It’s Thanksgiving week in the United States again, and this year I’m really grateful to be thoroughly in love with this country.
It’s not the world’s most ideal relationship and, as the man who spoke at my citizenship ceremony said, we are not a utopia. Everywhere you look, you can find heartbreak and outrage. As I type this, many innocent people lie dead in a store not far away after being shot in yet another violent attack, for example. I ache for their families. I fear for mine. And because I consider myself a real patriot, and not one of those “patriots” who gets paid a ton of money to spew toxic bullshit on TV, I feel not just free, I feel compelled to criticize many aspects of life in the United States.
However, this is an essay about gratitude. A lot of the Americans I’m grateful for are people you haven’t heard of: teachers, coaches, neighbors, friends, lovers, kind strangers, followers, readers. There’s Bob Dylan, who altered my consciousness and brought it to a higher state when I was just a teenager, crying from happiness at his concert, and there’s the lunch lady from my son’s old school, who spotted me in the parking lot one day and said, “You know what? You’re raising a good kid. You should be proud, mom.” I’m grateful for all of these moments, whether culturally significant and dramatic, or quiet and personal.
I’m grateful for the geography and topography of the United States. I don’t just mean the parts we all know — the drama of the Rockies, the rich strangeness of the Appalachians, the glittering sprawl of the Mississippi — but also the lonely fields, the bogs, the twists of the little-visited coastlines.
I’m grateful for how eager this country is to explore the universe. My breath caught in my throat when I saw Artemis launch. What strikes me as American, the drive and determination and our sometimes obnoxious but also endearing can-do spirit, is also an element that transcends borders and the Earth itself.
I could go on like this, but I also need to talk about how grateful I am for how this country changed me. I wasn’t bad when I got here, but I was unformed. The country began to inhabit me, like a mist you breathe in on a cold autumn morning. It crept into my bloodstream, settled in my brain, my bones, the inscrutable parts of me that are connected to living tissue and yet can think outside of it. I became a bolder person here. A person who can contain several worlds at once, and love the way they mingle inside me, or so I have discovered over time.
I have been spending a lot of time on American Civil War battlefields recently, listening for the whispers of the dead. Maybe that’s a little silly, because they’re mostly military dead, I imagine they’d yell a bunch of swear words if they really wanted to send a message. Still, I stand there, look at how the wind is worrying the grass, and feel a strong link between all Americans who died in unjust circumstances and the wartime dead in my native country, Ukraine. I’m so grateful for American aid in this horrible time, and also, for American resolve. I get some hate from online weirdos when I express gratitude — or when I’m deemed insufficiently grateful, for that matter — but online weirdos are also a part of life’s rich tapestry.
It was here in this country that I discovered that a broken heart can still be a full heart. Also, it was here that I really came to know that hearts are tough, muscular fuckers. Hearts can heal.
I went to an old tavern — old by our American standards — recently, in that part of northern Virginia where ghosts are especially plentiful, and listened to a man tell me about his past. Like mine, it was an interesting one. Our pasts hung between us in candlelight, as a picture of a stern George Washington looked on. I’m not a romantic when it comes to history, but I can appreciate its gifts, handed down by a long line of people most of whose faces I do not know.
Thank you, I say to them. Thank you.
Image: Gettysburg Sunset Cannon by Nicolas Raymond