In Which I Ponder Why I Love America

America Fever never runs quite so high as it does during the Olympics, I think. For a couple of weeks we're all cheering for the same team--Team USA--and the things that divide us the rest of the time seem to fall away just a little bit.

One of my favorite things about Team USA, though, is that sometimes you can't tell by the names (the last names, anyway) that they're American, because there's really no such thing as an "American" name in the sense that there are German names or Japanese names or Russian names. In figure skating alone, we've seen names like Yamaguchi, Lipinski, Boitano, and this year Shnapir and Castelli in the pairs competition.

Here are some of the reasons I love America:

I love that Simon Shnapir's father, a Russian Jew who with his wife immigrated to the U.S. when Simon was a toddler, has been making himself a very visible fan of Team USA in his big Uncle Sam hat.

I love the Coke ad with America the Beautiful in different languages, and I can't understand being offended by people from a variety of cultures thinking that America is beautiful. Shouldn't that make us proud, that people from all over the world want to make America their home?

I love that one of the men involved in the rescue of art plundered by the Nazis was German-born Harry Ettlinger, and in English that's still German-accented after all these years, he speaks of himself as an American, with obvious pride and undeniable patriotism.

I love that going out to dinner with my husband's cousins Anna and Beth and their families is like a League of Nations. Anna and her Venezuelan-born husband Jorge have four adopted daughters from Ethiopia, and Beth, whose husband Sam is from Japan, has two children (well, a teenager and a young adult) who are a perfect combination of Myers and Yamamuro, and bilingual to boot.

I love that Brandon Stanton, of Humans of New York, regularly captures moving stories of New Yorkers from all over the world who have come here for a better life--but certainly a favorite was Gac Filipaj, a refugee from the former Yugoslavia who worked as a janitor at Columbia University and went to school on his off hours for 12 years to earn a degree from the university that employed him.

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A few years ago, my son and I spent a wonderful afternoon at the Ellis Island Museum, and we couldn't help but be struck by the courage and optimism of the people who got on boats with a dream of a better life--many times with little money and a pretty tenuous grasp on the English language. In fact, my son's great-grandfather came through Ellis Island with his brother and his mother, who had been abandoned by the boys' father just before the ship set sail. 

America was not always kind to the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free--but the fabric of our country is woven through with the stories of religious pilgrims, slaves, refugees, and immigrants from all over the world, in addition to the Native Americans who were already here. 

I heard someone say once that America isn't really like a melting pot, which implies that everything melts together to become the same thing, but it's more like a big salad with lots of different ingredients that are separate and together are delicious. Where that analogy breaks down--or maybe where it's more honest than I'm entirely comfortable with--is when you think about the fact that there really are ingredients that some people put in a salad that you don't care much for.

My sister-in-law makes this wonderful spinach salad with candied walnuts and oranges and craisins (dried cranberries)--and I'll admit I pick around the craisins because I don't really like them. If one ends up on my fork, I'll eat it, but I would prefer not to. Same with that big salad that comes with your meal at Olive Garden--if an olive ends up on my plate, I will generally give it to my husband, because olives are one thing I just don't eat if I can help it.

But the thing is, there's a difference between not really liking craisins or olives and complaining that they shouldn't be there. Even as I'm picking them out, I realize that the issue is with me, not the salad or the individual ingredients.

I love this big salad that is America. With all its faults, it really is a wonderful country, with beautiful and amazingly diverse people.

"America, America, God shed his grace on thee

and crown thy good

with brotherhood

from sea to shining sea."

Guest Post: Sophie's Choice

For the past 20 years, being a mother has defined me and shaped me more than anything else. Nearly everything I do is filtered through that lens. But I am the mother of one boy, and as such, there are aspects of parenting that I will never experience--being the mother of a girl, for one, but also that inexplicable math of loving another child just as much as the one you already have without the first love being diminished.

After reading my friend Laura's explanation of how it works, though, I have a better understanding of how it is to love several children equally but also, occasionally, have favorites.

Sophie's Choice

by Laura Hankins Rand

I have four children. Or rather, I have four adults. The youngest is edging towards 30. I have been asked a few times over the years by an occasional rogue acquaintance if I have a favorite. I always respond with a resounding YES. I love seeing the surprised face and the wicked interest in such an unexpected and ill-advised response. We are supposed to love all our children equally, at all times, in all circumstances, world without end, amen, praise to the father, son, and Holy Ghost.

But I submit that every parent has a favorite. Oh yes, I believe this. Let me explain. When my second child was born, my oldest was 5. She was the center of the world. She defined everything a child should and could be. Her father once said, “I know I will love this new baby. But I also know that I can never love another child as much as I love this one.” Oh, the things we think we know until we experience them. I told him that love isn’t something we parcel out. Love is limitless. We would love the new baby with every bit of intensity that we loved the first.

I was right. And we went on to have four children, two girls, two boys. After the second girl, he admitted defeat and confessed that he loved her as much as he loved our singular first. Then we had our third – a boy. His father admitted to me (was he slightly ashamed?) that he had never felt this way before. It wasn’t that he loved this boy more than our girls. He just loved him differently. And when we had the second boy – the same. He was our last. We knew this. He was special for many reasons, not the least being he was last. The special position that somehow parents with multiple children understand.

Now our house was full – four busy children. Two exhausted parents. We never thought about degrees of love. How could we – we never had a spare moment. But looking back over the years as they and we have aged, I see more clearly the scope and breadth of parental love, the bursts, the pulsating underlying foundation of it all.

