Bryson - Im a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away

Bill Bryson - I'm A Stranger Here Myself
NOTES ON RETURNING TO AMERICA AFTER TWENTY YEARS AWAY
INTRODUCTION
In the late summer of 1996, an old journalist friend from London named Simon Kelner called me in New Hampshire, to where I had lately moved after living for twenty-some years in Britain. Simon had recently been made editor of Night Day magazine, a supplement of the Mail on Sunday newspaper, and it was his idea that I should write a weekly column for him on America.
At various times over the years Simon had persuaded me to do all kinds of work that I didn't have time to do, but this was way out of the question.
"No," I said. "I can't. I'm sorry. It's just not possible. I've got too much on."
"So can you start next week?" "Simon, you don't seem to understand. I can't do it." "We thought we'd call it 'Notes from a Big Country. '" "Simon, you'll have to call it 'Big Blank Space in the Magazine' because I cannot do it."
"Splendid, splendid," he said, but a trifle absently. I had the impression that he was doing something else at the same time-reviewing models for a swimsuit issue would be my guess. In any case, he kept covering up the phone and issuing important editor-type instructions to other people in the vicinity.
"So we'll send you a contract," he went on when he came back to me.
"No, Simon, don't do that. I can't write a weekly column for you. It's as simple as that. Are you taking this in? Tell me you are taking this in."
"Excellent. I'm absolutely delighted. We're all delighted.
Well, must run."
"Simon, please listen to me. I can't take on a weekly column. Just not possible. Simon, are you hearing this? Simon? Hello? Simon, are you there? Hello? Bugger."
And that is how I became a newspaper columnist, a pursuit I followed for the next two years, from September 1996 to September 1998. The thing about a weekly column, I discovered, is that it comes up weekly. Now this may seem a self-evident fact, but in two years there never came a week when it did not strike me as both profound and startling. Another column? Already? But I just did one.
I mention this to make the point that what follows was not intended to be-could not be-a systematic portrait of America. Mostly I wrote about whatever little things had lately filled my days-a trip to the post office, the joy of having a garbage disposal for the first time, the glories of the American motel. Even so, I would like to think that they chart a sort of progress, from being bewildered and often actively appalled in the early days of my return to being bewildered and generally charmed, impressed, and gratified now. (Bewilderment, you'll note, is something of a constant in my life, wherever I live.) The upshot is that I am very glad to be here. I hope that what follows makes that abundantly clear.
These pieces were written in the first instance for a British readership and of necessity included chunks of explication that an American would find unnecessary-what a drive-through window is exactly, how the
1 postseason playoffs work in baseball, who Herbert Hoover was, that sort of thing. I have endeavored to excise these intrusions discreetly throughout, though just occasionally the drift of the text made such adjustments impossible. I apologize for that, and for any other oversights that may have slipped through.
In addition to Simon Kelner, I wish to express my sincere and lasting thanks to Bill Shinker, Patrick Janson-Smith, John Sterling, Luke Dempsey, and Jed Mattes, to each of whom I am variously and deeply indebted, and, above all-way above all-to my dear, long-suffering wife and children for so graciously and sportingly letting me drag them into all this.
And a special thanks to little Jimmy, whoever he may be.
COMING HOME
I once joked in a book that there are three things you can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he is ready to see you, and you can't go home again. Since the spring of 1995, I have been quietly, even gamely, reassessing point number three.
In May of that year, after nearly two decades in England, I moved back to the United States with my English wife and four children. We settled in Hanover, New Hampshire, for no other reason than that it seemed an awfully nice place. Founded in 1761, it is a friendly, well-ordered, prettily steepled community with a big central green, an old-fashioned Main Street, and a rich and prestigious university, Dartmouth
College, whose benignly dominant presence gives the town a backdrop of graceful buildings, an air of privileged endeavor, and the presence of five thousand students, not one of whom can be trusted to cross a road in safety. With this came other attractions-good schools, an excellent bookstore and library, a venerable movie theater (The Nugget, founded in 1916), a good choice of restaurants, and a convivial bar called Murphy's. Helplessly beguiled, we bought a house near the center of town and moved in.
Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch. You proffer hopelessly inadequate sums when making small purchases. You puzzle over ATM machines and automated gas pumps and pay phones, and are astounded to discover, by means of a stern grip on your elbow, that gas station road maps are no longer free.
In my case, the problem was intensified by the fact that I had left as a youth and was returning in middle age. All those things that you do as an adult-take out mortgages, have children, accumulate pension plans, take an interest in the state of your guttering-I had only ever done in England. Things like furnaces and storm windows were, in an American context, the preserve of my father. So finding myself suddenly in charge of an old New England house, with its mysterious pipes and thermostats, its temperamental garbage disposal and life-threatening automatic garage door, was both unnerving and rather exhilarating.
It is disconcerting to find yourself so simultaneously in your element and out of it. I can enumerate all manner of minutiae that mark me out as an American-which of the fifty states has a unicameral legislature, what a squeeze play is in baseball, who played Captain Kangaroo on TV. I even know about two-thirds of the words to "The Star-Spangled Banner," which is more than some people know who have sung it publicly.
But send me to the hardware store and even now I am totally lost. For months I had conversations with the clerk at our local True-Value that went something like this:
"Hi. I need some of that goopy stuff you fill nail holes in walls with. My wife's people call it Pollyfilla."
"Ah, you mean spackle."
"Very possibly. And I need some of those little plastic things that you use to hold screws in the wall when you put shelves up. I know them as rawl plugs."
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"We call them anchors."
"I shall make a mental note of it."
Really, I could hardly have felt more foreign if I had stood there dressed in lederhosen. All this was a shock to me. Although I was always very happy in Britain, I never stopped thinking of America as home, in the fundamental sense of the term. It was where I came from, what I really understood, the base against which all else was measured.
In a funny way nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not. For twenty years, being an American was my defining quality. It was how I was identified, differentiated. I even got a job on the strength of it once when, in a moment of youthful audacity, I asserted to a managing editor of the London Times that I would be the only person on his staff who could reliably spell Cincinnati. (And it was so.)
Happily, there is a flipside to this. The many good things about America also took on a bewitching air of novelty. I was as dazzled as any newcomer by the famous ease and convenience of daily life, the giddying abundance of absolutely everything, the boundless friendliness of strangers, the wondrous unfillable vastness of an American basement, the delight of encountering waitresses and other service providers who actually seemed to enjoy their work, the curiously giddy-ing notion that ice is not a luxury item and that rooms can have more than one electrical socket.