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    America Redux: Impressions of the United States After Thirty-Five Years Abroad
    America Redux: Impressions of the United States After Thirty-Five Years Abroad
    America Redux: Impressions of the United States After Thirty-Five Years Abroad
    Ebook178 pages2 hours

    America Redux: Impressions of the United States After Thirty-Five Years Abroad

    By John Walters

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    About this ebook

    In 1976 John Walters left the United States in search of adventure and literary inspiration. He lived for many years in India, Bangladesh, Italy, and Greece. He married and had five sons. Finally, faced with the economic catastrophe in Greece and the lack of opportunities for his sons, he returned to the land of his birth. Without home, without job, without resources, he confronted his own country as if for the first time.

    This is a memoir of someone who, late in life, was forced to leave everything behind and start fresh in what for him had become a new land. It will appeal to those who are confronted with major life changes in these troubled economic times; to those who, though they may desire rest and retirement, must continue toiling to make ends meet; for those who desire insight into the vast, multifaceted culture of the United States from a fresh perspective, unencumbered by familiarity.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Walters
    Release dateDec 12, 2012
    ISBN9781301268559
    America Redux: Impressions of the United States After Thirty-Five Years Abroad
    Author

    John Walters

    John Walters recently returned to the United States after thirty-five years abroad. He lives in Seattle, Washington. He attended the 1973 Clarion West science fiction writing workshop and is a member of Science Fiction Writers of America. He writes mainstream fiction, science fiction and fantasy, and memoirs of his wanderings around the world.

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      Book preview

      America Redux - John Walters

      Prologue: The Buildup

      This memoir was squeezed out of me in desperation, confusion, uncertainty, inner turmoil, occasional tears, and great need.

      Looking back, I think the first hints that something was going to drastically change happened over a year before the big move. In Spring of 2011 my wife suggested I take a trip to the States. She could see that I was uneasy, though I went about my business as a father and an English teacher with diligence and as much fervor as I could summon. I sensed my own uneasiness too, but I disagreed about the trip; I didn't think we could afford it. The Greek economy was on a downward spiral, though neither of our salaries had begun to get slashed again and again and again like warriors in a Quentin Tarantino samurai flick, as they would over the coming year. I allowed myself to be persuaded, though, because I realized I needed a change, and I missed my two older boys and my other relatives. I had become isolated in Greece. I had no relatives to turn to except our immediate family, no friends except my sons, no fellow writers with which to hobnob except through correspondence. So I accepted that a trip would do me good.

      Then the floor shattered and I fell through. Of the details I cannot speak. Suffice it to say that my world and whatever security I thought I had fell apart and I was gutted emotionally. I wept much. I floundered, unable to stabilize myself. I went through the motions of work but it took all the determination I could summon.

      At this point I wanted to cancel the trip to the States but the ticket had already been bought and no refund was possible. So, ripped apart and more unsure of myself than I had been in years, I went ahead with it. In retrospect, I'm glad I did. I'm sure it was therapeutic for me to get away from the situation in Greece; I might have recovered from the trauma much more slowly if I had not. Nevertheless it was not a holiday in the true sense of the word; it was more of a convalescence, but at least I was aided by concerned loved ones.

      My first stop was in San Diego, where Sam, my second son, was stationed. I stayed at a hotel on the Naval Base for about three days and we went out to meals together and did touristy things like visiting Torrey Pines State Park and the San Diego Zoo.

      Then I moved on to Seattle for several days, where I stayed with my brothers and sisters and father. My father had been living in a cabin at the edge of Hood Canal in Puget Sound for years, a beautiful place from which he could see the Olympic Mountains across the water, but he was getting ready to move to a retirement home. He had already sold his house. I stayed with him overnight out there at what used to be our summer home, and shortly after I left Seattle he left and strangers moved in. In Seattle I saw the relatives, and on my own I visited the zoo, the aquarium, the used book stores.

