Personal Essays
SOUTH DAKOTA
Mount Rushmore was somewhat bigger than I was expecting but maybe because a friend had warned me that it was smaller than he'd expected. The avenue of all the State flags totally pulled the emotional patriotism trick on me. Then I remembered that I'm going to be Canadian and recovered. Years ago when I was a student in New Jersey I was befriended by an elderly Jewish lady. Her mother had made her bother, sister and her stowaways on the cruise ship where she was employed, in order to get them out of Nazi Germany and into the U.S.A. We spent many wonderful weekends exploring New York. She impressed on me that the USA seemed so much more patriotic than European countries because it is a nation of immigrants and recent immigrants are always the ones proudest to wave the flag.
Later that day we stopped for lunch in a place that made me edgy, in a town which had Elvis's motorcycle. The diner there had a waiter who seemed to do next to nothing, and was probably the boss's son, and a run-ragged waitress who screwed up our order. When J went to pay, the 168 year old cashier woman who sat at the counter asked if everything had been alright. He told her that the order had been wrong, and she asked defensively "Want a discount?" "No, it was just that you asked" "Did they tell you we have staff problems in the kitchen? The chef didn't show up to work today, and the other guy is a foreigner." We didn't start to discuss that until we were back in the car, because well, J was quite obviously foreign, but I'm guessing did not fit with the cashier's definition of a "foreigner".
Mount Rushmore was somewhat bigger than I was expecting but maybe because a friend had warned me that it was smaller than he'd expected. The avenue of all the State flags totally pulled the emotional patriotism trick on me. Then I remembered that I'm going to be Canadian and recovered. Years ago when I was a student in New Jersey I was befriended by an elderly Jewish lady. Her mother had made her bother, sister and her stowaways on the cruise ship where she was employed, in order to get them out of Nazi Germany and into the U.S.A. We spent many wonderful weekends exploring New York. She impressed on me that the USA seemed so much more patriotic than European countries because it is a nation of immigrants and recent immigrants are always the ones proudest to wave the flag.
Later that day we stopped for lunch in a place that made me edgy, in a town which had Elvis's motorcycle. The diner there had a waiter who seemed to do next to nothing, and was probably the boss's son, and a run-ragged waitress who screwed up our order. When J went to pay, the 168 year old cashier woman who sat at the counter asked if everything had been alright. He told her that the order had been wrong, and she asked defensively "Want a discount?" "No, it was just that you asked" "Did they tell you we have staff problems in the kitchen? The chef didn't show up to work today, and the other guy is a foreigner." We didn't start to discuss that until we were back in the car, because well, J was quite obviously foreign, but I'm guessing did not fit with the cashier's definition of a "foreigner".