“Getting to Know You”

There was a party in our neighborhood a few weeks ago. The day before, two preteen girls from this new family went door to door and asked if it was all right if they had music until ten o’clock at their party.

Let me just say, for the record, that we’ve never had anyone any place we’ve lived come ask our permission first to have loud music in the evening.

Cars and pickups began arriving on Sunday afternoon; bringing Mamas in their Sunday best, carrying covered dishes and Daddies toting babies in their car seats. Little girls in frilly pastel dresses and brothers in long pants marched proudly into the house.

We couldn’t see the dancing in the garage.  However, I suspected from the strobe lights and music that they were having a better party then we were.

Actually, the sound of foreign language and music at the house across our street every weekend reminds me of my Grandma’s house back east many years ago on Sunday afternoons. Polka music pouring forth from my uncle’s accordion filled the air. I’m sure our parent’s voices carried across the backyards and were just as confusing to their American neighbors.

My cousins and I played hide and seek; chasing and shouting like the little Latino kids do now across from my house.

Those cousins grew up. They married into various ethnic families and scattered across the United States.  My grandparent’s offspring learned American ways and taught some of their ways to others. The extended family boasts computer programmers, major league ballplayers, and engineers on some of the first manned craft our country launched. There are artists and writers; many women own their own businesses.

. They played football in school, golf with business clients and tennis any time they had a chance.

In other words, they assimilated, just as the families that visit across the street will also.

When he came here in the 1880’s, my Grandpa worked in the coal mines in West Virginia.  He and the other immigrant men that came to America to earn money and yes, send some of it back to their homeland, took the hardest jobs and were paid the least wages for them. He worked beside Irish, Polish, Russians, and many others. This country needed their labor in its industries just as immigrants are needed now to drive the economy.  The United States grew and prospered with their help.

The immigrant families came with the same basic aspirations and needs as the residents of their new land. The newcomers and the long established transformed each other through a blend of mutual cooperation, competition and yes, sometimes conflict.

Some fought side by side with fellow Americans in WWI; and in later years, along with their neighbors, said heart- wrenching good-byes to their own sons to fight in yet more of our country’s wars.

The cultural and ethnic fusion was slow; but our diversity in color, culture and thought is what makes this country great.