Expatica resident blogger R.W. Dooley discovers homesickness.

Yesterday I had coffee with an American. Not an unremarkable thing in itself, not for someone whose spent too many of his waking hours in cafes of one sort or another in many various haunts in New York City over the past two decades. But our get together wasn’t at Tartine in the West Village or The Bakery just off Union Square or, God forbid, Starbucks (you name the street corner). It was at a small outdoor café on the Apostelnplatz in Cologne, Germany. We could have been in any New York café, though, because I enjoyed my short, single espresso with a native New Yorker, a breed apart and just the sort of person I’ve avoided since I landed here nearly two years ago.

I met her last week at a function. She was singing, in English, and her songs were crisp and haunting and spoke from a heart longing for the life she had left behind 16 years ago. That was when she left New York and settled in Germany, making a new life for herself, a life that didn’t seem possible, for lots of reasons, in her hometown. She sang songs of America and at one point in her set, I had to turn my head. I couldn’t face her directly because I knew if I did, I would embarrass myself by being the only other person in the room with tears in my eyes.

I called her the next day and asked to meet her for coffee and yesterday, when we sat in the bright sun of the first day of autumn, it was as if we had known each other all our lives. In a short time, we discovered that indeed our paths had crossed before, and very close. Manhattan is a small island when you get right down to it and a few years back, we were both working for and attending the same university in Greenwich Village. We probably sat very near each other in La Laterna, a cozy, opera flavored Italian café on the western edge of Washington Square park, with no idea in the world that we would eventually face each other in another café, many years and dozens of disappointments later, when our lives had taken fully unexpected courses and brought us both so far from home.

Home was what we spoke of yesterday, why we left and why we can never abandon the idea of some day returning. We came to Germany for different reasons, but in the end the same one. We’re just about the same age, children born in the waning days of the great postwar baby boom. And although our particulars are unique, there are similarities we share, that I believe we share with many of our fellow boomers; the music, the idealism, the disappointment with the way things have turned out with the shape of the world. And we are both Americans. Being an American is something you don’t give a great deal of thought about until you are no longer a local in your own country. What is the old saying; "You never appreciate something until you lose it." Or in our case, until you leave it?

 I was most aware of my status as an American while traveling abroad. In Europe, Latin American or Africa, being an American was something you could never escape, no matter how you practiced your foreign language skills, altered your mode of dress or tried to keep your voice down in restaurants -- especially when the other Americans in the place raised theirs and turned the heads and rolled the eyes of the locals. It wasn’t that I wasn’t proud of my country or didn’t love it but I made it a point never to be a tourist, or at least an obvious one. I am one who travels slowly. I try to avoid the hurried, eyes in the sky, map in the hand, camera around the neck style of visiting a new place and have opted for a more measured, sit and listen approach. That has served me well enough and I may be deluding myself but over many years, I’ve gotten to know a few places well, even if I only spent an afternoon there, watching and listening from a small table in a side street. But during all these brief times away, I knew there was a ticket in my pocket that would take me home. I never, or rarely, experienced a longing to be back or felt genuinely homesick. In fact, I never really understood the condition until shortly after I left New York for the last time as a resident and the ticket I was carrying had no return one.

Yesterday morning, two Americans, people who had met only briefly a week before, fell deeply ill with it, call it a Folie à deux, or some milder form of infection. But sitting with Amy brought it all up in a way I haven’t allowed myself to feel before. I had to tear myself away -- my son had to be picked up from kindergarten and there was the weekly grocery shopping and a long list of other chores. But I waited and we talked on and I soaked it all up like a junky in a room full of crack. I expect we’ll meet again and maybe next time we will speak of other things than America but maybe not. There’s so much more to say and sitting with Amy feels very close to one of home, and just lately, home feels very far away.

27 September 2007

Copyright R.W. Dooley 2007

Read R. W. Dooley's full blog at http://germandiary.blogspot.com/

Subject: 'The New Old World', R.W. Dooley, expat in Cologne, living in Germany