The Wikiness

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

It was normal 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 to engage with others and not stand off by myself. There was safety in numbers, danger if I were alone. Unfortunately, I stood out among the kids in my grade. I wasn’t part of their cult, didn’t attend CCD, went to a church nobody had heard of, and acted bizarrely (as when I felt compelled to bring a stuffed animal to school). 

I was sure that my entire family was seen by the neighbors as peculiar– a mom who was often in hospitals and a father who seemed distant and somewhat menacing. I judged myself a weirdo from a weird home, and yearned to be seen as normal.

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

Compounding my eccentric reputation, I spent my free time in libraries, having discovered how books allowed escape from loneliness. When I found a book whose main character was like me, an outlier, the relief was palpable. A good book, I found, offered reliable pain-killing dopamine rushes similar to those I got from junk food, soda pop, and TV. While they lasted, these external inputs made me feel warm inside and accepted outside.

My striving to fit in motivated my success at school. With high marks in the classroom or victory on the playground, an intense contentment followed. In those moments, I luxuriated in a precious sense of belonging. 

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 deception worked, no one would figure out what a B-team bench-warming, south side loser I really was,

I spread myself far and wide at Oak Park and River Forest High School, joining three sports, the class council, the Pollution Control Center, the student newspaper, dramatics, the debate team, and the Social Affairs club. 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, 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 on the scene with fresh eyes, ready to see me and my world with compassion and curiosity, with zero 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 spending 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 loosened.

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

That I willingly underwent the trauma of separation 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 turned out to be a superpower for a foreign-exchange student. 

The American Field Service (AFS) assembled its 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 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. Accompanying herself on acoustic guitar, she poured herself into a rendition of Dona, Dona, a Yiddish folk song. 

Susan’s knowledge of Europe’s history was 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 kid 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”

In these sessions, I felt my old estrangement. I looked around at these accomplished young people and noted my deficiencies. How could I compete? And what had I gotten myself into?

We flew Finnair into Amsterdam, and the students bound for Belgium and I got on a bus taking us across the remarkably flat Netherlands to a monastery in Wallonia. We stayed here for another few days of preparation. The individual monastery cells we were assigned were spare, but the little bars of lavender soap the monks provided stood out. They had the most wonderful scent I’d ever known in a soap.

We got additional instructions on schooling in French in Wallonia, but a 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. 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 were 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 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 he 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.