They will tell you that you can't love others before you can first love yourself. This revelation of  thought about life is given for the price of purchase in various self-help and psychological texts for the reader to change and become the best, sanest person he can be.  Damn shame it is that in my generation of first born American's of Eastern European descent that pearl of wisdom didn't appear to be practiced by the clergy or lay community.
Or for that matter by teachers, nuns and just about any other adult one
might have the misfortune to run across. A precarious positioning of the stars
in heaven and crazed dictators on the earth led to what amounted to be
nations of people fleeing ancestral homelands for the supposed safe refuge of a country founded by religious fanatics some two hundred years ago. What the hell where they thinking of? In retrospect it's hard to imagine that they
didn't have the slightest clue of what they were getting themselves into, but
that is the fact. Gullible people, perhaps. However, a new form of
education  waited with open arms and blackjacks to welcome them on shore and expediently separate them from what little money they may have possessed.
     Many occasions are commemorated in my mind by the simple asking of
that obviously disconcerting question to my family. I say that it was obviously disconcerting to them based on my close analysis of the subsequent
phenomena that it produced. Swelling of the lips and related structures caused by close quarter blows to the face, open handedly if the  occasion would warrant such luck, but just as often a good solid belt or kick would accomplish the desired effect. At that point the desired effect appeared to be my silence.
Which by its own statement became an absurdity because as a young child of
three, or four I had stopped making the sounds of infants long ago, but
would not grace the ears of listeners with any sound whatsoever. I would be
silent to the extent that my parents were offered no alternative but to take the
little cretin to the Doctor to have them assess my obvious problem. You
hear stories as you get older about how little good is done by traditional
allopathic practitioners in contrast to their more esoteric, but not as
heavily regulated colleagues. It is a fine thing to note that the husband
and wife team of Internist Dr.C. Albriodonzini, and his wife Pediatrician Dr.
Irena Kavaitis created a symbiotic union that not only created a difference
but became influential. At least in my case, and I rest assured in many
others.
    The good Dr. Albriodonzini had spent at least an hour with me asking
me questions and waiting for the replies.  While my Father bellowed and
sputtered on and on about what a mentally malformed clod I must certainly
be the Dr. approached him and relayed to him a message that would eternally
define our relationship.
    "The boy, he is a fine. No organic trouble at all. And from what I see
and know about you, the boy he just ain't got nothing to say to you so
he's a quiet. You think about that , OK?".
    Vindication can often times be a venomous bitch, and she was most
certainly here. What ensued later fore shadowed my inability to keep my
mouth shut and just let things I could not influence be left undisturbed. On the car ride home from the doctor's office my parents began the usual back and forth berating of each other. This time, as it seemed to a young boy's
mind, the old man was getting a hand up on her, so to speak.  He had her in
tears and was proceeding in verbally for the kill when I calmly, but loudly
expressed from the back confines of the car.
     " Leave my mother alone."
     No profanities, no threats of later mayhem to be inflicted were uttered
by me, however the ass-beating that followed most assuredly would indicate
a far reaching conspiracy directed towards the old man that I was the head
of.
This is the weekend readers condensed version of the story. This in a nut
shell was how life was for me, and many of the children I grew up and went
to school with.
    My parents and their generation were not  so much lost as they were
uprooted. Homeless while wandering towards that golden land, America. And
damn good timing too, in a few decades the government in America would
slap an immigration freeze and quota against Northern and Eastern Europeans.
Supremely baffling and contradictory in light of the fact that's what the
genetic make-up was of the average early American settler. Who knows why
in reality? Maybe it had something to do with the European tradition as
practiced in Mexico, South, and Central America of butchering and trying
to eradicate the native populace for the profit of the King and or Queen.
That's just a supposition of course, and not based at all on the early American habit of totally eradicating where at all possible the native culture and
people of this land. Unfortunately a darker and more odoriferous part of
the historic past that we share in common. Anyway, after defeating the odds
and arriving here they were not welcomed with open arms. From time immemorial the immigrant experience is often times a bitter lesson to learn and move through as quickly as possible. If you make it through then establish a new life with a tight reign on old traditions so as not to forget who you are. And sometimes sadly, those old traditions help you in remembrance of those left behind to die, or worse. Because, yes, there are a multitude of fates worse then death.
