Be from somewhere

I used to tell people that my family was German. This is a weird thing that some Americans do. Being a country of immigrants, many of us can point some relative within the last 200 years that came to the US on the proverbial boat.

I would get frustrated with my wife when people asked her about her heritage. She would always say, “We are just purebred American.” “What are you talking about?” I would ask. You have to come from somewhere. The only real Americans are the Native Americans. All the rest of us are English or Italian or Polish or something like that.

I started to realize how ridiculous I sounded saying my family was German while living in India because I met actual Germans, and I was at appropriately too embarrassed to claim a culture of which I did not know a single word of their language, food, heroes, or history.

There were times in India when I tried to distance myself from my culture. To abandon it and become “a citizen of the world.”

Then one Thanksgiving in India, we ate reheated dhal with chapati for dinner. Something felt very wrong about that. The more distance I put between myself and my home culture, the more empty I felt. I could never take Tamil culture as my own. Even if I appreciated it, I had to do it from the base of my own home.

I finally came to the realization that I needed to be from somewhere, even if I didn’t live there anymore.

I come from a lower-middle class family in suburban southern Indiana. On the whole, my people like fishing, hunting deer, going to church, Indiana basketball, high school football, not talking about emotions, and sweeping things under the rug. We do bad line dancing at weddings and love to eat pigs in many different forms. We puts up trees, lights, and cheap, gawdy lawn decorations for Christmas, stuffs ourselves full at Thanksgiving for no good reason, call all soft drinks Coke, and most of us either think about or actually become teachers at some point.

A part of me deep inside gets filled up when I eat a breaded pork tenderloin sandwich, or see the Ohio River, or taste Grippos BBQ chips, or travel down a small hilly backroad in the snow late at night. These are things that remind me where I’m from, even if I’m not there.

There are some things about my home culture I can’t stand. There are some things I love. There’s a lot that I wish I loved more.

I’ll probably never live in my hometown again, but I need to own it and appreciate that part of my story. I had the advantage of staying in the same place for all of my childhood, something a lot of kids don’t get. But even if you’ve moved around most of your life, there’s something powerful about that question, “Where are you from?”