blue2helix over at
State of the Day writes:
I'm leaving late from a friend's house. I had already drunk a few beers and watched a basketball game and now it's time to come home to my wife and child.
I run out to the corner of 39th Street and Third Avenue and hail a taxi, (after 12 years of living in Manhattan, it's such a trivial, mundane thing to do). The cab pulls over and I hop in, "Third Avenue and 77th Street please" I bark out as I settle in to the back seat of the car.
The driver is an older man with a long white beard and is wearing a lungee (turban). I catch his leathery eyes noticing me through the rear-view mirror and he smiles a smile of recognition and comfortably asks me "where are you from?"
My Spanish/Mediterranean appearance is the appearance of much of the world. I have been mistaken for a Spaniard, a Greek, an Italian, an Arab, and even an Iranian or Indian. Sometimes people see in me what they want to see, my face is such a broad canvas of geographical possibility that the subconscious observer projects on me the painting under progress in their mind at the moment of our encounter.
I turn to my driver and answer with pride, "I am Cuban." He smiles back, almost disbelieving and says, "you look like you are from my country."
I cling to my Caribbean heritage with pride, but home for me has always been somewhat abstract, personal and self-reliant. Upper middle class and acceptably white for some, but not really white enough for others. Latin enough for some, too American for others.
"Where is your Country?" I dutifully ask in return.
"Afghanistan" he replies.
Immediately, I recall having read about some beautiful sections of Afghanistan, perhaps it was an from an old edition of a National Geographic magazine that had once inspired my imagination a long time ago.
"I hear there are some beautiful areas in Afghanistan."
Brief pause.
"Yes...yes, that is true, there are some beautiful places." We both lose ourselves in quiet meditation.
We ride the rest of the way to 77th Street and Third Avenue in a very comfortable silence.