    What I consider a supreme irony of life is that my father, privileged
and exposed to higher education Lithuanian that he was, found himself working as a sharecropper in Mississippi after arrival to this country. Many stories and tales he had of those days, the chief one being how on weekends after tending the fields he would break out his accordion and while away the evening hours with music. He lived in a one room wood and tin cabin on the property. On cold nights it was heated by a small pot-belly stove that he also used to cook his meals and make coffee. One weekend he was playing as ususal and there came a knock on the cabin door. Outside stood a handful of grinning Southern black field hands with their guitars, banjos and harmonicas in hand.
    "You the one makin' those sounds?"
    "Taip, as esu. I am the one."
    "Man what is that thing?"
    "Accordion. Very popular in my country."
    "Can we just set out here and play along with you? We ain't never heard
no thing like that."
    "No, I don't think you should. Everybody should come inside."
    He said they did that for months, weekend after weekend. Then came
another hitch in the road. My father had been working on his English
skills, trying to ascertain and master the intricacies of American English. He
somehow was persuaded to enlist, or join, got hood-winked into the
American Army in time for the Korean Conflict. Now imagine this, because it's so absurd it shouldn't prove to be difficult. Take a young man from another country, one that has been at relative peace for the last few hundred
years or so, not counting Soviet invasions of course, and throw him into a
combat situation when he isn't even a citizen yet. That would come much later, in fact I stood and heard as the judge swore him in as a United States
Citizen when I was just a wee lad. Now, rather than situate him in  some rear
echelon assignment where multi-language skills could prove useful, how about he's an immigrant so we just might use him for cannon fodder. He was made a tank driver and spent his entire tour in combat zones. How's that for out of
the frying pan and into the flame? Escape one war just in time to be neatly
delivered to the next. It was no wonder to me that the old man was nuts.
Hell, I could say it more refined, but the bottom line remains. To this day I
still don't understand how he got there. He wasn't offered  citizenship
upon induction, and if he had died no one but his immediate family would have known that he was there in the first place.
    Childhood thoughts and memories give way to the actualities  of adult
life far too early for the most of us. And for some of us, those who are
caught  between the incompatible identities of two distinct cultures, adulthood begins way too early. We  were at a disadvantage in many ways.
Wanting fervently to fit in with the local American kids we quickly learned
their language and sports. I  was reading Hemingway and L'Amour before
kindergarten. My brother went from geek to the ultimate Teutonic athlete
in a few years. Excellence appeared to be inbred, but actually was a force
driven into us from nonacceptance by our American neighbors and their clones, their children. The adults were not spared from it either. It's for that reason people from the same homeland are attracted to dwell in close proximity toeach other. Creating little villages and cities within the cities already created before. Safety in numbers and strength through traditional ways. And we the young ones walked a line between these two distinct worlds
carefully trying not to topple over this way or that for fear of isolation from
either group.
    In those situations and places the rote offering of apologies to appease
the offended one and fervent prayers for good fortune do little if anything
at all to ease the transition. Pain, and a feeling of ill ease sit like a ruling monarchy over these fated matters often times throwing the wheels in
motion for a good beheading when your lot was called in. Of course much to
the chagrin of the charged party who in a fair many instances, I was.  We
were told about freedom and how we all had choices to make, decisions that
would set the tone for our lives. We were free people in a free land that had
long ago learned to control its populace through hope, fear, greed and
ignorance. To be  honest, it's the major corporations that control the
media and the government to a great length. Telling the common folk what they should think, buy and eat. The nations of the earth merely serve as grist
for these gigantic mills that spew out planetary and social destruction. But
this is leading us off this track and putting us on another. Though there's
much to discuss, there is a time and place for all of it.
    I ask what are the differences between us as first generation American's
and those who bred us?  They tried so damn hard to fit in, to be the Joneses
and live the American dream. They traveled thousand of miles through
hostile times and country to come to a place where they would have to give up parts of themselves for acceptance into the mainstream. Homogenization. Perhaps it's a good thing and that's what makes this experiment in democracy a successful one to date. But I can't help but look behind the scenes for
the true operators and directors of it all. Scurrying back and forth through
high level meetings in exotic locales and to remote corners of the globe for
their continual amusement and further profit. I know they're out there, I can
sense them.
    As for the true me, myself, I know I am an American. I can't help but
feel I'm already an expatriate.