Repat Chronicles: Random Musings on Life Back in the Colonies

You know how when you’re doing laundry, and you always find a stray sock with no match? It happens all the time, everywhere, throughout the history of laundry. It’s as predictable as sunrise and weeds.

I’ve been doing laundry for a month here in America since moving back from London – yes, I handle the family laundry and meals – and there are already three stray stocks. Maybe four. We’ll never find their matches. The matches have departed this mortal coil. It’s the greatest mystery in the world.

Here’s another mystery: Things disappear when you move, never to be seen or heard from again. It happened during our recent move across the Atlantic. We didn’t even ship that much stuff, but we’re missing things, or at least I am. A pair of white shorts. A refrigerator magnet from Vienna (this is a thing of mine, collecting fridge magnets during travels). A miniature baseball bat. An electronic gizmo or two.

I know I packed these items. I’m sure of it. But they are nowhere to be found, even after unpacking everything.

If there were 20 or 30 missing items, I’d simply write it off to a box not being delivered. But it’s only a few things – and those few things would have been packed in a box with a lot of other things that are present and accounted for.

I ask you, my friends: Why does this shit happen? Why? Why why why?

You don’t know, and neither do I.

Here are some other random reflections on our return to the States….

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Driving

For five-and-a-half years – from January 2018 to July 2023 – I spent 98% of my time not driving. We did not own or drive a car in London. The only time I drove during those 5.5 years was when we visited the USA, and we would rent a car. That averaged about one week a year.

You don’t really need a car in London. You can walk, bike, or take transit to get where you need to go. A car is a liability in a city like London. It costs too much money and energy to park, and after driving about 43 meters you are stuck in traffic – and you stay stuck in traffic until you reach your destination, where you won’t find a place to park, anyway.

Plus: They drive on the left side of the road in the UK and a handful of other ridiculous-ass countries, and I did not want to test my skills at driving on the left side after a lifetime of driving on the right side.

Well, needless to say, I am driving again here in America. Everybody drives in America. You drive half a block to the grocery store in America. You might drive down the driveway just to fetch the mail.

Mind you, I don’t drive that much here. Usually just short, 3-minute hops to take the kids to and from school when they don’t feel like walking, or the weather doesn’t permit.

But I do drive. We bought a nice used Nissan Altima, jet black, loaded with all the modern tech features that we have never used before. It’s a nice car. I’m glad we have it. In a couple of years our oldest daughter will be driving. The thought of that simply….well, never mind.

What I haven’t done is ever be tempted to drive on the left side of the road – because I have never driven on the left side of the road in my life. However….

Cycling

….I have bicycled on the left side of the road – plenty. I biked just about every day in London, probably 50 or 60 miles a week, down busy city streets, amongst the bloody traffic, with the bloody lorries and double-decker buses and whatnot. I got used to biking on the left side of the road.

And when I got to America, and finally had one of my bicycles delivered in workable shape, the first thing I did was bicycle on the left side of the road. The first time out I wondered why these idiot American drivers were coming right toward me.

Why were they driving on the wrong side of the road????!!!!

WTF was wrong with them???!!

Why are they looking at me all weird and angry????!!!!

Oh, right. I was the idiot cycling on the wrong side of the road. My brain had been conditioned to cycle on the left side, and we were now in the land of the Right Side.

I have since corrected it – mostly. It’s still a work in progress….

School Daze

Back in London, our daughters attended two different schools. One was a public (state) school that was for years 1-6, which is the equivalent of K-5 in the USA. The other was a Catholic college, which was the U.S equivalent of middle through high school, for Catholic kids. They were both excellent schools, and our daughters made many good friends there.

What struck me about the schools in London is that you have very little contact with the teachers and administrators. They teach the kids, occasionally send out an email about what’s happening, you maybe have a couple teacher-parent conferences a year, and otherwise that’s pretty much it.

We have our daughters in excellent schools here in New Jersey as well – one at the local high school, one at a sort of late elementary/early middle school. Next year they’ll both attend the same school, grades 7-12. It’s a small town in an otherwise densely populated area that people move to simply because the schools are so good.

Here is what has changed:

We get about five or six emails a day from these schools. They have already had a couple of parent-teacher functions and they will probably have at least one or two a month for the next seven years.

They bombard us with information about different events – Support our teams! Attend this money-raising car wash! Doughnut sale for the band! Attend this Zoom conference! Sign your child up for this club! Volleyball game next Tuesday! Soccer game next Wednesday! Parent Night this Friday!

I am not used to this. We are not used to this. This is America – a never-ending event, a never-ending invitation to be involved, meet people, do this, attend that. I appreciate that they care so much.

Do I have the energy for it? Time will tell….

Speaking of Schools…

A couple weeks ago we got an email from one of the schools informing parents of this: Students and staff participated in a lockdown drill earlier today. The goal was to make sure the 7th graders are familiar with safety and communication procedures in the event of an active shooter during their lunch period. 

This is the first time we have ever received one of these notifications. In case you don’t know, these drills are meant to prepare students and teachers of what to do in the event that a psycho whips out a gun and starts blasting at everyone – which happens a lot in America, but thankfully, not so much in New Jersey (which is a major reason we moved here).

I hope every sane person can see the insanity of having to issue that kind of email to parents of school kids.

And that’s all I have to say about that…

Yes, I’m From North Carolina

We’ve met a lot of new people here, and they inevitably ask where we moved from. I tell them we moved from London, but we used to live in North Carolina, and I’m originally from there. And here is how the conversation usually plays out:

Them: You’re from North Carolina?

Me: Yes, I was born and raised there, and lived there a long time, but then moved around to a lot of different places as an adult, Connecticut, California, New York C…

Them: You moved to New Jersey from North Carolina?

Me: Well, yes….

Them: It’s usually the other way around. Everybody from New Jersey is moving to North Carolina.

Me: Yeah…

Them: I never heard of anyone moving from North Carolina to New Jersey.

And on and on.

Which is true. New Jersey is in the Northeast, which is very expensive, densely populated (at least in North Jersey, near New York City), and has frigid winters.

North Carolina is in the Southeast, which is much less expensive, has more open spaces, and milder weather. My hometown, Charlotte, is maybe the fastest-rising city in the United States in terms of population growth and job opportunities.

In a former life, all of these regional differences in climate, population, cost of living, culture, accent, history and geography might have made a big impression on me. In fact, back in 2000 I lived in New Jersey for a while, freshly relocated from North Carolina, and I could feel the regional differences in my bones.

But today?

Once you have lived overseas, America is America is America no matter where you are. It all more or less looks, feels, and sounds the same. To me, New Jersey is no different from North Carolina or Texas or Iowa or Montana or Oregon.

This is the value of travel, of living overseas. The differences you once thought were so profound turn out to be nothing much at all.

America is one country, with more in common than it thinks, given the current insane political divide. That gives me some kind of weird hope.

Let’s hope I’m right.

Note: Image from Google