ROOTS (or where is the place we call home?)

            Breathes there the man with soul so dead


            Who never to himself hath said,


            This is my own, my native land!


                                    - Sir Walter Scott

           

          The story begins with a wedding in wartime Scotland.  The year is 1943.  The bride is 23, the groom 31.  In their wedding photo, they look happy and as cautiously hopeful as is possible under the circumstances.  

            Unlike most new grooms, the man does not immediately leave his bride to rejoin a military unit.  He has not been permitted to enlist because his work as an engineer building ships on the River Clyde in Glasgow is too important to the war effort.  Instead, because housing is in short supply, the newlyweds set up housekeeping with the bride’s parents. 

            Just under a year later, the man and woman produce a son.  Five years later, the war is behind them and the man and woman are living in a flat of their own.  Still, rationing continues, and the man is eager to move to Canada, where his sister reports that there is housing, work, and no rationing.  The woman, who is pregnant again, is not eager to leave her family or her home country.  The man prevails.  The man and woman move to a town near Montreal, where their baby daughter is born. 

            Two years later the family moves again, this time to the United States.  Soon after that, another baby is born in New Jersey, where the family has settled. 

            The man and woman are my parents.  I am the Canadian baby.  The little boy born in Scotland is my brother, Jim.  The American baby is my brother, Ron.             

            And, so, we three children are raised in New Jersey.  We are just like all the other American kids at our American schools.  Sort of.  Other kids have grandparents who don’t speak English very well, but my parents are  different.  Sure, they speak English, but not in the same way that the other kids’ parents speak it.  I am not troubled by their accents---some of my friends ask me to let my mother answer the phone so they can listen to her.  (This was long before cell phones - back when everyone in the house shared the land line.) No, it’s their word choices that set up land mines for me.  My mother says “wee” instead of “small," and “dear” instead of "expensive."  An advertisement is an “advert,” not an ”ad.”  And don’t get me started on “Hoovering,” the word of choice for “vacuuming.”       

            So what’s the big deal?  From my perspective now-- nothing.  But, as I child, I live in horror of saying the wrong word and enduring the teasing that will follow.  I am not a child with the force of personality to start a trend with my word choices.  I am, instead, a child who wishes to fit in, to get by without making waves, to not draw attention to herself.

            Still, my Scottish heritage is important to me.  I enjoy the gatherings of family friends, Scottish immigrants all, at holidays. And as I get older, and become more sure of my ability to use the right phrases in the right context, I become more comfortable with my parents’ use of language.  I even enjoy it. 

            And yet, Glasgow, the place my mother always refers to as “back home,” remains a mystery to me.  I live in New Jersey.  I cannot conceive of any place else.  When we plan a trip to New Hampshire one summer, I overhear the milk man (yes this is a long time ago) say to my mother, “It’s really different there.”  I am maybe 12.  I ask myself, “What could ‘different’ look like?”  My imagination fails. 

            And then I see New Hampshire.  And over the next few years, I visit Canada, where my aunt, uncle, and cousin still live.  And I visit Florida with a neighbor.  And I visit Maine with my best friend’s family.  And I begin to understand what “different” means. 

            When I am 21, I spend most of a summer with an aunt, uncle, and cousin in Scotland.  I learn about really different.  I am delighted with my relatives and my heritage. 

            When I am 24, I opt for different.  No, I don’t move to Scotland.  But I leave New Jersey and move to North Carolina and, a year later, to the Pacific Northwest, where I live still. 

            So that’s the arc – conceived in Scotland, born in Canada, raised in New Jersey, and long-time resident of the Pacific Northwest. 

            But what if my folks had not emigrated?

            I found myself thinking about this last month during a visit to Scotland.  My husband and I looked for, and found, the flat where my parents last lived before they left Glasgow.  

           I stood in front of the building feeling very strange.  I imagined my pregnant mother coming in and out of the basement flat with my brother.  I looked up and down the street and pictured her pushing me in a pram.  I asked myself, What if they hadn’t left?  What if I had grown up with my cousins and aunts and uncles?  What if I had known my grandparents?  Who would I be now?  Clearly, I would have a different accent.  I would have a very different life.  (There’s that word again.)  Another “different” that I can’t quite bring into focus.

          I don’t wish that my parents had stayed in Scotland.  How could I?  I wouldn’t have the kids that I have.  Or the husband that I have.  Or the friends that I hold dear.  The places of my conception and birth notwithstanding, this is my own, my native land. Home is where I have put down roots and centered myself.  I feel it every time that I fly home to Portland from somewhere else, and cross the bridge over the Columbia River into Washington State.  I am home.

            And yet. 

            And yet, I know that I am also a Scot.  And that if it weren’t for my father wanting something different, I would live in Scotland still.  I would say “wee” and “adverts.”  And I would be quite at home. 

            And that would have been a good life as well.