Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. 2013

T. and I are celebrating a special occasion. We always seem to be; our good fortune calls for celebrating as frequently as possible. So on a rainy night in the Scottish capital, we head for The Cellar Door, a vaguely nautical-looking basement restaurant that promises especially good food.

Our table discussion turns to taxes and the morality of avoiding them. I say that nobody likes paying taxes and some taxes seem truly unfair, but as long as they are the law, then the only thing I can do is pay them, while working to change them (and any law that is unfair). I think this is part of the Discreet Traveler mentality. As I am a citizen of two countries, and resident in a third, being a "good citizen" means different things to me than perhaps to a homegrown patriot. I am a guest in this country. Paying taxes, and obeying laws, are how I participate in a nation, not owing allegiance. I don't expect to agree with policies for which I didn't vote. I honor the requirements of the country for as long as I choose to live here.

This is getting a bit heavy so we order some drinks. T. has Tiger beer from Singapore, while I have a white wine, a Gewürztraminer from Chile. Chilean is my favorite white, and the waitress says this particular wine is her favorite on their list. It is very good, as is the first course of The Cellar Door's "surprise menu," a smoked salmon spring roll. How nouvelle écossaise. This is followed by another Tiger and a ribeye steak for T., and a glass of merlot and the surprise main course for me. She finds the steak a little thin, but cooked the way she ordered it, and my lamb is out of this world. The greens are very good too, as are my mashed potatoes. T. thinks the excellent chips (fries) must be double fried, to get them so crispy on the outside and soft on the inside.

I am tempted to go for all three surprise courses, but opt instead for cheese with port for dessert. I have what my sister describes as a "cheese tooth." Even T., who has the sticky toffee pudding, can't resist the cheddar, which is called Isle of Mull--crumbly texture like a Cheshire cheese. All the cheeses are Scottish, and served with Arran oatcakes. Another principle of the Discreet Traveler: Whenever you have the opportunity, sample local.

The waitress brings the bill, not outrageous. and I note that she hasn't charged me for the glass of red wine. "Thank you!" she says. "Not everybody would have mentioned that." Well, we were just talking about this, the Honest Abe mentality (Abraham Lincoln was said to have walked miles back to repay a shopkeeper who'd given him too many pennies).

"I can't help it," I say, and she agrees, she's the same way. If she'd overcharged me, I certainly would have complained. You can take the girl out of America, but...

Tomorrow I'm off to my day job, and T. is off to buy Isle of Mull cheddar cheese.

The Discreet Traveler

I wish I had been wrong in predicting that the U.S. Senate would cave on immigration reform that would benefit families like mine. But, the Senate has caved on a lot lately. Meanwhile, a terrorist act last night in London has, predictably, been blamed on "immigration" by the head of the British National Party. And, the Obama administration is officially admitting what was already known: that it uses targeted drones to kill American citizens. I need to limit my "rants"--er, critiques--to one paragraph at a time! 

So, I'm relaunching my 'blog as THE DISCREET TRAVELER. Part travel log, part travel guide--anecdotal, based on my own experience--and part critique. If you've read Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad, I'm going for a twenty-first-century version of that, but a shade less satirical. Twain makes fun of the places he visits, of his fellow travelers, and of himself, but ultimately concludes:

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

This "blog" (Web log) is a record of travels, like the log book of the ships I read about in stories as a child, and longed to sail away on. And a soundtrack seems as good a launching point as any. On a train from London to Edinburgh, I pop on my headphones and out comes "American Idiot," by Green Day. "American Idiot" is what the songwriter assures us he does not want to be.

I am not a travel writer, but a writer who travels, as much as I possibly can. I would go so far as to say that I am only a storyteller, and began writing stories down, as a way of creating adventures that I had not (yet) personally had. If life is a journey, then my life has been a lot of smaller journeys. The next song, for instance, is Willie Nelson's "On The Road Again," which also plays in my first novel, Arusha. I remember this song on the country radio station many mornings, as I rode the school bus. I grew up in Carter County, Tennessee, trying not to become an American idiot. I wanted to travel the world, further than anyone in my county school had been or even heard of.

