Twenty years ago this morning my wife and children first awakened here in the New World. They had flown from Frankfurt am Main to Philadelphia where they were slated to remain overnight and then fly to Groton-New London Not Quite International Airport but I decided my fun meter was pegged out and went to PHL to welcome them to their new country.
Things had already changed before they had touched down. I had gone from driving a BMW 518 to something called an Isuzu I-Mark (I was to have another name for it in very short order. but I digress) that labored for every mile of the 11.2 million miles it seemed to be from where I had set up our new home and the City of Brotherly Love.
Sigrid, my wife, had been in the USA on two occasions-a bit more than a year after we'd been married, sort of one of those victory lap visit things I do so poorly, and did this time as well, and a visit the summer after my Dad died. She was always proud she got on so well with my father-and rarely appreciated it when I told her she was only related to him by marriage not blood and that made all the difference.
Patrick and Michelle had never been to their father's country. Both Sigrid and I had discovered the year previously, when my mom, "Oma America" as Michelle, barely three at the time, kept calling her, came to visit that Patrick spoke English. It served him well as well as Michelle even more in the first few months on this side of the pond as he was Michelle's translator for our neighborhood and beyond.
Patrick was nine when my job disappeared in Germany and grasped far more of what was happening and its impact on his life than I would've liked. Michelle, however, was much younger and stepped off the plane clutching a clockwork pig, the only toy the packers who descended on our apartment in Germany hadn't managed to seal up in a giant shipping crate.
As toys went, the pink pig would have won no prizes--it would take three steps forward, offer a pair of oinks, and then take a quick step back. She had had it for a few months prior to the Westward Migration and that night in Philadelphia, she held on to it as if it were life itself. I'm pretty sure she still has it and would not be surprised if she keeps it forever.
All three were the last ones to clear customs and immigration because of some truly stupid advice I had been given in Germany by the lawyers who worked for my bosses. Two decades later, I'm not quite so angry about all of that. (Though I do still hope all of them are as dead as I wished them very intensely that evening.)
I stood in the arrival terminal as streams of passengers brushed and rushed by me, willing my family to appear. Sigrid, drawn and gaunt, holding Michelle, with Patrick venturing ahead by a few steps, came into view and I had one of the most amazing moments in my life in the most unlikely of locales, holding all three in an embrace whose memory I wanted to last a lifetime. So far, so good.
We collected suitcases and headed to the car with Michelle rubber necking in every direction and repeating that "Amerika ist sehr dunkel." When she's right, she's right; besides I saw no point in telling her it was eleven PM. The trek north on I-95 included a Roy Rogers restaurant at a rest stop somewhere on the Jersey Turnpike to refuel our son, whose appetite had survived his Atlantic Crossing intact.
It was very late, or early, you decide, when we arrived/returned home/back to Norwich to sleep on mattresses loaned by co-workers as all of our furniture and furnishings were bobbing around in the North Atlantic in a container ship, not to arrive for another few weeks. Patiently and with skill and love, Sigrid, a stranger in a strange land, worked to turn a curiosity of a house into the heart of our home. Two decades ago this morning we awakened to begin to dream again.
-bill kenny
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