Some time ago I morphed into being A New Yorker. I can't pinpoint to the day, or even the month. It was about two years ago.
I used to sit in the subway are or bus and look across at the other commuters. "These are not MY people," I'd think. The tired passengers of all colors and ages didn't look at all like Australians. They looked like strangers - people I'd never relate too. They interested me but I was not one of them.
And then one day about eighteen months' ago I suddenly realised, as my mind wandering aimlessly, I gazed at the people sitting opposite me, that I felt like one of them. They no longer seemed strange and alien. I
belonged to this group.
How did this happen? I have no idea except that it must have something to do with time. They say that "time heals". Time must also help us to adjust. As it was around this time that I stopped trying to make American friends in the mold of my Australian ones.
And after all it was a fruitless task. No way am I going to find friends like the Brendas and Janinas of my past life. And in any case they are and always will be there. Much better to go with the flow; to stop rebelling against and to accept the ways of my host country.
If someone - not that anyone is likely to - dropped by today, without phoning first, I'd be horrified. I no longer expect to find a group of co-workers who go for drinks after work. I don't even think of lazing around at a beach or the local pool (is there one?) There are only a few people in America that I have long phone conversations with, and they are not American. The thought of not having social engagements for weeks at a time no longer frightens me. Yep folks, I've changed.
Nevertheless, like the images of people long since gone from this world, images of friends and Australian scenes live on in my head. Like movie stills, frozen forever, I have a set of picture-memories of my Australian life.
They are invariably images of a carefree and happy life. How realistic they are is another matter...
I remember my adult daughter, uninhibitedly leaping around like an eight year old in a hotel pool at Coolangatta. She is half out, half in the water which is a perfect blue. There's a palm tree close by. The air is absolutely still. A picture-memory frozen in time, never to change or fade.
The sky is always blue in my photo-like memories - the stills of a time long past. Like English people in Manchester, huddled together in tiny grey rooms watching "Neighbours", the world twelve thousand miles away is one of never ending sunshine.
I remember meeting my friend Brenda many years ago. I was sitting on a toilet in a local pub. A complete stranger, she entered my cubicle - "Shove over," she commanded and nudged me aside so that we were sitting side by side, both precariously balanced on the opposite side of the seat. How could I not become a life-long friend of such a woman?
I remember plummeting down a wave at Jan Juc beach. The smell of the salt water. Of wet sand moving under my feet.
A still of a restaurant. Upstairs at University Café in Lygon Street on a hot Melbourne summer night. I was with Brenda and a group of friends. Too impatient to wait to be seated by one of the arrogant Italian waiters, she moved to a table under an open window and tossed the remnants of the previous occupants' drinks out the window.
I remember dinner parties where there was always a "topic" that we could all get stuck into and argue endlessly about till the early hours of the morning. Lindy Chamberlain, The Paxtons, Joan Kirner, The Gulf War ...
Long Christmas days where lunch merged with dinner; ex-spouses turning up and laughing over old times while the kids wrecked the house and the wine flowed.
Squeaky Beach at Wilson's Prom, rosellas at Mount Tamborine, cockatoos at Charles Street Northcote - especially one owned by the parents of two little kids, that had learned to screech "Mu-uu-uu-m" in perfect imitation. Two six-year-olds - Tom with his aerosol can of fart gas and his twin Bart with his can of anti-fart gas, both presents from an eccentric father who thought nothing of returning his pet fish to the pet shop because "it had no personality."
In my mind my friends and their children are a happy and carefree and eccentric crew living in a sunny paradise of perfect weather and good food and wine.
How true is it all? Who cares. In New York you learn to live inside your own head. True social interaction of the sort I took for granted isn't here - well not for me any way.
So like many a long-term expat, I live with the memories - and that being the case, I am bloody well intend to ensure that they are pleasant.
Kate Juliff
New York
December 2004
Comments from Readers
What a lovely
letter from NY.
Living in a foreign country gave me many dilemmas when the time came to choose names for my boys...do you do the right thing??? Follow the paternal naming system of the culture here? No I didn't and ended up with Pavlos/Paul and Lukas/Luke, names that will travel and not be bastardised and fortunately both boys have claimed they are happy and secure with their chosen names.
As for you wanting to be a Susan...as you know, I am one and I remember as I moved through the haze of my often very stoned 70's I spelt my name Sioux because at 16 I felt I was far too eccentric to be a Susan/Sue. Although I am comfortable with my name I still feel for the lifestyle I chose the name is a bit of a mismatch, certainly not as you imagine a Sue to be!
'I always think that if I'd have been a Sue I would have been more stable. I think I would have lived in the leafy suburbs and married an accountant. My car would have been a Volvo and I would have joined the local tennis club.'
From, a often not so stable, Sue!
