The day after tomorrow I will embark on another adventure, quite different from India but in some ways equally foreign.
To start with, the people zealously follow a religion hardly seen and only talked about disdainfully in my adopted home of San Francisco. They advocate different political and social values and embody a different, sometimes inward-focused world view (~70% of them don't have passports, for example). They eat food so entirely foreign that after a few days I long for access to my own California grocery store full of thirty kinds of greens, impeccably fresh fruits, local artisan soft cheeses handcrafted in organic farming collectives and hundreds of nuanced red wines from near and far with thoughtful descriptions ranging from "enormously complex with intense dark berry fruit complemented by savory pepper, vanilla, coffee and mint tones," to "rainbow of tastiness."
I am going to a place where people drink Bud Light more than water, call BBQs "cook-outs" and soda "pop," and where eating anything less than a pound of steak is considered a very bad deal.
I am going to...Ohio.
To start with, here's a map of the United States, with Ohio highlighted. I must start this way, because in my past I've mentioned the state of Ohio and had entire conversations before someone inevitably said something like "So, that's the one next to Nebraska, right?"
View Larger Map
Now that I've cleared that up, I'll also set the stage with a screenshot of the Ohio tourism board's current homepage. I have to assume that the tourism board's webpage is the most official representation of what the state's citizens want to highlight about their unique and tourism-worthy culture.
Let's take a look:
As delicious as that hamburger looks, I may have to pass in favor of the "Ohio to Go" 744-calorie, 64 ounce coke at McDonalds that will give me exclusive tourism discounts. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe I can just have burgers at both places; Wasn't I just talking about needing danger to make my travel feel like an adventure?
Arterial dangers aside, this is actually an adventure, because as snarky as I sound making fun of the caloric weight featured as the primary tourist attraction for this mid-western state, deep down, Ohio has far more meaning than this, and Tomorrow Somewhere is going to help me explain why.
If India represents the place on earth that is most different from where I grew up, Ohio holds another unique distinction in my life - it is the place of my forefathers and therefore the origin of my family's culture. That unique feature makes a visit there a familiar and foreign experience at the same time. It allows me to observe cultural norms that shed light on personal characteristics that have been otherwise unexplainable by my California upbringing, such as why the grammatical construction "this needs cleaned" sounds totally normal to me. Yet, in other ways it is entirely foreign in a way that feels wrong - I should know it, but upon arrival in the land of corn fields, buckeyes, big burgers and even bigger trucks, I am always reminded that I don't really know it at all.
It's probably the closest I'll get to the feeling that children of immigrants must feel growing up in a country that is entirely theirs yet is foreign to their parents. They stand out as foreign at school due to their physical features and unusual names, yet come home every day to a culture that is foreign to them too. They are stuck in limbo between origin and future in a more obvious way than I am, yet returning to Ohio is my little piece of it. In America, most people have come from somewhere else at some point, as much as we'd like to pretend otherwise, and my travels to Ohio bring up the same questions and answers that lead to more questions that everyone comes upon when they are faced with the foreign place of their origin.
My parents met at Ohio State University in the 1970's, in the era of the Vietnam War, hippies, protests, and the Kent State massacre in which the Ohio National Guard (ie, the government-sponsored military) shot unarmed college students, some of whom weren't even part of the protests. It was a time of tremendous social change, where entire ways of life were disappearing and new world views emerged like a phoenix from their ashes. Some people clung to the old ways, others embraced the new. It was a time of great discussion and upheaval, and my parents emerged from the frigid winter cold with their own personal revolution - they packed up their Dodge Colt and headed for California.
To me, this story exists chiefly in family legend, brought up at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and on occasional winter days when the weather reports from Ohio showed particularly frigid temperatures. "How would you like to be shoveling snow off the driveway?" my dad would ask at the warm California breakfast table, "I want to go to the snow!" I'd enthusiastically respond. He'd shake his head. Clearly I had never shoveled a driveway...and indeed, I had not.
In my childhood mind, snow was a magical substance that you'd drive up to for the day, splash around in, throw at your brother, and then drive home from to your warm, green-lawned house. In that same childhood mind, Ohio was a place of fireflies, thunderstorms, bunnies hopping around in storybook gardens and lazy summer afternoons eating pretzels and staring at the TV at my grandparents' house.
As an adult I have only returned a few times, always for family visits. It is only recently that I have come to recognize that these cultural origins, and particularly the differences that I find startling, represent clues about who I am, in ways that are important but not obvious.
Ohio offers up experiences and perspectives that are quintessentially American, and from which my family came. From my grandfather's special muskets used in the war of 1812, to the family cemetery with 200 years of Roofs buried in a field South Bloomfield, there is a lot of my origin to explore there.
It is from this origin that my family will continue, and if, for one moment it seems that perhaps this origin does not play a role in who I am, I will be reminded by my fiance. I met him on the other side of the world, yet he was born and raised in California like me. He is accompanying me on this mid-western journey to his family origins too. They moved from Ohio to California in the 1970's. His grandmother may have even worked in the Ohio State University hospital at the exact time that my parents met there. They didn't know each other.
Our origins play a mysterious role in who we are - sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle. It's time to dig deep and learn more about this foreign place. I'd better start my diet now.
