Being Strange in America

Yesterday, I had one of my more normal days since we returned from Brno a year ago. 'Normal' for me here means, pretty much, waking early, and racing through the day trying to see just how much I can accomplish by bedtime. I made the beds,took Bram to his day camp, stopped by a store where I chatted with the cashier, a complete stranger, about cleansers. I listened to Spanish language tapes while I scrubbed the bathrooms, repaired the slow drain, replaced two shower heads, did 6 or 7 loads of laundry, cleaned the rugs, the porch, and the kitchen. In the afternoon,we went downtown to pay the car taxes on our 10 year old little Toyota and ate in a sidewalk cafe. Later, I cleaned the carport and driveway, pruned some shrubs, supervised the hanging of a new clothesline, and put away some of the dry clothes.

And so begins the being strange in America. The temperatures have been in the mid 30s here with about 80% humidity, and I am determined to make it through the summer without the air conditioning. And I am not using the clothes dryer, either, for most of the laundry. There is nothing wrong with our a.c unit, and our dryer is not broken. And this makes us strange. The general attitude here is that only poor (or strange) people do without these things. What makes it even more perplexing to our neighbors, who walk past our house and peer with pity on their faces into our wide open windows, is that we are choosing to live this way. Again today, we filled the clothesline with laundry and used the fans, and sweated a bit. I had coffee for breakfast, a kid meal from Burger King for lunch and rice for dinner. A little later I will have an American beer (go ahead, feel sorry for me with no pivo. I do.) and maybe, like yesterday, I will drink it without saying how much I miss Brno or complaining about how awful my beer is (though I am sure that I will think it and pity myself for the lack of my Czech friends).

I like the summer. I like the heat and the humidity and being outside, letting the outside in. Maybe I even like to sweat, though here I must be careful not to smell of sweat, since that, too, is a hallmark of the poor and of the strange. And when I was in the Czech Republic, in one of the coldest wettest winters on record, I loved the cold and the snow. This too makes me strange, at least here. Today, like yesterday, I feel as I often felt in Brno, both at home and homesick. And this, these days, is what passes for normal for me-- being strange, in America.