So much for the TRAVELER. As for the DISCREET...it is my goal to tread, and to help my readers tread, as lightly and thoughtfully on our travels as we can. The joy of this earth is that we, all living creatures, share it together. Getting to see as much of the world and its people as possible, with as little negative impact as possible, requires an open mind and a willingness to learn. Observing, maybe criticizing, but with a discretion that never veers off into paranoia. The better part of travel is discretion, as Falstaff might have said.

So welcome to my journey of today. Our last song is Dido's "Life For Rent." The train conductor asks us to have our "travel documents" handy, and my first thought is, What travel documents? Scotland has not yet declared independence; it's part of the United Kingdom. So we definitely don't require passports.

It turns out he only means tickets. Still, it starts me thinking. When do you need a passport? "When crossing national borders" seems a good answer, yet as England to Scotland proves, what border means, and what nation means, is far from straightforward. And I intend to go far.
 

Top 20: How blessed am I?

I’ve been thinking a lot about patriotism lately, and nationality, and what it means to be a citizen. Particularly this week, after yet another senseless attack in the United States—not just on America, but on people from all over the world. A marathon like Boston is an international event. Long-distance runners are a global community.

The American and Canadian flags evoke different emotions in me; I feel I belong to two countries. From many discussions, I know that binationality is as difficult a concept for some people as bisexuality used to be for me (and I’m sure there are more posts in that). But the way I’ve been feeling lately, it seems very important to dispel the notion that one country must always be defined against other countries, or that love for one country means loving another country less.

I challenged myself to come up with some personal “Top 10s.” I can tell you right now that laws and policies like health care, same-sex marriage, immigration, or gun control are not on these lists. Not only because there is plenty already out there about those important issues, but because I wanted to make these lists personal. I am very aware that a place can look very different “on paper” than it looks in real life, when you’re actually living there. The things that make a place worth living in, and a country worth loving, are often not the way its government behaves—in fact, quite the opposite. This is not a “X is better than Y because” post. You might as well ask someone to pick one of their children over another.

So here are the Top 10 of the country I was born in, and the country I chose:

10 Things I Love About America

1.            The Statue of Liberty. My all-time favorite monument. Lady Liberté (I love the story of French schoolchildren sending in their pennies to build her) is the one patriotic thing that moves me to tears. Because of all she stands for, and how far we still have to go.

2.            “America The Beautiful.” The song, in this case. It describes exactly what I love about America and I never stop at the first chorus, which everyone knows; I always go on to the second: “America! America!/ God mend thine ev’ry flaw,/ Confirm thy soul in self-control,/ Thy liberty in law.” Thank you, Katharine Lee Bates.

3.            America the beautiful. The national parks. The Grand Canyon, the Grand Tetons, the grand everything.

4.            Following on from #3: I think that Wyoming and East Tennessee, where I come from, are the two most beautiful places in the U.S.A., if not on earth. And I am sure that I could walk up to any house in either rural location with an American (or Confederate) flag out front, knock on the door, and not agree with the residents about anything other than their right to fly said flag. And so %$$! what? Which brings me to

5.            The U.S. Constitution, more specifically the Bill of Rights, and most of all, the First Amendment. Free speech is one thing I think America gets 100% right. If you disagree, please, feel free to say so!

6.            The people. We’re friendly, we’re loud, and you can always tell we’re coming from a mile away; we’re generous too. Come to think of it, generosity is a feature of both my countries’ people.

7.            Project and process and above all, progress. We pronounce them all with a short o. How could I ever pronounce progress except the American way?

8.            Fahrenheit. Not the cologne (well, that too) but I've never been able to get used to any other temperature scale. But, if you can stand the cold getting down to 40 degrees below zero, that is the point where Fahrenheit meets Celsius (or, given the weather, where America meets Canada).

9.            My family. Sure, I wasn't the first Knowles to migrate up north; my ancestors were Crown Loyalists, and my great-great-grandfather was born in Nova Scotia. But today, my relatives are all American.

