Of Thee I Sing

I was eight years old when I went to see The Jazz Singer. It was 1980. I still remember leaving the theater with my brother and sister, head dizzy and exhilarated with the refrain, “They’re coming to America…”

“Today!”

My sister was ten, my brother seven, probably the first time we’d gone to a movie without our parents. My sibs felt just as jazzed as me, the song punching us full of enthusiasm and excitement.

Do you remember that Neil Diamond song? It’s called, simply: America.

Far
We've been traveling far
Without a home
But not without a star

My country, the United States of America, providing light and truth and the promise of opportunity to people in lands far beyond my imagination or understanding.

The song stirred an intuition. Nothing I could articulate, but no less fixed and definite. I felt PROUD. My country was special. I was blessed, part of a country with a mission, a country that inspired hope in people from all over.

I had no way of knowing that, four years earlier, a young mother and her two daughters were arriving from India, a precise amount of cash in their pockets (about $7.25, owing to currency export controls) at JFK in New York and onward to Newport News, VA, soon to reunite with her husband, the girls’ father, who’d come ahead to find work. To start a new life in a country they chose.

That summer, 1976, the United States celebrated its bicentennial, maybe the first big word to stick on my tongue. One day in particular from that summer provides my earliest lasting memory: two boys in colonial garb, knee-length breeches with high white socks, tri-corner hats, holding hands and gamboling under the sun in the schoolyard where, a year later, the older child would begin kindergarten. His brother would start school the following year.

Why did Neil Diamond’s song come to me this day? We are in the kitchen prepping early Thanksgiving sides – cranberry sauce, corn bread, chopping the vegetables for a pumpkin lasagna. Food that will travel with us to celebrate in the Nutmeg State with my parents and my sister and my brother and their families.

Thanksgiving celebrates America. It celebrates coming to America. It remembers those who made the earliest passages to escape oppression and it celebrates – far less than it should – those who met and helped these immigrants through their first difficult seasons.

Free
Only want to be free
We huddle close
Hang on to a dream

This next part is difficult. I think about the anthem blowing through my mind and all the promise it offers, the same feeling I had leaving the theater as an eight-year-old. What’s left now is sadness and shame. I feel like a villain. I feel like a thief in stolen land, hoarding a thing that isn’t mine and never was, part of a cynical people who’ve forgotten all they were given and all they once stood for. All they once meant to the rest of the world.

Our recent period of darkness is opening now onto even greater darkness. Of those who selected this, opted for this message, to close the door, I ask: Did you forget, or did you just never know?

Home
Don't it seem so far away
Oh, we're traveling light today
In the eye of the storm
In the eye of the storm

To the struggling pilgrims and migrants who feel dismay at the dimming beacon, I wish you courage riding out the storm. We ride out a storm of our own. You’re traveling light; we’re traveling without light.

The woman working beside me in the kitchen, a friend of almost three decades, a wife for nearly two, came to America with $7.25 in her pocket in the year of our bicentennial. In time again we may lift our voices to sing.

On the boats and on the planes
They're coming to America
Never looking back again
They're coming to America

Home
To a new and a shiny place
Make our bed and we'll say our grace

Freedom's light burning warm
Freedom's light burning warm

Everywhere around the world
They're coming to America

Every time that flag's unfurled
They're coming to America

Got a dream to take them there
They're coming to America

Got a dream they've come to share
They're coming to America

They're coming to America
They're coming to America
They're coming to America
They're coming to America

Today, today
Today, today, today

My country 'tis of thee (today)
Sweet land of liberty (today)
Of thee I sing (today)
Of thee I sing
Today, today, today
Today, today, (today, today)

Such a great song. Such an amazing anthem. Such high and winding inspiration.

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