Only Half Here

For some reason, yesterday, I decided to take the long way home after I visited an exhibition of the Italian Immigration Experience to North and South America at the beginning of the 20th century.  Obviously, moving to another country to live and work is a topic I can relate to since that was my reality for many years.  You pack up a suitcase, trundle onto a plane, and try to make sense of your new environment as best and as quickly as possible.  Sooner or later you learn to get around. You pick up enough of the local language and customs to survive at first and then hopefully to feel "at home". It's a gradual process but fortunately human beings are somewhat adaptable.  We merge.

     

        Ad Promotion for Passage To America From Italy, circa 1910

I can't really beam myself back in time to actually feel what it must have been like to just up and leave your home for a strange new continent.  But I do think that it must have been an act of desperation.  All the birds on the ad poster are having a wonderful experience.  Being stuck in 3rd class below the water line and sleeping on cots placed 7 across and two bunks high must have required a real desire to escape.  According to the description of the immigrants in 3rd class, approximately half of the travelers had no documents, probably because they were too poor to afford such a luxury.  I remember as a kid in the sheltered little Midwestern town where I grew up hearing the term " WOP" as a negative slur against Italian Americans.  I was nearly 60 before someone explained the meaning of that term (With Out Papers or WOP).

     

     Cross section of a ship showing 1st, 2nd, & 3rd class travel

I can't really put myself in the minds of those poor huddled masses because I suspect that given the choice between grinding poverty in the South of Italy and heading off to North/South America, it might have been the best of 2 bad options to leave.  What I do know for sure is that such a major move to another country was a life altering experience.  I know from my own personal experience that traveling and living in another country rearranges your mind.  

At the tender young age of 20, I took the big leap to study abroad for a year in West Africa.  

Living abroad usually leaves a mark on people.  On me it did more than that.  It made me "different".  When I returned to my old surroundings, I just didn't quite fit in.  I looked at my old surroundings and always felt like I was half there.  I was physically in the USA, but I was mentally always yearning to be somewhere else.  The old friends and the old routines just didn't satisfy me anymore.  I was like the old song lyrics which said " How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paris (pronounced pair ee).  Indeed.  I had seen Paris, I'd studied in Geneva, I been to Madrid, I'd walked on the beautiful beaches of the Canary Islands, I traveled and lived in West Africa.  I was always "halfway" sitting in some cafe near the Eiffel tower watching the crowd pass by as I slowly sipped my cafe au lait with a croissant.  I just found myself not really fitting in any more amongst the old group of friends that I had left only a year ago.  I really was half there...half somewhere else.  Mentally and emotionally, I was a foreigner in my own country.  That was the thought that immediately hit me when I saw this statue on the wall in Lucca.

     

     Statue of half a person, clutching a suitcase...just like me!

So, at the ripe old age of 75, I guess I have come to accept that no matter where I go or no matter how hard I try to "Be Here Now", I will probably always only " Be (HALF) here now.

That's my story and I'm stickin to it.

Dan