10.          See Canada #10.

You might notice that a lot of what I love about America is—wait for it—freedom. Freedom of choice, even to a fault, is a big American value. It’s because I’m American that I love having choices, that it’s such a blessing to have more than one country in the world where I am absolutely free to live and work and...ironically, that’s what I love about Canada. No one made me be Canadian; I chose Canada freely. In fact, Canada doesn’t make me do much of anything:

10 Things I Love About Canada

1.            Canada doesn’t tax me no matter where I live in the world, or make me file paperwork unless I live in Canada.

2.            Canada doesn’t limit me, as a Canadian abroad, from investing (overseas financial institutions have closed their doors to “U.S. persons” because they don’t want to comply with the onerous filing requirements of the Internal Revenue Service).

3.            Canada doesn’t require me to have a Canadian passport to leave or return to the country (though I'm happy to have one).

4.            Canada doesn’t restrict me, as its citizen, from traveling to any country. (For the record, there are lots of countries I’m more interested in traveling to than Cuba; but isn’t it communist states that are supposed to restrict their citizens’ travel?)

5.            Canada the beautiful. Cape Breton Island, Northern Ontario, canoe trips, getting thrown out of a dogsled in the snow.

6.            Canada is my land of opportunity. Canada gave me a chance, when it was the most important thing in my life, when doors were closed to me in every other country of the world. As with other chances I’ve taken, things didn’t ultimately work out the way I’d started off hoping; but I would never have known what was possible if I hadn’t had that chance.

7.            In Canada, I found work that I liked and that could support me in all the things I really wanted to do in life. I’m not saying that this, or #8, would never have happened if I’d been living somewhere else, but Canada is where they happened for me.

8.            And directly following on #7: Canada is where I finally started taking my writing seriously, and launched a career, with the support of some of the same people I still rely on.

9.            Speaking of whom: I’m fortunate enough to have friends all over the world, but the place with the biggest concentration of people I really value as friends is the Toronto area.

10.          I was living in Toronto on September 11, 2001. Thankfully, I had no television, so the news of what was happening in America came to me first from a friend (one of that rare breed born and raised in Toronto) who has said, and not just to me, that he’s never met an American he didn’t like. People that day stood together, Canadians, Americans, and indeed people from all over the world. We felt a strong sense that our common humanity was so much more important than our different nationalities. Sadly, that sense does not always remain strong among people; but like other Americans, I will never forget that day. And like other Canadians, I will never forget how united we felt that day.

If I hadn’t had all these experiences in Canada, I might not forever link being American and being Canadian together in my heart. But I’m very blessed to do so. And on top of that, I have twice as many things to love.

Separate or Equal: A Non-Wedding Story

“We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education

England and Wales are legalizing same-sex marriage. If the House of Lords does not scupper this bill, lesbian and gay couples will be able to choose to have a minister of religion conduct their wedding, or have it in a church, or not, like any other couple getting married. Unlike civil partnership, marriage is a term that means something outside this country. It is not “separate but equal.”

Inevitably, this made me think about my non-wedding day. The day itself was happy, but beforehand I was acutely aware that civil partnership was separate and not equal. Not just because I had to ask my sister to pray in a separate building, after the legal ceremony was over, so as not to contaminate the gay with God. The town hall room itself made discrimination hard to miss. There was a big sign right up front, where it would be seen by everyone. “MARRIAGE ACCORDING TO THE LAW OF THIS COUNTRY IS THE UNION OF ONE MAN AND ONE WOMAN...” it proclaimed, to the polygamists, barnyard-animal-marriers, and queers.

This was like something you’d see in America, I thought. I wanted to protest, but I’m a foreigner, at the mercy of British immigration authorities. That’s why I was there in the first place. (Well, and to have a massive party in the other building.) I couldn’t afford to rock the boat.

