"New citizens, turn your eyes to the screen!" Obediently we sit, row after row in a Florida ballroom, clutching our little flags as fireworks explode on the giant monitor and a familiar tune swells. Not "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Instead, that country star croons his pride in a nation "where at least I know I'm free." As the schmaltzy anthem reaches its crescendo, the singer commands: "Stand Up…!" And all around me, my new compatriots obey, waving their flags proudly.
I shamble to my feet, flag drooping in my grasp.
There was a moment earlier when the officiant called for a show of hands as he ran through the nations represented. Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, India—a flurry from each. Nigeria, Haiti, and on and on. Sometimes just one person. There was something grand and uplifting about that moment—so much excitement, so much hope. So many hard-fought dreams come true.
And then there are those like me and a couple of others from the U.K. I catch one Brit's eye, recognizing the same emotion as we tweak our flags in cynical solidarity.
It's done; I'm a citizen. I have pledged allegiance and, with a twinge of guilt, renounced my loyalty to "foreign potentates." My husband brings flowers, and we walk out of the convention center amid the chatter of celebrating families.
"So, do you feel different?"
"Not really. Did you?" He had taken the plunge a few years earlier.
A grin. "Remember Britain 'declines to recognize' our renunciation.'" A reassuring reminder.
Becoming American was never part of the plan. We had arrived in 1980, more than thirty years earlier, with no intention of staying. Things were bleak in Britain; Margaret Thatcher was cutting higher education and ushering in austerity. His university fellowship ending, my husband leveraged some contacts and accepted a one-year teaching job in Iowa, a mysterious state where, we learned, there were six pigs for every person. Not a place that loomed large in the British imaginary of America. I would follow when my dissertation was done. After a year, we would travel the country and go home. I was adamant about that.
Six months in, he was offered a tenure-track job in the same department. It came with sponsorship to apply for permanent residency—the much-coveted "green card." Though happy for his success, I felt a stab of worry; tenure means permanent, doesn't it? But with no work on the horizon at home, I agreed we'd stay longer. The green card would offer freedom to find my feet and perhaps a job; I could better enjoy our temporary sojourn as more than a "trailing spouse." And there was so much more to see in a country whose vastness I was only just starting to grasp. We had plenty of time.
Off we went on the four-hour drive to Citizen and Immigration Services in Omaha, where, if we were lucky, someone would interview us. No appointments, no guarantees. We brought our required professional photos, "Three-quarter face, left ear completely exposed." This was apparently based on a theory that the basic shape of ears never changes, allowing authorities to identify us in perpetuity. (Years later, I learned from a British scientific paper that this implausible claim has merit).
We sat all day on benches in the large lobby, waiting with dozens of others for our names to be called. At around 4:30, we were summoned to an upstairs office. Both our photos were instantly dismissed. "Surely you can see the strand of hair blocking your ear?" We couldn't, but who were we to argue? Off we shuttled to the instant photo studio—the one no one ever told us about—and paid another fee.
Then the interview.
"So, when were you married?"
We respond simultaneously—different dates, different years. I glare at my shamefaced spouse. Surely this would be fatal?
But the officer just grinned, and we filed out of the building as it closed for the evening. Our green cards would be in the mail; it was all surprisingly easy.
He accepted the job. We moved from our tiny apartment to something bigger, then to a rented duplex.
I worked to maintain the ties that bound us to home, as I imagined life beyond this now open-ended American interlude. I read the Guardian Weekly avidly, determined to keep up with news and culture. In that analog age, phone calls were reserved for holidays and emergencies, and transatlantic flights were beyond our budget. I missed my brothers' weddings.
But the mail brought real letters, eagerly devoured. My parents had moved to the English Lake District, and my mother described days of walking, gardening, and community activities. Sheep from the neighbor's farm had nibbled the top off the little chestnut tree we planted when we got married, carefully transported to their new home. "It may grow in a little strange, but it will be there when you come back."
As my husband's career thrived, the moment was never quite right to leave. With green card in hand, my life was shifting. I was doing things I'd never contemplated in England—playing soccer and softball, sending articles to newspapers, enrolling in a journalism program, teaching anthropology whenever someone would pay me. Tentatively protesting poor service in an utterly non-British fashion. And making new friends along the way.
Our conversations changed: "You know, it probably makes sense to buy; we're just throwing our money away. And we'll make a profit when we leave!" We thought about our exit even as we refinished the floors in our Victorian fixer-upper.
Letters from home shifted too. My mother, who used to scour the academic job postings every week, now wrote about shipping my childhood desk, an heirloom from my grandfather at which I used to do my homework. She would pack it with books, pictures, and things that would connect me to home. I advised her to offer our remaining belongings, including our cache of wedding gifts, to siblings: "We'll buy new when we come home." Instead, we bought new in Iowa, gradually replacing our yard sale finds with things that were meant to last. My mother wrote apologetically that my father's overzealous trimming had killed our chestnut tree.
The day her heart stopped, I was out of town, returning to a note pinned by the police to our door. Before cell phones and even voice mail, it was the only way my siblings could reach me. I arrived in time to see her buried among the lakeside daffodils.
In 1986, our Iowan first son came home from the hospital wearing a baseball onesie and a "Born in the USA" bib. His Minnesotan brother wore them three years later, in our next home on the shores of Lake Superior. Moving north had been an opportunity too good to pass up. And we could still go back as long as the kids were young, right?
Minnesota brought me a real job, and then tenure, and ushered in the glorious years when we were building a family of our own. There was no time to pine, and we finally had the resources to travel home more regularly. Our gateway to England became the seventeenth century cottage where my father now lived alone, the woods and the water just steps from his door.
