License plate bingo

is no fun by yourself. This is my conclusion after spending an hour and forty five minutes waiting in line at the Lewiston border between NY and Ontario yesterday.

It's ironic, this cross-border dating thing I seem to have going on right now. I grew up in a border town. Both my grandfathers worked in the US their entire lives, zipping back and forth across the bridge or tunnel every day. I have a strangely paradoxical internalization about that frontier. On one hand, we treated it like a bit of a game when I was growing up, hiding the clothes my grandmother bought us at Fairlane mall under our existing clothes, my mom sneaking into the duty free to buy smokes and booze even when we were just driving through the hour and a half to Sarnia to take the faster route to the cottage. On the other, I was raised with a sense of Scary Other about Detroit, cautionary tale of the "race riots" with their fires and smoke visible from our side of the river, of people hauled out of their cars at lights when they'd neglected to lock their doors, robbed or throats slit. Poverty and desperation folded into a kind of frightened racism that later integrated itself into a pretty strong aversion to the entire country, what I saw as a culture of self-absorbed smugness, consumerism and inability to understand its impact on the rest of the world.

The place still astonishes me. Driving across NY I-90 today, I listened to a real country station -- not the Dixie Chicks new country "empowering" stuff, but the kind filled with little announcements of gratitude to specific soldiers for doing their patriotic duty and songs about what you lose when you choose to spend your money on a cheap motel and a cheap woman and cheap alcohol instead of... I dunno, church? your wife? I also flipped the dial and heard an ad for the "Ave Maria group of funds," "ethical" investment choices for Catholics who don't want their money going to companies that support choice or non-married benefits. And you can't get a decent cup of coffee to save your life anywhere between Rochester and Lewiston.

At the same time, none of my American friends fits anything resembling the US stereotypes we all have. They're all passionate about participatory democracy, revile the administration, mistrust the way God is invoked in the public discourse (even when they actually go to church themselves), bend over backwards to understand diversity and inclusiveness.

It's all a big paradox... and constantly forces me to rethink my assumptions. I'd always seen this country as "over there," within view but arm's length from me -- and now seem to be spending more and more time becoming who I am in this context. Forced to face my own fears and fairy tales about the "affable menace" which is so much more multi-variegated than I'd ever allowed for.

(On, and for the record? Scored New York, Ontario, Connecticutt, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, Maryland, Wisconsin, Florida, Massachusetts, Quebec, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, Maine, New Brunswick, New Hampshire and Utah! while I was waiting in line at the border).