In the excitement of non-wedding preparation, I happily forgot all about this. With a great deal of difficulty, seven members of my family, including my brother’s girlfriend (now wife) Elizabeth, traveled from the U.S.A. to celebrate with us. But until the ceremony, and my sister’s blessing in the Indian restaurant, were over, I knew nothing about the most boat-rocking moment of the whole day.

“Now that you’re legal,” Elizabeth said over dinner, “we can tell you what we did.” Turns out I may have forgotten about the offensive sign, but my aunt noticed it right away.

This won’t do, she thought. My brother’s pictures document her striding right to the front of the room and removing the sign. Then she and Elizabeth hid it behind a curtain. Unbeknownst to me, they kept worrying that a town hall employee was going to find it and put it back.

When I heard what had happened to the sign, I was retrospectively thrilled that it hadn’t been there to spoil our non-wedding pictures. But I was more proud of my family’s actions. They weren’t afraid to ask for discrimination to be taken out of the picture. They didn’t even ask.

Resistance to British authorities is why America is a country in the first place. Civil disobedience is what we do. My straight American relatives couldn’t make equality happen in this country, let alone in their own. But when and where they could, they struck a blow for equality.

And that brings us closer than ever.

The good doctor

The former surgeon general of the U.S.A., C. Everett Koop, has died at the age of 96. If you were American in the 1980s, you might remember this surgeon general. He wore a mustache-less beard and his distinctive uniform, which made him look like a naval officer. Cigarette advertisements (which still appeared in print in those days) always carried the SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING, bringing Dr. Koop into every magazine and grocery store checkout, whether you wanted to read about him or not.

Dr. Koop obviously had a long life himself (a widower, he remarried at 93). His passing reminds me of what the U.S.A. was like under Ronald Reagan, who appointed him. Dr. Koop disappointed President Reagan and many others in Washington by advocating based on what he honestly saw as threats to public health, rather than ideology. One threat, then as now, was the scandal of many Americans having no health care at all. The surgeon general had no success getting his bosses to care about that.

But there were two other areas of huge danger to people's health in which Dr. Koop didn't toe the line, either. One was the syndrome that came to be known as AIDS, which first appeared in the U.S. at the beginning of the eighties. The other was, as already alluded to, cigarette smoking.

Try to remember what AIDS meant in the decade before antiretroviral drugs. It was a 100% killer which, as we know, brought unimaginable loss to the gay community. Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act were not even thought of yet--our main national issue was dying men, and women in solidarity with them. AIDS began as GRID or "gay cancer," and was thought only to affect homosexuals. Even later, when others contracted AIDS from blood transfusions, the country saw them as "innocent victims." Which implied that somebody else was guilty.

If we're ever tempted to think that gay Americans haven't made much progress, we should try to recall C. Everett Koop's day. Homophobia in the U.S.A. now is persistent; thirty years ago, it was indescribable. Phobia was an accurate term, because it was as much terror (of those AIDS-spreading gays) as hatred whose pervasiveness is difficult to grasp today, even for those of us who were there.

Before AIDS, homosexuality was more or less unspeakable. When AIDS arrived, and appeared to affect only gay and bisexual men, very few people outside the community cared. It wasn't just a crazy fringe view that these people deserved death as punishment for their lifestyle. That was mainstream America's view, and it was the view at the highest levels of government.

The virus that causes AIDS is often said to have been "co-discovered" by French and American researchers in 1983, although in fact, the French discovered it in 1982 and the U.S. scientific community held off on recognizing this until one of their own had also isolated it--which he could not have done without the French scientists' help. For Dr. Koop, AIDS was not a plague in a biblical drama; it was an epidemic that deserved a scientific response.

What I am perhaps belaboring here is how radical that approach was in the eighties. Even when AIDS began to affect straight people, it was still associated with injecting drug users and homosexuals above all--the guilty victims. Neither group got much compassion in the era of the Reagans and "Just Say No."

This is interesting, because the very people who thought AIDS a just consequence of one's lifestyle did not feel that way about smoking-related diseases. Dr. Koop warred with North Carolinians like Senator Jesse Helms, a Republican, and the Democratic governor who called for him to be impeached. Senator Helms was a ceaseless foe of homosexuality and any representation thereof, for example in art. He also represented a state that is at the center of the tobacco industry, and took every opportunity to protect it.

