THE EXPATRIATE’S COMPLAINT—OUT OF PLACE AND OUT OF TIME

The expatriate lives in a world of dichotomy. You’re always torn between the land of your birth and the country or countries where you live by choice or by destiny. Your heart tells you to see things from the perspective of the place that will always be your birth right and the culture that you suckled at your mother’s breast. But cold observation and logic will teach you to also see the world and your native country from a neutral, objective viewpoint and to understand how others see you and yours. And depending on your personality, you’ll either be humbly apologetic or obnoxiously arrogant about it. 

You’ll never feel completely at home in either world. No matter how long you live where you live abroad, no matter how many decades, you will always be a foreigner to the natives, but more importantly, to yourself. You may congratulate yourself on how well you’ve adapted, how well you speak the language, how well you fit in. But it will always be that—fitting in, adapting, camouflaging yourself as something you’re not. And no matter how good you get at it, it won’t take long in a conversation, with those who are born and bred, for you to be found out and fingered as a stranger, even if as a warmly welcomed one.

Unless you consistently seek to keep abreast of the evolution or decline of the place from which you came, you will see your original home in a picture that is frozen in time. It becomes a museum piece. Especially after your most referential figures have faded away and you become the generation that your parents and grandparents were before you. And every time you return “home”, you won’t try to find out what has changed but will seek to confirm what has remained the same, because that’s what makes you feel “at home”.

You’ll bristle when others tell you that you’re being naïve, that things are nothing like they used to be. And are they ever better? Not likely. It seems they never are. You will want them to be, though, because they are a big part of who you were before you became who you are today. You’ll look, as in a dream, for glimpses of your past, for fragments that tend to reaffirm “who you are.”  You’ll walk once familiar streets trying to remember what used to be there, attempting to see in your mind’s eye the building that once stood where there is now a parking lot, the department store that’s now a thrift shop, the tavern that’s now a set of law office, the rambling old house where your grandparents lived and that, for the past forty years or so, only continues to exist in your memory and in your heart.

You’ll yearn to bump into people who are long since dead but who live on in your mind, just as they were. Or to meet up with classmates whose adolescent images have remained timeless in your memory so that you probably wouldn’t recognized them if they passed you on the street—just as you no longer recognize the reflection that stares back at you in the mirror while you shave.

No matter how long you live abroad, you will have moments of terrible longing to be “back home”. But when you go there for a visit, you’ll find that you no longer fit in completely, that you’re treated as “a guest”, that your vision is another one, at once familiar yet foreign. And should you decide to go back and stay for a time, you’ll find that it feels more like a holiday than a homecoming and that you can no longer be in one place without missing the other.

You’ll also have regrets. You’ll be grateful for the time spent with parents and siblings and life-long friends when you were back on always too short visits. But you’ll mourn the times you weren’t there, the life-events you missed, the comfort you failed to give, the always thinking there would be more time, another visit, a new homecoming, when those reunions were never to be.

Expats are destined, then, never to be quite satisfied, never to be quite happy, always to be out of place and time.

That sensation of “not belonging” is heightened when you journey from one hemisphere to another, because even the seasons are opposite. I was thinking about that on this blustery spring morning in Patagonia. I was remembering that October was the month that my mother, Reba Mae, loved best, because she loved the autumn. And in Ohio, September can still be somewhat summery and winter can come early in November. But October is the quintessential month of autumn.

Reba Mae talked in October about “sweater weather”, and about “bright blue October skies”. She loved the sweet, tobacco-like smell of the fallen leaves on the damp ground, and she missed the incense smell of the dead leaves burning along the curbs in town before burning was banned and people started having to bag or mulch what they raked.

But mostly, she loved the fall colors of October, the fiery reds and yellows, as if the maples were aflame, the soft yellow hue of the cottonwoods, the rich red-brown of the oaks. “No matter how good you were,” she used to say, “you couldn’t paint this. A camera can’t even do it justice. It’s just breathtaking!”

Sometimes we would take a ride out in the country on an October Sunday, gasping, ooing and aahing at the flaming colors of the woodlots, while Whitie, my dad, stayed home, snoozing on the couch and pretending to watch the ballgame. Reba Mae’s voice would tremble when she would say, “I feel so sorry for your father. He just doesn’t seem to see any beauty in anything. I think he would feel so much less depressed if he could just learn to love nature, to stop and look at all this, to let it into his heart.”

Later in life, after a great deal of psychiatry, anti-depression drugs and help with what doctors call his “chemical imbalance”, Whitie got so that he would go on walks or go places now and then with Reba Mae, where nature was particularly prevalent. By then he had learned that being able to see your surroundings and be awed by them and grateful was a sign of sanity and that failure to perceive beauty was a symptom of mental illness. He was nothing if not smart in this way. And so he might stand watching a sunset briefly and then say, “Boy, that’s pretty!” And if this failed to elicit a response from Reba Mae, Whitie would nudge her with his elbow and say, “Ain’t it, ‘Mau’? Ain’t it?”

It was as if to say, “See how I’m seeing it? See how I notice things now?”

And Reba Mae would stand there with a lump in her throat watching the sun go down, fighting back tears, and thinking that she’d give anything for him to believe what he was saying and to feel it the way she did.

Over the years I’ve learned to celebrate Christmas in eighty-five-degree heat with a cold buffet and chilled cider and champagne. Or not to celebrate it at all.  I’ve learned that we can have one of the worst snowfalls of the year on July Fourth. I know that the first day of spring is September 21^st and although the secretaries in Buenos Aires are anxious to wear their new spring outfits, as the day ends you can usually see them carrying a spray of flowers that they’ve received at work to celebrate the onset of the season of love while they shiver at the bus stop in the persistent winter chill.

But October will always be autumn for me, no matter where I am in time and space. And it will always belong to Reba Mae.