      My final stop was New Jersey, where my oldest son taught high school math and physics. The area was sweltering in a heat wave. We hung out for a week or so, took a few trips to Princeton, where he had attended university, a few others to New York, where we wandered in Times Square, Central Park, the Museum of Natural History, and the Strand Book Store.

      All of this sounds very much like a vacation, I know, but it was anything but. It was more in the nature of convalescence after surgery, when you are still in a daze and it still hurts. I tried to enjoy myself but couldn't escape the feeling of dread that was oppressing me, not at all, I hasten to add, exacerbated by the people around me. Those I visited were hospitable, supportive, generous, magnanimous. The problem was within me.

      Anyway, afterwards I went back to Greece, and life went on. I was not as content as I used to be, but I dealt with it on a day-to-day basis and coped the best I could. The thought never occurred to me that future plans would involve anything else than what they had for years: that I would remain in Greece for the rest of my life, retire there, probably die there.

      In the meantime, the economic crisis got worse and worse. It's impossible to understand how bad it got from the outside, just reading about it in the news. It became impossible to pass a downtown city block where businesses hadn't closed down; my wife's salary was cut, then it was cut again, then it was cut yet again, with further cuts promised. Though my per-hour salary did not diminish, my benefits began to be slashed; all my paid holidays were eliminated and holiday bonuses were drastically reduced. Okay, so what? My wife and I had been through worse. We'd been really poor at times, so poor I hadn't been able to afford a pack of the mint gum I liked to chew to freshen my breath before work. We could get through this, I thought.

      But then came the crunch. I looked at what was happening to my sons. Unemployment up over fifty percent for young people. Nothing for them to do. No future. No hope.

      I couldn't let that happen. No way.

      I can put up with a lot. I can muddle through somehow. But when it comes to my sons, that's when I draw the line.

      And that's how I was led to believe that I might have to depart from Greece and come to the States. I couldn't leave my sons in the doldrums. I had to do something about it.

      When moving to the States first occurred to me it was such a shocking thought that I mulled it over for weeks before mentioning it to anyone else. It was such a major change that I even fasted for a day as I pondered the ramifications.

      This is where the quote from Henry V comes in. I felt like an old retired soldier being called back into the fray, being asked to leave behind what he imagined was the modicum of rest due him after so many years of service. I had to stand up, straighten my shoulders, polish my rusty metaphorical armor for an upcoming change as great as any of the radical changes that had occurred not infrequently thus far in my life. I had thought all the major changes were past, that things would settle down. Once more unto the breach, my friends, once more...

      Finally, though, I told my wife what I'd been thinking about. I saw this coming, she said.

      The thing is, there was never any serious consideration of her leaving Greece. She has an important job that she likes, and she has friends and family there. The onus was on me to do it alone.

      For a while it was unsure which of the boys would come with me. Finally we decided that our third and fourth sons, twenty and seventeen years old, needed to leave first, and the youngest would stay in Greece for the time being.

      Once the decision was made there was no turning back. I informed my other sons, and my relatives in the States. I had no idea where I would go or how I would support us. We had no money for plane tickets. It was all a wild idea, an idea without material foundation, which I was determined, nevertheless, now that I knew it was the right thing, to see through all the way. As the weeks passed advice poured in and I followed up possibilities with further research, but nothing concrete emerged from the conjecture. I wanted to leave right after the school at which I taught closed, at the end of May, and I had to buy tickets as soon as possible, as the closer to the date it got, the higher the prices rose. I considered landing in the Seattle area or the Portland area, where relatives lived. It didn't seem practical to land blindly without job or dwelling in a strange place where I didn't know anyone.

      The times in my life when after I have decided to do something opportunities have opened up at the last moment are more numerous than I can count. In this case, right around the time when I really had to do something or back off, my son in the Navy suggested he could apply for a housing allowance, rent a house, and the boys and I could move to San Diego.

