Glaswegian Curry, American Stew

Last night’s foray into Glaswegian society was interesting. For one thing, a bit further out from the city center, we saw two foxes loping through yards, and an arachnid which T. insists on describing as “a runaway racing spider without his livery on, and missing his gnome groom,” which gives you some scope as to the size of it (as there have been no sightings of live things in the flat except for gnats near the fruit bowl and the unholy city trinity of rat, pigeon and seagull in the park, seeing a garden spider indoors was a shock. T’s momentary… er, surprise, had her leaping behind a few people and making for the door. *cough*). These wildlife displays aside, the home we visited was just like an apartment we’d see in the states, on the fourth floor with large windows giving a view of a very green neighborhood, and woods just over the crest of a hill.

Our host was one of D’s academic supervisors; an expert in the field of archive science, though not an academic himself. His home is filled with lots of African artifacts, as much of his work for the National Health Services takes him to other countries to work with the World Health Organization. The other guests were also representatives from various countries, including two guys from Africa: one from Uganda, and the other is from Malawi and works in the National Archives there. Our conversation with them was limited, as they, like all of us, were too shy to say much, but our hostess’ voluble commentary on her love of cooking, her distaste for the Greek isles, her various college roommates, her parent’s business, her father’s likeness to Gordon Ramsay, and whatever other ephemera came to mind filled the blanks between the pauses very well.

We were advised that the cuisine would be South Asian (which is in fact the national cuisine of the United Kingdom, apparently), and duly recorded our preference for a few vegetarian options, which were cheerfully presented in exchange for some of D’s ginger-apple filled pastries. The rosy-cheeked young hostess made three kinds of curry from scratch, and the house was filled with the smell of spices, samosas, and frying poppadoms. The kitchen door was kept firmly shut, however, as the hostess did not want the smell of spices to get into the drapes. (That was a vain hope, however!)

There was only one…awkward time in the evening, when we were seated around the table, and said hostess turned to the only Americans in the room and proceeded to quiz us on the American political scene. This has come up repeatedly, and D. has a stock speech prepared. This time we briefly discussed electoral votes, and how that worked, but the hostess once again pressed us for personal opinions on how we thought it was going to go.

And an entire table of people from many nations, enjoying food and conversation… fell utterly silent in anticipation of our reply.

Aaargh! Awkweird.

It feels like false modesty to say so, but that was indeed awkward, and an awful moment. Because: we don’t want the most important conversation in a house full of people to be what’s going on with the United States. We don’t want to be in another country in a room full of people of other nations which have their own beauties and traditions and richness, and have them hushed and waiting, forks halfway to their mouths, leaning forward, eager to hear, as if Divinity itself has leaned down to speak. It’s not that important. We aren’t that important. Seriously.

Or else, we’ve just never felt like it.

It’s such an odd time to be away from home. We strive vainly for distance from the political situation, from the inevitable conversations people want to have with us about how people are acting in the U.S., and what they’re saying. Not because we have no opinion. Not because we don’t care, but because we are in the tenuous position of being… almost…representatives of a country which encompasses nations, just us, by ourselves. And we don’t know how to do that well.

We read. We listen. We want to understand what our fellow Americans think and feel, just as we want to understand what Germans think and feel. But in that desire is the recognition that we don’t, that we can’t. That we can get an idea of what someone thinks and feels, but their reactions come from having grown up on a sheep farm in Wyoming, and having their nearest neighbor be a mile away, and ours might come from recycling aluminum cans, because we live cheek by jowl with people who believe that the environment is the most important thing in the world.

In Southern Cal, you can drive for four hours in a straight line and never leave city… so we may not have the same understanding of a person who lives in a town of 500, all of whom attend one of two churches in town, and most of whom are related by marriage and ancestry for the last two hundred years. Not on a visceral level, anyway. We can understand that intellectually, but you wouldn’t want to take our word for anything that group thinks or feels. We don’t know them.

The distance between San Francisco and L.A. is the same as between Scotland and Denmark.

Even the states next door to our home state — Oregon and Washington — we can understand only intellectually. They want to maintain the dam on the Snake River, for instance, but we also understand that by doing so, they’re destroying the salmon habitat in the Snake River. We don’t have the attachment to the issue that the people who live there and farm successfully as a result of the dam have. To them, it’s vitally important. To us… it’s something we know about from the newspaper. Likewise, we can hardly be expected to represent the interests of a person in Kazakhstan merely because we live here in Scotland, yet we’re expected to be representative of the opinions of the people in New Jersey, which is about as far away from California as Kazakhstan is from Scotland. (Cairo is closer, if you can imagine that.)

“Things are getting pretty rough, aren’t they?” the hostess’ cousin asked us curiously. “People said some things about race after the debate…” she trailed off, and leaned forward, watching us. Well, yes. In some places, things are getting rough; people are exercising their democratically protected freedom to speak, and others are exercising their rights to shout at them and film themselves on YouTube. But it’s a question of size and scope once again; it’s not happening at our house in California, so how can we respond? The international media picks up the loudest, most strident voices, and delivers sound bytes to a curious world, who is itself leaning forward, hushed, and straining to hear.

We deflected the question. We turned the conversation. We ate our spiceless curry stew, and we wondered what else America had to say.

– D & T

(Later, in the course of the conversation, we were asked if the “American-Canadian ‘thing'” was still alive and well. What thing? Have we had a “thing” and no one told us about it?? Are we expected to hold the same attitudes as people in Michigan, who apparently HAVE a “thing” with Canadians? And how big is Michigan, anyway? Could it maybe be just the people who live on the Canadian border who are “thinging” with Canadians? (Are the Canadians “thinging,” too, or is this also just an assumption? Canadians, chime in, guys.) And maybe the “thing” is rampant annoyance that one has to carry a stupid passport to cross the border now, perhaps? Did they mean THAT “thing?”)

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