Homecoming
Culture shock doesn't just happen when you move from country to country. As a senior in high school I had one goal in life: get as far away from my family as possible. Luckily, my church had a university in Oklahoma, USA, 2000 miles away from my hometown in Oregon, USA. I led everyone to believe that I wanted to go there because I loved my church but in reality I saw it is my ticket to freedom.
When I finally landed in Oklahoma, I had no idea what I had gotten myself into.
In Oregon, most people wear jeans every day. School dance? Unless it's prom, throw on a pair of black jeans. Sunday service? If you're a teenager a denim skirt or nice pair of slacks is totally appropriate. Night out with your friends? If it's warm, throw on a pair of shorts. No one I knew wore dresses on a regular basis. The most popular girl in school was an athlete who lived in sweats and tees.
Not so in Oklahoma. It was 1992 and big bows with sun dresses were all the rage. Make up was required every day. People were fancy in a "down home" sort of way. We're not talking Vera Wang here--Kathy Lee's Wal-Mart brand was fancy enough. I once saw a woman mowing her lawn in a dress. That's when I knew life had been turned on its head.
Of course, it was not only the clothing that made me feel like an alien in my own country.
The people were subtly different. More friendly, always willing to wave and say hello. Oregon is a friendly place compared to some places I suppose, but it doesn't know the first thing about southern hospitality. The first time I went driving I could barely keep focused on the road. Everyone kept waving at me!
All of these things were just superficial shocks. The real shock, the real change in my life, was going to come later on a small farm in the backwoods of Arkansas.
Unbeknownst to me, my grandma had two brothers and their families living just three hours away from my college. I had met them once as a child, but never really thought about them. They had no impact on my life. My grandma in Oregon, being the worry wart that she is, contacted them and begged them to be my guardian angels. Little did she know, she was introducing me to a whole new concept of family.
I didn't grow up with a lot of family around. I grew up in a very dysfunctional household and was very wary of men thanks to my dad and his alcoholic friends. I didn't believe in love or romance. I had never seen a genuine example.
The week before Thanksgiving that first year of college I got a call from my great-aunt inviting me to her place for the week-end. I didn't want to go.
My grandma had never particularly liked that branch of the family and didn't have a lot of good to say about them, mainly because of sibling rivalry. Her baby brother didn't have to pick cotton. The Great Depression was over by the time he was in school. He got a lot more than she did, as the second oldest of five. Thus, her views of him and his family were tainted with petty jealousy. But I didn't know all that then. All I knew was that I was suddenly going to be spending a whole weekend with people that were "odd."
Those "odd people" saved my sanity. They were different from what I had grown up with. They talked slow. They had cows. They were always going to the "holler" (took me four years to figure out that meant "hollow"). They were relaxed and loving and caring. They listened to me and to each other.
And most of all they were in love. They'd been married 40 years and loved each other even more than on their wedding day.
That was perhaps the biggest culture shock I've ever experienced. It sounds silly, but I honestly didn't know that two people could love each other so much. They weren't gross about it. I never saw them kiss or anything--to my 18 year-old self that would have been plenty gross, though now I think it would have been sweet. Instead, I saw my aunt buy the kind of ice cream my uncle liked. I saw my uncle carefully clean all the fresh produce he picked from the garden. I saw them take turns using the remote control. I saw the way they did each other little favors and never spoke harshly to each other.
I'd traveled all those miles to run away from my family, and here I was firmly in the web of a new family--a family so alien that I wondered if it could be real.
I spent four years of college breaks with my Aunt Joan and Uncle Ray. Aunt Joan has been one of the biggest influences in my life, my first real role-model. I have seen her take care of her husband, bake cakes for the neighborhood children, take garden fresh vegetables to the elderly and always have a kind word for anyone who crossed her path.
Today, her life is very far removed from mine. She's lived out on a farm her whole life. She doesn't have a computer. She doesn't read a lot. She thinks gardening is fun. She's nothing like me.
Yet I strive to be like her. Those 2,000 miles away from home took me straight to the heart of a real home, the heart of a loving and generous woman.