      Moving to California, much less San Diego, had never occurred to me. It took me some time to digest the idea. My wife and I talked it over. In the end, though, it was the only definite open door we had. But that's not the only reason I accepted. I realized that it appealed to me to have Sam in our family unit; apart from brief visits, we hadn't lived in the same house for years. In addition, though I hadn't lived in San Diego since I was two years old, as a young writer I had always been drawn to California.

      So San Diego it would be.

      Once that decision was made, I set out securing the tickets. My relatives in the US pooled some money together to lend us for tickets and landing funds. I researched prices online and settled on a date in early June for myself and another date about a month later for my sons.

      The original plan was that my son would find a house before we arrived, but it turned out he had no time to do so; he had to leave for training until the end of June. We'd have to look for a house together then. He reserved a fairly inexpensive hotel for me and I flew ahead on schedule to scout out the land and look for a job.

      Most of the rest of the story is told in the essays that follow.

      The first group of six essays I wrote during my first trip, when I had no idea I would return so soon, and the period immediately afterwards when I knew that something was still significantly wrong but I didn't know what to do about it. Symptomatic of this time is the essay I Don't Care in which though I was trying to salve my own wounds and convince myself that stoicism would do the trick, it was becoming more and more obvious that this was far from the truth. There is a time to sit tight and make the best of things, and a time for direct action, and at this point the action stage was much closer than I imagined.

      The rest of the essays were written after the idea of moving back to the US had occurred to me, after I had definitely decided to go, some in Greece when I was preparing, some at the beachfront hotel in San Diego where I stayed while waiting for my son, and some in the house we eventually found.

      The adjustment is ongoing. You don't stay away from a place for thirty-five years and then return and fit right in.

      I want to make it clear that this is not a travelogue; this journey is more interior than exterior. These are snapshots of my soul in transit, and I have not arrived. I never will, of course; there is no final destination in this life. But even in this transitory phase things have not settled down. I still thrash about. I am uncertain much of the time. I make frequent faux pas because I am still not used to the current culture. I don't know if I will ever feel completely at ease here. I have wandered the world for so many years that this just seems like another way station, another rest stop before the next journey.

      And perhaps that's exactly what it is.

      Part One

      Departure

      The problem I allude to in this essay was not a breakdown. A breakdown is transient, a condition from which there is hope of recovery. I was trying to justify that which I was going through with traditional terminology. I was not only groping for an explanation, I was covering up as well. I didn't want to admit the permanency of what was happening even to myself. Hints of the cataclysm which would send me halfway around the world already had begun to emerge.

      * * *

      I'm heading into unfamiliar territory here, and by that I do not mean the United States, although that could be one sense of the allusion, as I have not lived there for almost thirty-five years. I have been living in a rut. I have developed a system that has helped me survive but has stultified me. I did not realize that I had been caught in a web of my own weaving until recently. The nature of this delusion is only now becoming clear to me. Let me clarify that: a few strands are becoming visible; most of it is still hidden in shadow. I don't know what to do about it. Perhaps nothing can be done, at least nothing visible. Perhaps ostensibly, when I return, life will go on as it had before. But something will have changed. Now I know. I have become aware. I am no longer half-asleep and am determined not to revert to that condition.

      As far as the particulars are concerned, I myself am American. I have been living in Thessaloniki, Greece, raising a family and teaching English as a second language. Many details absorb my attention daily: my job, of course, which I do in the afternoons and evenings at private schools and also take on as many private lessons as I can, but also seeing the kids off to school, shopping, cooking, running errands - in short, the tasks with which many parents are occupied day in and day out. But that's not all. Any spare moment I have is taken up with writing. I can't help it; I have to fit it in somehow. In short, there is no relaxation built into the schedule. Every moment is accounted for.

      That can be fine for a time - even a long time, but eventually there will be a burnout or a breakdown.

      Mine occurred several weeks ago. It left me confused, disoriented, unsure of myself,

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