The Wikiness

“I have been a stranger in a strange land.”  -Exodus 2:22”

It wasn’t strange for me to feel estranged in the years leading up to becoming an actual stranger in a strange land. Yes, right there, in my neighborhood, I often felt the odd one out.

At preschool, I learned the importance of engaging with others and not standing off by myself. There was safety in numbers, danger if I kept alone. Unfortunately for me, I stood ou tamong the kids in my grade, not attending CCD, being part of a church nobody heard of, acting bizarrely (as whenI felt compelled to bring a stuffed animal to school). 

My entire family was seen by the neighbors, or so I was certain, as peculiar– a crazy mom who was often in hospitals and a father who seemed distant and somewhat menacing. I judged myself harshly as a weirdo from a weird home, and wished only to be seen as normal.

In actual fact, our family and my oddness were probably not remarkable to anyone in my world. I learned later that many families around us were in worse situations than ours. But in my mind, everything about me was stained with stigma.

Compounding my eccentric reputation, I willingly spent my free time in libraries. I discovered that books helped me escape feeling alone, and when I found a book whose main character was like me, an outlier, the relief was palpable, as reliable for the pain-killing dopamine rushes I got from junk food, soda pop, and TV. These external inputs helped me feel, for a while, warm and accepted inside.

Striving to fit in motivated me to succeed at school. When I achieved high marks in the classroom or won on the playground, an intense contentment rush followed. For the time it lasted, I luxuriated in the precious sense of belonging that “winning” brought me.. 

When I arrived at high school, trying to hide my freakishness was second nature. My prime objective: avoid exposing the laughable misfit I knew myself to be. To fool everyone, I affiliated myself with known and respected extra-curricular activities and sports, generating the appearance of being known and appreciated. If my plan worked, no one would figure out what a B-team bench-warming, south side loser I was,

I spread myself far and wide. I joined three sports, the class council, the Pollution Control Center, the student newspaper, dramatics, the debate team, the Social Affairs club, and probably more I don’t recall. If you knew me by these involvements, you’d never guess what an imposter I was. But since keeping up the illusion meant not getting close to others, most of my peer relationships at OPRF were superficial.

But then, in junior year, I met a true stranger from a strange land, the lovely foreign exchange student Patricia Rengifo from Cali, Columbia. She appeared suddenly on the scene with fresh eyes, ready to see me and my world with compassion and curiosity without prejudice. She was one of those guardian angels who always seem to show up in my life when I need to take risks and grow. 

Patricia and I grew close, and as I spent time with her, I started to see my world from her perspective. She questioned what I’d taken for granted, looked for answers with an open heart, and wasn’t afraid to be vulnerable. My sclerotic, fearful cynicism lessened.

It was largely Patricia’s influence that led me to join the school’s American Field Service chapter and to apply to be an American Scholar Abroad.

That I willingly chose to undergo the trauma that sudden separation brings was not unusual, given my family situation in 1978. My divorced parents were pursuing their separate blisses, while my siblings lived lives separate from mine. There was no real home life for me to feel homesick for, which was a superpower for a foreign exchange student. 

The American Field Service (AFS) assembled all its American scholars headed to Europe for the 78-79 academic year onto the campus of C.W. Post College, in Brookville, Long Island. The hundred or so students and I were given three days of culture and language basics. I had my first French lesson here with those headed to France, francophone Switzerland, Belgium, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The day-to-day language there is Luxembourgish, but its administrative language is French. 

Only one other American was destined for Luxembourg with me, Susan Lance, of Rye, New York. She was bold and passionate, with long, thick hair that she tossed around for emphasis, And she always seemed emphatic. Her intense energy she poured into a rendition of Dona, Dona, a Yiddish folk song she accompanied herself with on acoustic guitar. 

Susan had a knowledge of Europe’s history informed by having lost family members in the Holocaust.

Her sophistication (from the suburbs of NYC!), her ability to speak confidently in English or French with anyone, and her obvious musical talent, left me feeling like the lesser American.Those feelings were based on my internal dialog, forever judging me in invidious comparison with others. Susan neither said nor did anything to goad my inferiority complex.

