First Man of the Land
Friday, November 22, 2013
It is impossible to ignore today that event
in Dallas 50
years ago.
This morning I drove my wife to whom I have
been married for 45 years to the UBC
Hospital to undergo one
of those feminine operations, one not involving a scalpel. She is a trooper.
She slept the night but I didn’t. I feel that she and I are like our 2007
Chevrolet Malibu. The warranty is long gone and the repairs are going to be
cropping up haphazardly until that final one and we will go where cars and
elephants ultimately end up.
In 1960 I was attending St. Edward’s High
School, a Catholic boarding school in Austin,
Texas. My mother, who lived in a mining town in Mexico, Nueva Rosita, Coahuila, was all in a
flurry of excitement. She was telling me that a sexy Catholic US Senator
would perhaps become the first Roman Catholic president of the United States.
On campus we were excited, too. We all had
to explain to a few of our non-Catholic classmates what Papal Infallibility was
about and the fact that if Kennedy were elected president he would be his own
man. Few believed us.
On September 26, 1960 I had been playing
pool in our Junior/Senior rec room. We had a TV in the room and some of us
watched that first debate between Nixon and Kennedy. I was particularly impressed
by the voices of both men. They were speaker’s voices. I found Kennedy’s
insertion of an r at the end of any word that finalized with an a charming. I was told
that it was a Bostonian accent.
When Kennedy did win the election our
campus was in a minor uproar of delight and pride. I graduated in 1961 and our
Edwardian, the school yearbook was dedicated to Kennedy and another icon of the
time Pope John XXIII.
Our pride was short-lived. We had many
Cuban students in our school and when the fiasco at the Bay
of Pigs occurred I remember distinctly being harassed by one of
those Cuban students that “Your president abandoned us.” It was then that I had
some of my first intimations of a doubt that have followed me all these years.
When convenient I am an Argentine, or a Mexican, or a Canadian (I am a citizen
of Argentina and of Canada) but deep inside I feel very American
even when I suffer the indignity of crossing the border at Blaine. I am treated as an alien. Which I am.
The Americans, with singular foresight have paved the way for the eventual
immigration of Martians and Proxima/Alpha Centaurians.
Those at the border would never suspect or
know that I have a feeling of alienation in Vancouver,
in Buenos Aires, in Mexico
City and now that my mentor Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. has died
this year I no longer have a desire to visit Austin. Austin
is a place where I lived the transition from boyhood, those teenage years and I
almost became a man. I have those roots there and a lingering feeling of “I am
an American!” persists.
I look forward to that phone call from UBC Hospital
sometime today. I will pick up my Rosemary and bring her home. We belong there. Here!