This week, one of my children had emergency surgery. He is now asleep in our guest room, recovering well. He is my favorite.

In 2006, I became a grandmother for the first time, by my second daughter – the one I knew somehow I could love as much as my first. I helped coach her through her delivery and saw her baby before she did – from the vantage point of the end of the hospital bed. That day, as she breathed and sweated and worked so hard, my favorite child had a baby.

My oldest, my very heart, was in a horrific car accident. The car rolled over, the glass shattered, and my favorite child walked out of it without a scratch.

You may have heard in the news a couple of years ago about my third child, my oldest son. He was attacked by a group in Asheville, his cheekbone and glasses broken, and left in a parking lot. It was on the local news. What the news didn’t say was that he is the favorite child of Laura Hankins Rand, who was at the place of business the next morning, demanding an answer for what had happened in that lighted parking lot with security guards inside the store.

And it’s not just about when they are in pain or life-threatening situations. That sense of favoritism arises when a child, a favorite, is teased by classmates. Or when he gets 2^nd place in the spelling bee. When she is in the school play and lights up the entire gym or makes the valedictory speech at graduation. And when his or her heart is broken by an adolescent crush or as an adult by a spouse. The child who needs me in that moment, my focused attention, my lap, my shoulder, my praise, my laughter, my discipline (yes, even that), is my absolute favorite.

Sophie’s Choice it is not, thankfully. There is an undrainable well inside of parents. It is given either in the labor and delivery room or upon leaving the hospital as a gift of grace. No child can use it up. No number is too many for each to receive the full scope of it. It is not divisible, only multiplicable. There may be some trigonometry involved. Not sure.

Now I experience this same bounty of love with my grandchildren. I had only one for 6 ½ years, and in July my second was born. The first one expressed some attempt at grappling with the measure and limits of love. He said he understood that now I love the baby more than him. I sat him down, looked him in the eye, and said, “Absolutely not. I love him. I love him in his own special way with all my heart. But I will never love anyone more than you. You are you and I have special love for you. The baby has his own special love. Do you understand me?” I hope he did.

Should you ever run into me and just can’t hold back your question, go ahead. Ask me on any given day who my favorite child is. I just might smile properly, lower my eyes, and say, “Favorite? Oh, I love them all exactly the same!”

When Celebrities Die

Today Philip Seymour Hoffman died--a truly gifted actor who apparently battled some pretty nasty demons, like many other artists do. And when I heard the news, I was shocked and saddened.

Just a couple of months ago it was Paul Walker, of Fast & Furious fame, who died with tragic irony in a horrific car accident. Before that Cory Monteith, James Gandolfini. And in recent years we have seen the deaths of Whitney Houston, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, and Steve Jobs, among others.

Those are tragic because they were in the prime of life--many of them right around my age, some quite a bit younger. But we're also saddened when we lose a childhood icon like Bob Denver of Gilligan's Island, or music legend Lou Reed, or the great actress Jean Stapleton.

The way this always plays out in social media seems to be this: Everyone is shocked and wants to offer an R.I.P. or post a favorite quote or clip or song because that person has touched them in some way.

And then, in a few days--sometimes in a matter of hours--some person decides that too much is being made of this celebrity's death and creates a meme with a photo of an emaciated child who is clearly dying from malnutrition or a homeless person in the snow and some variation on this theme: "Actor dies of a drug overdose, and millions mourn. Thousands of children die every day, and no one mourns."

And people see the meme, and nod their head sagely, and don't want to be lumped with the shallow masses, and they pass it along. Or they come up with their own commentary about the sad state of affairs when people care more about a celebrity than these suffering people.

First of all: It is simply not true that nobody knows or cares cares about or mourns the loss of those little ones, or Syrian refugees, or the homeless people who have frozen to death in the recent winter weather, or whoever is being juxtaposed with whichever celebrity has recently died. Their suffering and death is heartbreaking and tragic and ever-present and completely overwhelming in its enormity.

But there is no reason that people should be made to feel shallow for expressing sadness over the death of one person they've never met as opposed to those other millions they've never met. Just because Philip Seymour Hoffman battled a drug addiction and he was famous, did his life also not have value?

It's disturbing to me that celebrities are often treated as if they're not humans with feelings--actresses like Anne Hathaway and Gwynneth Paltrow who are despised for no apparent reason, the famous couple whose marriage troubles are splashed all over magazine covers, young celebrities whose fame seems to trip them up at every turn. Whenever I read some harsh criticism or see personal details of something that's none of my business, it makes me thankful I'm not famous.

In their death, too, this idea that it's shallow to mourn their passing seems to imply that they're not real people whose lives have value. Or that if we mourn them, we're assigning greater value to them than to others whose deaths are equally tragic. It's true, we don't know those people personally. But they are people whose work touches our lives in some way, and obviously some deaths will touch us more than others.

Many times, too, I think what we really feel is our own mortality. It's true that I'm extremely unlikely to die of a heroin overdose, but this is a guy my age, and now he's dead. A guy with a family and a very successful career. A guy who by all accounts was a nice person, a hard-working actor, a professional. A guy who had issues that he ultimately couldn't overcome.

I have enjoyed watching his films and seeing him grow as an actor over the years. I love the fact that a guy who wasn't movie-star good-looking was respected and honored because he was good at what he did. I'm sad for him that drugs were something he couldn't shake, and terribly sorry for his family, who now face a world without him in it.

I'm sad about it, and I'm not going to apologize for being sad.