The flags were flying at half-mast today in the cold wind. Anchorage is a young town by most American standards, but it remembers Pearl Harbor all too well. There’s still remnants of the world war and the cold war laying around. Bunkers, and batteries, and old forts built into cliffs at sea.
Anchorage is also a diverse town. The schools here are the most diverse in the nation, boasting students fluent in over 99 different languages. So I suppose it wasn’t surprising that I was driving to meet a Japanese woman for lunch. Our kids are in preschool together, and we hadn’t planned on Pearl Harbor Anniversary lunch, this is the first Wednesday of the month and on the first Wednesday of the month we have brunch.
The cold wind brought a touch of snow as I pulled up to a little cafe that boasts organic, fair-trade coffee (a favorite of my friends) and reindeer sausage (a local favorite).
We weren’t there to discuss politics, but life. She asked about Thanksgiving and told me she’d never learned to make a turkey. They had sushi for Thanksgiving (I love sushi and told her to invite me next year). We talked about the kids, and how we get them to do chores, and how we’re teaching them to cook. Her boys make an excellent fried chicken, she tells me. I’ve never made fried chicken so we agree to exchange recipes: her Japanese fried chicken for my American turkey.
Seventy-five years ago this kind of exchange probably didn’t happen. I’d like to think that there was at least one sensible pair of friends who watched the news in grave horror together that day, but continued to be friends despite the war and their cultures. I hope they talked about home towns and New Years traditions like I did with my friend today.
Because I believe in a different America than the one shown in TV shows or described by political extremists who are scared of everyone who isn’t white enough.
I grew up in towns thriving on diversity and mixed heritages. I grew up playing with kids who had dark eyes and brown skin. We spoke the same language: Spanish. We loved the same food: anything Mexican. We shopped in the same town: Tijuana.
I moved to Chicago and found people of darker colors. And the pale blonde down the street with washed out blue eyes, she was Canadian. I fell somewhere in between, with sun-browned skin that stayed a shade browner than the white people’s in the winter, and fair hair than turned ever darker the longer I stayed away from the salty Pacific. The people in the Midwest ate strange foods – hamburgers, meatloaf, and peanut-butter-pickle sandwhiches- but there was a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant that made a decent horchata so it worked out. Here, English was the main language, but I heard Greek and Indian as well. My best friends were a Polish boy with too many constants in his last name, and a boy bused in from downtown Chicago. What did we have in common? Not much except a love of Calvin and Hobbes comics and Michael Crichton books (in 3rd grade… yes… we were THOSE kids).
All my life I’ve been surrounded by color. From pale white, nearly albino friends in my English class, to a friend so black they seemed to absorb light. They were unique individuals. Fascinating, fun, supportive, wonderful people. Our backgrounds didn’t matter.
The older I’ve gotten, the more people I’ve met, the more people I’ve met from outside America… and they’re all fantastic.
My Japanese friend and I spent 15 minutes debating the etymology of RURAL. Why? Because she was an English teacher before her husband’s job moved them to the states. She loves English literature and is happy to talk about books for hours. That’s what makes the USA so great… people from everywhere come together and share and become friends. We’re better because we’re different colors, come from different places, have different stories. That makes us special. That makes us strong.
Americas is great because it’s diverse. And a diverse America is the America I love.
I hope the next few years don’t destroy the America I love.