America, of Thee I Sing

I stayed in the USA for a month and visited seven states in 30 days. It was a whirlwind visit that started when I landed at LAX, the Los Angeles International Airport. I was bleary-eyed and unwell because my obese seatmate occupied half my seat and snored through the 14-hour flight.

But my ordeal had not yet ended, for lo and behold, at LAX was this elderly Filipina who, instead of helping me, looked me up and down and asked: “Do you have a US visa?” It took all of my self-control to blurt out, “Do you think I could step aboard that plane without a US visa?” Unlike the Latinos around her who were busy herding the passengers to their proper, roped lanes, she had the time to accost me and ask an impertinent question when she saw that my passport was still brown, and not blue like hers.

I just ignored her, queued up, and had my passport stamped by the immigration officer who only looked at me briefly to check if indeed, I was the person in my passport photo. We were hurried out of the crowded airport by a posse of security guards, and soon I was met by my nephew Luigi, who had been two years resident in the City of Angels. Luigi wants to be in musical theatre and I told him I am a psychic, one day, hijo, you will be there.

We took the airport shuttle to the Van Nuys terminal, and since it was past 11 p.m., there was hardly any traffic on the freeway. Again, parts of LA reminded me of home, a feeling that was reinforced when I arrived at my sister’s house in Porter Ranch (they were then having a vacation in Hawaii), a two-story affair with sloping, red-slated roof set in a garden whose trees were abloom with pink flowers.

I stayed in LA for a few days, cooking for my nephew and niece, visiting my friends, going to book stores and art galleries and museums, eating in Japanese and American restaurants, having my first real vacation in a year. My friends looked happy and fulfilled. V. came here with her two kids after her Filipino-American husband died. The kids are now grown up, and she has found a new partner. She continues to work, humming along with what life has given her.

L. has found fulfillment in married life as well, telling me funny stories about the loops she had to drive around at the freeway while all along, we took photos of the lovely Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol paintings on the wall. C. and I discussed writing while going around another massive art gallery. In the yard, I also took photos of tar pits and places where fossils had been dug up, the black bubbles perfect as a setting for a chapter in my second novel, a supernatural tale about politics and ghosts.

I’ve already written a fortnight ago about my visit to Vermont, as one of the General Participants in Fiction for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. One vignette I forgot was our visit to the house of Robert Frost in Ripton, Vermont.

“Whose woods these are I think I know,” I began to recite as we walked deeper into the forest to reach his house. Frost stayed here during summer and early autumn. I took pictures of the desk where he wrote, the chair where he sat, and the bath tub where he soaked himself while the luminescent lines of poetry blazed in his mind.

After Vermont, I took another plane for JFK Airport in New York City, to meet up with S., another long-time friend. S. has immigrated there and has been a New Yorker for a year. I told him that I had lived in New Brunswick when I was studying at Rutgers University, and after reading 1,000 pages of books a week, my friends and I would go to NYC, to dine and to drink and to dance.

But that night he brought me to the places I had not yet seen, the Statue of Liberty green and golden in the night, the necklace of lights strung around Brooklyn Bridge, while we kept a running account of each other’s lives, the losses and the gains, the laughter and lore that still burn brightest in the hearts of friends separated by years.

After New York, I flew again to Baltimore, Maryland, to visit my cousins. We ate seafood and told countless stories, then we went to Philadelphia, soaking in the history and the memories of a country being born, the Liberty Bell tolling time and again, symbol and substance of a new and brave nation.  We also went to Washington DC, where we visited a news museum, the State Capitol, and the Library of Congress that contained a copy of my first book of poems, Skin Voices Faces.

I also met up with J., my classmate from Ateneo, and drove to Annapolis, to case the joint, as they say, of the military academy and to eat freshly caught shrimps. We also visited a church and a college that reminded us of the quadrangle at Ateneo, and then we drove to near where she lived and sat on a bench with a view of the wide and beautiful sea.

Afterward, it was back to New York but a thunderstorm caused my flight to be rerouted to Charlotte, North Carolina, where I was stranded for seven hours because the airport had been closed down. Someone was having a nervous breakdown because of the delay but I’m a Filipino, I am used to delays, so I just sat down and ate and drank water.

When the airport reopened, I flew to NYC just to get my luggage from S, then flew back to Los Angeles the next day – with another stopover at Charlotte.

I had not seen my sisters in years. I last saw one of them almost ten years ago, when we buried our parents one month apart. But now we were together for a week, I cooked for them and we talked and we also ate outside, America with its many restaurants and malls filled with so many goods.

They asked me to finally look for a teaching job in the US and stay there and I said we will see, we will see, as I hugged them and waved goodbye and walked to another plane that would ferry me across the big, blue ocean toward the arms of home.

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