In our group of French learners at C.W. Post was a gregarious fkid from Wisconsin named Cary. He made a song up from our rudimentary lessons, and it stuck with me: 

“Je ne comprends pas

Je suis américain

j’ai faim, j’ai soif, je suis fatigué.

Oú est la salle de bains?

L’autubus est là

Je m’appelle, Je ne sais pas”

I felt my habitual estrangement in these sessions. I looked around and noted deficiencies in myself. I lacked confidence and stayed silent. How could I compete with these extraverts? And what had I gotten myself into?

We flew Finnair from JFK into Amsterdam, and the Belgian students and I got on a bus that took us across a remarkably flat Netherlands to a monastery in Wallonia, Belgium. We stayed there for another few days of preparation. The individual monastery cells were spare, but the little bars of lavender soap the monks provided struck me with their excellence. They had the most wonderful soap scent I’d ever known.

We got additional instructions about French schooling in Wallonia, but my more important training occurred the night before we departed for our separate destinations. The Belgian AFS organizers made us the celebrated guests of a “boum,” or a school dance. A live band played covers of “Black is Black,” “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” and “Nights in White Satin” and dozens of Belgian kids came out to party with us. And for me most amazingly and influentially, there was a bar serving green bottles of Stella Artois… to 17-year-old me, suddenly of legal age!

I partook, and the dopamine that flowed through my brain evaporated fear and alienation. The beer tasted delicious, and wow, this music sounded great, and oh! Those French-speaking gals are pretty! And were they just smiling at me? 

By the end of the dance, I was all smiles, with a few addresses of actual mademoiselles I could correspond with and perhaps see again!

The next day Susan and I were on a train bound for Luxembourg-Ville, the capital city, where our host families met us at the station.

Susan had been assigned the family of the Secretary of Education, Guy Linster. They lived just outside the capital. I was picked up by my host father, Mr. John Elliott, in his Volvo sedan. The Elliotts were British nationals living in a town on the country’s border with Germany, about a 40-minute drive away. Elliott was the Technical Director of a Monsanto plant that made nylon. I learned that the Elliotts’ youngest son, Duncan, whose bedroom I’d be occupying, was spending the year in California, so a true exchange was happening for them, me for him. Mrs. Elliott, Kitty, ended each day with a bubble bath and a glass of wine, but all day, every day, she ruled the home with strong opinions and a certain supercilious disdain.

Her youngest may have gone to America in exchange for me, but she had two older children still at home. Steven, the brother, was a year or two older than I. He strove to be cool at school (for as an expatriate he was also a stranger in a strange land) and played guitar, which I admired. The older sister Lois, slept with a Luxembourgish boyfriend, Théo, in her bedroom. Théo smoked Craven “A”s and looked very cool in the morning as he shaved in the mirror, his clope dangling from his knowing lips. 

The Elliott’s modern home was on the outskirts of Echternach, a town of about 4,000 on the Sauer River. The town grew around an Abbey that Saint Willibrord (the patron saint of Luxembourg) founded in 698 AD. The Abbey was rebuilt just before the French Revolution turned it into a Porcelain factory. By the time I arrived, it had been turned into the lycée classique that I attended six mornings a week (yes, there was school on Saturday mornings) with Steven.

There wasn’t much to do in Echternach when I wasn’t at school, so I took to wandering the corn fields behind the Elliott’s home when I wasn’t doing homework or writing letters. 

It was a cigarette from Théo’s pack that I pilfered one bored afternoon, when a walk in the fields behind the Elliott’s invited. The smoke I intentionally drew into my lungs made me cough convulsively, but also gave my brain a buzz. This must be why people smoked–the tobacco gave me a feeling of onrushing forward movement, a sort of pleasant dizziness. Did it also quicken my wits? Most likely. All the intelligent people around were doing it. Only the birds, the sun, and the wind witnessed my first choking lungfuls. Yet they began a 40-year relationship, one based on the instantaneous, quasi-hug a cigarette gave, a warmth in my chest no matter the time of night or day, or how crushing my loneliness.