Then one more move, to Florida, a state that seems to inspire equal parts of envy and ridicule. Here, as the first decade of the twenty-first century came to a close, I finally took that oath—not ready to cut the ties, but knowing it was time to participate in whatever was ahead. And here we still are, forty-five years since first setting foot in Iowa. Citizens, voters, with a grown family, a home, a circle of friends, and a retirement fund. Still being taken for tourists. Still talking about the perfect moment to leave.
The year we drove to our destiny in Omaha, Neil Diamond had a hit with his song, "America," celebrating the triumph of the immigrant: "They're coming to America!" Driven by despair or drawn by a dream, the immigrants in Diamond's rapturous song "never look back." Hyperbole perhaps; I have yet to meet an émigré who does not sometimes yearn for home. But when you're driven from that home by poverty, pain, or persecution, the temptation to look back must be less cogent.
For the inadvertent immigrant, looking back is a constant part of the territory. A friend's poem about daffodils triggers memories and tears. My heart still jolts when the plane descends over the gold and green mosaic of the countryside. I must have my tea in the morning. I renew my British passport faithfully. Never a royalist, I felt an unexpected twinge at the news of Queen Elizabeth's death. Named sovereign the year I was born, she had somehow been a thread in what wove me to England. Those threads still tug, if less tightly now. Some have snapped altogether, as my family of origin shrinks with the passing years. Others are strengthened by a nostalgia for something that maybe was never quite there. I devour British TV, disdaining the captioning that my Anglophile friends embrace. "Of course I can understand them!" Well, mostly. I longingly watch reality shows in which people buy the perfect country home and wake up to breathtaking views of the Yorkshire Dales or the Somerset Downs. A couple returns from thirty years in Canada, finally letting their threads draw them home. Could that be us?
I know the answer, though.
America has given me a career, the opportunity to explore a breathtaking country, a sense of optimism—even a cautious opening of unaccustomed sentimentality. Like on "National Sons' Day," clearly an invented conceit, when I posted photos of my "boys," and told the world (or my tiny part of it) how wonderful they were. My sister, only half-joking, said this proved I had become a real American.
And maybe I have. Over the years, my little corner of England remained the same, as my father aged into his nineties and I visited often until the end. I saw the woods and hillside strewn with daffodils in March, carpeted with bluebells in June, and dusted with snow in December. But even as funerals and video calls bring the extended family together more often, I track American politics and culture now, as the everyday realities of Britain recede. Generations of British celebrities are a complete mystery. When did Brits start greeting people with "ya alright then?" When did everything become "brilliant," even "magic?"
Perhaps it would be nice to report that my heart now swells with pride when I hear the anthem or gaze at Old Glory. But it wouldn't be true. No more than it would be true to say that tears well up when I see the Union Jack or hear "God Save the King." I find myself hovering over the Atlantic, torn between two shores, and not quite belonging on either.
And these days, from a perch of privilege I once barely understood, I can't help but reflect on the divergent stories of the immigrant experience.
I recall a casual conversation with an acquaintance about how our Florida town has changed.
"All these immigrants, of course."
"I'm an immigrant, you know."
"Well, yes, but you know what I mean…"
Oh yes, I know. Back in Minnesota, I taught a class in which students explored their family histories, telling of the epic journeys that brought them here, whether a century or a generation ago, whether from Sweden or Somalia. America is built on such stories. In the 1980s, as we settled in Iowa, Ronald Reagan was championing amnesty for the undocumented, sparking a surge in new citizens and their modern immigration sagas. But over the last few years, the narrative of immigration has shifted to a darker place. For some Americans, Neil Diamond's cry of triumph has become a call to arms. "They're coming to America!" On the local news I hear a third generation Floridian describe being asked to prove his citizenship. The song played at my naturalization almost fifteen years ago, deemed appropriate to welcome a diverse new citizenry, has become the soundtrack for rallies against the invaders who "poison" our nation's blood. We all know these marauders don't look like me. At those times I fear for the future.
We never had to worry about proving our right to be here. Uncomfortably, I recognize the irony that we, who never really wanted to come, are welcomed—even celebrated—while others are not. I think back to my Iowa days when a simple call to an insurance office ended in a job offer— "because someone with your accent would class this place up!" Or the moment in my husband's citizenship interview, when he momentarily blanked on the thirteen colonies. "Um, Massachusetts, Virginia, Carolinas... um..." The examiner smiled helpfully: "And Georgia, and Delaware... You've got this!"
It's an old cliché that America is born of immigrants, and it's true, of course. But while some wait for years or suffer and even die in the struggle to belong here, others like me just came and stayed – invisible citizens of convenience. My sons will have no origin tale of adversity and perseverance to pass on to any future generations. No one forced me to come, and no one tried to make me leave. My choices were my own, and even as regrets still linger, only now do I understand what a luxury that was.
I will not jump to my feet when some self-described patriot orders it, and I will not buy that old maxim—America, love it or leave it. I cannot feel unreserved love for a country that permits carnage in the name of freedom or refuses to care for the poorest of its citizens. I still hover uncertainly.
But it is my country now, for good or ill. I arrived young and curious, with no plans for what lay ahead. I glided into busy middle age, building a new family and thinking less about the past. Today I find myself old and meditative, still beside the partner who has shared this unplanned life, and with ghosts of the past crowding in from all sides. I glance in the mirror and wonder: Did my ears really remain the same, even when nothing else did?
This summer, we gathered with our American family to celebrate fifty years of marriage, most lived this side of the pond. Through these years, I have inadvertently woven new threads that stretch across this astonishing continent and bind me here. In uncertain times, one thing I believe: I will always hanker for the land over the water, but one day my ashes will meld with American soil.
