How to get a bunch of Americans to start tearing up, immediately?
Start playing America the Beautiful as your closing song at a Thanksgiving day Mass at an American-centered parish in a foreign country. Even if it’s Italy, and even if it’s a beautiful Roman day outside. Halfway through the first verse, I looked around, and saw six people wiping their eyes.
Funny thing. Because it’s more than “I miss a clothes dryer, I miss going to Wal-Mart, I miss driving a car” as one person said to me this week. It’s just something else, hard to define.
It was Thanksgiving Day Mass at Santa Susanna, the American parish in Rome, run by the Paulists. I got there about halfway through, so I didn’t hear Cardinal Foley’s homily. But I did meet him as he juggled coffee and a muffin, and also had the great honor of meeting Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon, who was there in attendance, and read President Bush’s Thanksgiving Day proclamation after Mass. EWTN’s Joan Lewis was there, but was busy chatting with several others, so I didn’t have a chance to meet her. She’s quite the energetic lady, it seems.
How neat — I played “America the Beautiful” at the end of Mass too. I love that second verse about “pilgrim feet.”
Ah, that puts me in mind of one of my own Thanksgivings in Rome! Only that particular year the Mass was at S. Agnese in Agone in Piazza Navona. And “Thanksgiving dinner” was chicken mcnuggets at McDonald’s on Piazza di Spangna.
The prior year I was so homesick I phoned a cousin back New York from a public phone box and talked to her for two hours!
As you say, it’s different when you are so far from home, even worse when you’re all by yourself.
You are absolutely right about that “thing” about expatriate life that is difficult to articulate. On one hand, we have these opportunities living in another culture, possibly learning another language, and having these experiences that we are supposed to believe we are privileged to have. We’re not supposed to appear unappreciative. But on the other hand, we know we are alien and remember how good-different our lives were in our home country. It is easier to vent about missing our dryers and cars and baseball because these are things that are easy to describe. Last summer when one of my American friends talked about her moving back to the U.S. after almost five years in various parts of China, she began listing all the plans she was already making for the summer (ball games, family picnics, summer reading programs for her kids, etc…..). I interrupted her, and asked if it was just that she was ready to go back to living an American life. She agreed. That was the best way to describe that truly indescribable sense, the one we miss, the one that will make us cry on these holidays. It’s worse than regular homesickness.