

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it on was rented because my parents couldn't afford to buy one. On a typical rainy Sunday afternoon

our family could be found inside watching dusty old westerns. There was something about seeing all

that sand, the canyons, and all those earth tones that made my tongue dry up like a piece of clay. Back

then, British television programming was unpredictable and most programs were shown sporadically.

So on Saturday nights in the summer when one of the stations ran "The Wonderful World of Disney,"

it was like we had witnessed the holy grail of television shows. I used to tear up with excitement just

watching the introduction. When I moved to the United States, I had never heard of George

Washington, but you better believe I knew who Walt Disney was and that Disneyland was in a place

called California. The first time I went to Disney World in Orlando was with my husband back when I

was in my 20's and we had such a good time that we've been back three more times since. I became

more Americanized with each successive visit. But back then in my eight year old mind, I didn't know

what moving to America actually meant. In my mind's eye I pictured a hybrid of a cinemascope desert

replete with cowboys and Indians blending in with 1960's Technicolor landscape. My imagination

went wild at the prospect of a new life in America. What I didn't take into account was all that we

would leave behind.

When my parents told their own parents about the move, my Nana Beckett, my material

grandmother, took the news in stride. My grandfather had passed away two years before and she had

four other children and ten more grandchildren besides my brother and me. On the other hand, my

paternal grandparents didn't take the news nearly as well. My father was their only child and my

brother and I, in turn, their only grandchildren. Air travel back then was very expensive, but they

pledged to come and visit whenever they could. I was sad to leave behind all of my relatives, but

particularly my paternal grandparents who brought gifts and candy on every visit. I still have the fan

and a pair of castanets they brought me back from a visit to Spain which I used to frequently play with

as a child.

My brother and I usually walked or took the bus everywhere with my mother, so the day my

father took us on a rare car trip to Bristol to get our passports was a memorable one. He insisted we

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not smile in our pictures of else our applications would be rejected. He became more and more

aggravated with me as he kept feeding money into the picture booth and I kept automatically smiling

for the camera. Finally he got so angry he made me cry and it took ages for me to calm down. When I

finally did, into the booth I went, and "snap" went the camera for a perfectly despondent shot. It was a

sign of things to come.

On moving day we dropped off my hamster Christmas at my Aunty Ann's. She had promised

to take good care of her for me. I tried to get Christmas to come out of her little house so I could hold

her one last time, and when I stuck my finger in the doorway of her little plastic house she bit the tip.

The day was off to a bad start. On top of my hamster rejecting me, in a moment of uncharacteristic

generosity for an eight year old, I decided to leave my beloved mechanical barking dog Cokie at our

old house for the new owners as a housewarming gift. Cokie was one of those annoying mechanical

dogs that ran on a battery, shuffling along, stopping to bark every few steps. Looking back Cokie

must have been incredibly grating to my parents, so it's no wonder they encouraged me to make the

ultimate sacrifice. Of course, I immediately regretted it the moment the car pulled out of the drive

way.

This was the first time my brother and I had ever been on an airplane and we were given

honorary British Airways Junior Jet Club passbooks to enter our future BA trips (of which there

would be none), and lapel pins depicting a pair of wings imprinted with the British Airways logo. The

thrill of it all didn't last long because less than a couple of hours into the flight, both my brother and I

got airsick and continued being sick for the rest of the flight. We arrived in Boston the afternoon of

December 21, 1978. Jack my father's supervisor and our sponsor came to pick us up at the airport and

my airsickness turned to car sickness on the ride back to his family's home where we stayed for the

next few days. On the drive, I continued to retch while taking in the sights of Route One out of the

side window, past the Hilltop with its plastic cows grazing the side of the highway, and the

bewildering number of restaurants, billboards, and lights we passed by. When we finally pulled off at

Exit 19 of Route 128 onto Brimbal Avenue in Beverly, it was then that I noticed the grey heaps at the

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side of the road weren't made of dirt, but were grimy icebergs. I had only ever seen snow once before

in Yate and it was stayed white until it melted within a couple of hours of falling. This was the first of

countless comparisons I drew as I realized I didn't want to live in America after all. But there was no

turning back.

Jack his wife Marge lived in a modest bungalow, but it was huge by our standards. My

brother and I were particularly impressed when we were shown a room called the den which had a

loveseat, armchair, and a television. We were offered ginger ale or Dr. Pepper to drink. Pop was

always a big treat, something we didn't drink at home, so my brother and I leapt at the opportunity to

sample ginger ale and Dr. Pepper, neither of which we had in England. We were told they were just

like lemonade (Sprite) and Coke. Both tasted too spicy to our bland palates, so in the end we wound

up drinking milk. Dinner was a miserable affair once I realized America didn't have Heinz's Salad

Cream, and our hosts graciously offered up a multitude of vinaigrettes and other types of dressing to

compensate for this disappointment, but I didn't like any of them. I was cheered by the thought of

dessert which was apple pie. How could anyone mess that up? Apparently quite easily by adding

cinnamon to the apples and serving it with melted cheese on top. I went to bed with a throbbing

headache and growling stomach that night, wishing that I would wake up in my bed, safe and sound in

Yate the next morning.

In the midst of total culture shock, my brother and I started school in Beverly in January

1979. In and out of school, I had difficulty understanding what others were saying, so I learned to be

diligent when it came to listening to others. And since none of my classmates knew what I was saying

either, I quickly assumed a fake American accent which in time morphed into a real one. I adopted

words like gross, weird and wicked into my lexicon, progressively replacing words like tea with

dinner, biscuits with cookies, and settee with couch. Letting go was hard and I missed England for a

long time. I missed my relatives, my friends, my school, the food, the countryside, the wildlife, and

my culture. I felt like I was always drawing comparisons between English and American culture and

choosing sides.

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CONCLUSION

Finally, at the age of 24, on September 23, 1994 in Concord, NH I was sworn in as an American

citizen. But quite honestly, becoming an American has been a gradual process occurring over the

course of my life here. My education, friendships and travels through the country are all contributing

factors. Looking back, I think the first time I truly felt that America is my home for good was on my

wedding day. My husband and I were married in the Rose Garden at Lynch Park in Beverly on a

beautiful June day in 1999. With the Atlantic Ocean as a backdrop and surrounded by our families

and close friends, we exchanged our vows. We put down roots in Beverly in April 2001 when we

bought our house in the same neighborhood my family moved to back in 1978. Our daughter was

born in December 2003, and at eight years old she is now attending the same school I did at her age

when we moved here all those years ago. In a sense when I look at her, I feel like I have come full

circle. This is where I belong.