To start with, the people zealously follow a religion hardly seen and only talked about disdainfully in my adopted home of San Francisco. They advocate different political and social values and embody a different, sometimes inward-focused world view (~70% of them don't have passports, for example). They eat food so entirely foreign that after a few days I long for access to my own California grocery store full of thirty kinds of greens, impeccably fresh fruits, local artisan soft cheeses handcrafted in organic farming collectives and hundreds of nuanced red wines from near and far with thoughtful descriptions ranging from "enormously complex with intense dark berry fruit complemented by savory pepper, vanilla, coffee and mint tones," to "rainbow of tastiness."
I am going to a place where people drink Bud Light more than water, call BBQs "cook-outs" and soda "pop," and where eating anything less than a pound of steak is considered a very bad deal.
I am going to...Ohio.
To start with, here's a map of the United States, with Ohio highlighted. I must start this way, because in my past I've mentioned the state of Ohio and had entire conversations before someone inevitably said something like "So, that's the one next to Nebraska, right?"
View Larger Map
Now that I've cleared that up, I'll also set the stage with a screenshot of the Ohio tourism board's current homepage. I have to assume that the tourism board's webpage is the most official representation of what the state's citizens want to highlight about their unique and tourism-worthy culture.
Let's take a look:
As delicious as that hamburger looks, I may have to pass in favor of the "Ohio to Go" 744-calorie, 64 ounce coke at McDonalds that will give me exclusive tourism discounts. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe I can just have burgers at both places; Wasn't I just talking about needing danger to make my travel feel like an adventure?
Arterial dangers aside, this is actually an adventure, because as snarky as I sound making fun of the caloric weight featured as the primary tourist attraction for this mid-western state, deep down, Ohio has far more meaning than this, and Tomorrow Somewhere is going to help me explain why.
If India represents the place on earth that is most different from where I grew up, Ohio holds another unique distinction in my life - it is the place of my forefathers and therefore the origin of my family's culture. That unique feature makes a visit there a familiar and foreign experience at the same time. It allows me to observe cultural norms that shed light on personal characteristics that have been otherwise unexplainable by my California upbringing, such as why the grammatical construction "this needs cleaned" sounds totally normal to me. Yet, in other ways it is entirely foreign in a way that feels wrong - I should know it, but upon arrival in the land of corn fields, buckeyes, big burgers and even bigger trucks, I am always reminded that I don't really know it at all.
It's probably the closest I'll get to the feeling that children of immigrants must feel growing up in a country that is entirely theirs yet is foreign to their parents. They stand out as foreign at school due to their physical features and unusual names, yet come home every day to a culture that is foreign to them too. They are stuck in limbo between origin and future in a more obvious way than I am, yet returning to Ohio is my little piece of it. In America, most people have come from somewhere else at some point, as much as we'd like to pretend otherwise, and my travels to Ohio bring up the same questions and answers that lead to more questions that everyone comes upon when they are faced with the foreign place of their origin.
My parents met at Ohio State University in the 1970's, in the era of the Vietnam War, hippies, protests, and the Kent State massacre in which the Ohio National Guard (ie, the government-sponsored military) shot unarmed college students, some of whom weren't even part of the protests. It was a time of tremendous social change, where entire ways of life were disappearing and new world views emerged like a phoenix from their ashes. Some people clung to the old ways, others embraced the new. It was a time of great discussion and upheaval, and my parents emerged from the frigid winter cold with their own personal revolution - they packed up their Dodge Colt and headed for California.
To me, this story exists chiefly in family legend, brought up at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and on occasional winter days when the weather reports from Ohio showed particularly frigid temperatures. "How would you like to be shoveling snow off the driveway?" my dad would ask at the warm California breakfast table, "I want to go to the snow!" I'd enthusiastically respond. He'd shake his head. Clearly I had never shoveled a driveway...and indeed, I had not.
In my childhood mind, snow was a magical substance that you'd drive up to for the day, splash around in, throw at your brother, and then drive home from to your warm, green-lawned house. In that same childhood mind, Ohio was a place of fireflies, thunderstorms, bunnies hopping around in storybook gardens and lazy summer afternoons eating pretzels and staring at the TV at my grandparents' house.
As an adult I have only returned a few times, always for family visits. It is only recently that I have come to recognize that these cultural origins, and particularly the differences that I find startling, represent clues about who I am, in ways that are important but not obvious.
Ohio offers up experiences and perspectives that are quintessentially American, and from which my family came. From my grandfather's special muskets used in the war of 1812, to the family cemetery with 200 years of Roofs buried in a field South Bloomfield, there is a lot of my origin to explore there.
It is from this origin that my family will continue, and if, for one moment it seems that perhaps this origin does not play a role in who I am, I will be reminded by my fiance. I met him on the other side of the world, yet he was born and raised in California like me. He is accompanying me on this mid-western journey to his family origins too. They moved from Ohio to California in the 1970's. His grandmother may have even worked in the Ohio State University hospital at the exact time that my parents met there. They didn't know each other.
Our origins play a mysterious role in who we are - sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle. It's time to dig deep and learn more about this foreign place. I'd better start my diet now.
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