Nothing much

 

The more I read various posts and comments on Substack and elsewhere, the more I realize how little in common I have with these writers and maybe most of the rest of society.  This is not a new conclusion so much as it is a reinforced one.  As an armed services brat (born, raised and transferred), I grew up mostly overseas and so lived a life far from that of a normal American.  

US military bases in Japan.

I was left out of most of the cultural references and key social highlights of a typical person of my generation. I didn't see the TV shows -- never saw an episode of Friends or South Park or Sex in the City -- only heard a selection of the popular songs of the day, certainly didn't hear anything out of the Top 40, especially not anything niche, localized or otherwise appealing to a limited audience, never saw the the TV commercials that everybody liked or hated -- the Geico caveman, Donald Trump and Pizza Hut -- wasn't aware of the political squabbles or the politicians and political commenters involved, didn't participate in the fads and fashions of people my age in the States -- I never planked or wore jeans under my dress or sported a whale tail, never wore fake nerd glasses and posted selfies of myself, hands raised, fingers curled like claws, with the caption "Rawr!" I never used L33T speak, never even heard of it. I did used to tYpE lIkE *t*H*i*S oN y*A*h*O*o w*T*hH mY ¡hOmE! ¡cReW! And I used Yahoo audibles with enthusiasm and frequency -- this one below was my favorite. But that's about it.

I wasn't really from anywhere and had no hometown. But I had lived in lots of places -- Misawa, Yokosuka, Atsugi, Sasebo in Japan, Sigonella, Gaeta and Naples in Italy, Souda Bay, Crete, Rota, Spain, Guam, plus Whidbey Island and North Island.... One year, I went to 11 different schools.  "Class, this is our newest member. Go ahead, introduce yourself."  "Thank you, Miss Gump. My name is Wanda and...." -- out comes the Shepherd's crook and I'm jerked away to another school maybe in another country, maybe on the other side of the world.

I learned to shut up about all that when I settled stateside to finish high school, the same as I learned not to mention I was fluent in Japanese. The other kids thought I was lying or just weird. "Wait, what? You've climbed Mt. Etna and Mt Fuji? And skied both the Italian and Japanese alps? Oh, sure you have!" (belly punch)

Then in the service myself it was more time overseas, often in the same places I grew up in and in some cases where my parents and grandparents on both sides, they having been in the service, too, also lived. My grandfather was stationed at Atsugi, as was my father, and as was I, and now my little girl has, not been stationed (yet), but lived there, too. At one point, I served on the same aircraft carrier as my father had.

Another grandfather, in the Air Force in the 1950s, lived with his family in Washington Heights, the American housing complex in Tokyo located where the 1964 Olympic Stadium and Yoyogi Park are today. Before we Americans took it over, it was a Japanese Army Air Force facility; in fact, it was where the first airplane ever flew in Japan.

 I once saw an old Mainichi Graphic, a sort of clone of the picture magazine Life, that they had saved that had published a picture of them barbecuing in their back yard. The photo was taken through a chain link fence with a telephoto lens.  The caption read that American military in Japan were so poor that their houses didn't even have kitchens so they were forced to cook outside.  

That photo was a lesson to me in how people willfully misunderstand each other and willfully spread those misunderstandings to denigrate others and assert their own superiority.  In this particular case, the Japanese author of the story could simply have asked American military public relations to explain what was happening in the photograph and written about American customs and pastimes unfamiliar to Japanese.  But he didn't do that.  He wrote negatively about Americans to assure his Japanese readers that they were superior to these foreigners polluting their homeland.

I've walked around that area of Harajuku and Yoyogi and probably have been in the same spot or near it where the house my grandfather lived in back in the early 1950s once stood. 

I come from a long
line of service members
and their brats.

Anyway, growing up I was familiar with all the cool places to hang out in Catania in Sicily or where not to venture in Naples, or where that crashed F4U from World War Two is on Big Navy, Guam, or which trains to take from Sagami-otsuka to get to Nikko, bicycled downhill from the base gate to Rota town, gobbled up trabancos in Jerez de la Frontera, saw the monkeys on the Rock at Gibraltar, wandered around the palace at Knossos, hiked  down to the Grotta del Turco at Montagna Spaccata and so on and on.  But I had never been to New York City or New Orleans or Chicago or the Grand Canyon or....  The only America I knew was some dumb ranch and environs in Montana that I flew to, seeing only the airports in EWR, LAX or SFO.

Phi Gamma Delta. Stupid wars.

"So," you might say, "you were a citizen of the world, at home wherever you found yourself."  Uh.... No.  What I was was a citizen of nowhere, an alien outsider wherever I went.  The perpetual one who did not belong. Ask any brat.

He had baby brats.

You might think that I am bragging to mention all these foreign places, but I'm not.  Transferring from one duty station to another was just ordinary life, and while outside the gate the world was different, inside it one Navy base was pretty much like any other, with an MWR, NEX, fast-food franchise, commissary, movie theater, base housing, office buildings, hangers or port facilities looking the same, painted the same, in Guam as Japan as Spain as Italy as Greece.  But once in a stateside civilian high school, I learned that what was normal to me was seen merely as boasting so I kept quiet.

For a while, I suffered pangs of homesickness and wished I was back aboard a Navy base in a foreign land.  Homesick for a stupid Navy base? Are you brain damaged? Get out of here! No, really, I was.  Brats will understand, not you slacker landlubbers.

So what's all this blabbering leading up to?  Not that much, just the realization that still, and I guess always, I will be alienated from the American mainstream, not quite a foreigner, maybe more like an out-of-phase American.  

There are lots of stories of the dumb things I did when I first settled in as a civilian.  At the time, they weren't dumb to me.  It was just that I didn't know the correct protocol, didn't understand what things to do and not do, how the ... well, it doesn't matter.  I almost lost my life twice because I didn't understand there were no-go zones in American cities, or that a female should not be out alone too early in the morning or too late at night even in supposedly safe areas. 

You say that doesn't matter? Of course, it did then.  I was shocked and terribly frightened. But it's in the past and I learned that in some ways and in some places, America is  no country at all. It's a land before civilization. I didn't .... It got too much for me.  It really did. So as soon as I could, although I never thought I would, and when fate stepped in, I put on a uniform and escaped. And when fate stepped in again, I took it off.

Am I complaining about my childhood and I should just put a sock in it?  Well, the latter is always good advice in any circumstance, but I'm not really complaining so much as noting and evaluating how growing up as I did has influenced who I am as an adult.  I'm not a nowhere (wo)man sitting in my nowhere land, as the song has it, but I'm familiar with the feeling.

Bottom line, when I read others' personal accounts of life in these United States I feel like a stranger in a, not strange, but unfamiliar land that I thought was my own, my native land.  It is, but the people in it are not quite mine. Or I am not quite theirs.