Here was an industry whose products, Dr. Koop said, killed 300,000 Americans every year, most of whom became addicted in their early teens. If some in Washington had their way, the surgeon general could not defend these kids from cigarette promotion on the one hand, nor protect them from AIDS by mentioning condoms, on the other.

We know now the scale on which Big Tobacco has been a merchant of death, the extent of their denials that their products are both addictive and deadly. We also know that when reason and science are brought to bear on a virus, the epidemic of AIDS is stemmed. But when Dr. Koop said these things thirty years ago, they were not commonly accepted. They were not in the interest of a tobacco-addicted, homosexual-hating country, as large parts of it were.

In 1981, at the beginning of his term, one third of Americans smoked. When he left eight years later, it was down to just over one quarter. President Reagan's first public mention of the word AIDS did not come until 1987, when it was in the context of opposing safe sex education for schoolchildren.

The U.S.A. today is increasingly a country in which homosexuality is accepted as a natural variation in human society, while smoking cigarettes is regarded as a terrible lifestyle choice. Who saw that coming?

Meanwhile, the late C. Everett Koop was not a perfect surgeon general, but he still stands as a good example. May we also go to work every day to serve people, rather than care so much about what authorities think, or the prevailing prejudices of our time.

The bus

This past Sunday, The New York Times reported on a reality that still surprises many people, straight and gay: that Americans with same-sex partners from abroad have to leave the country to live together legally. (The article doesn’t mention those whose partners’ countries are also intolerant, and who therefore have nowhere in the world to go.) You can read it here (thanks, J.)

To his credit, President Obama has included this dilemma as part of his proposals for immigration reform. There is a lot to be fixed as far as the U.S. immigration system is concerned. And while I focus here on one aspect to be fixed, I don’t mean to question that other failings need to be addressed.

Although this particular failing has affected me personally for more than twenty years. Has changed the entire course of my adult life, more than any other single factor.

Which is why it was so hard to hear that the Senate’s proposed bill for immigration reform has deliberately left out people like me. Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said, “There are so many other, bigger issues the Congress has to resolve in immigration reform before we would even get to a point where we would be discussing a change to a longstanding policy like this.”

In other words, we can talk about any number of “bigger” issues-- Latino votes for Republicans? cheap labor for business?--before we can talk about gay citizens, born in the U.S.A., who have never had so much as a traffic ticket in our entire lives.

The threat seems to be that the Senate is prepared to derail all immigration reform unless we, Americans with same-sex partners, are left out of it.

Think about that. We, U.S. citizens with foreign-born partners, can get behind those who, perhaps unknowingly, perhaps under mitigating circumstances, have immigrated illegally. We are assured that those who have broken immigration laws, while having a path to legal residence, will go to “the back of the line.” Meanwhile we, the gays, can go to the back of the bus.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, “has warned that adding the divisive social issue to the legislation could ‘derail it.’” Now, I have more respect than you might think for Senator McCain. His experiences as a prisoner of war in Vietnam have led him steadfastly to oppose torture by, or with the approval of, the U.S.A., while others around the country have happily clamored for scalps. And he may just have been making a realistic assessment of the situation in the Senate. But it’s hard to escape the implication that we have to wait until there is no longer any controversy about this “social issue” before even considering equal rights.

This past week I was reading Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, a novel set partly during the anti-communist hysteria of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s day. In one scene, Kingsolver fascinatingly evokes one of the most horrifying aspects of McCarthyism (detailed in William Manchester’s wonderful history of America, The Glory and the Dream). In the 1940s and '50s, many employers or institutions that wanted to be rid of someone would assure her that, of course, they knew that she had committed no crime against the U.S., nor was she even a communist. She had simply become “controversial.” The mere fact that there was controversy about someone—although that controversy had no basis in fact—meant that she had to go.

Even if we someday get past the controversial stage, it will be too late for some of us. I’ve long since become a citizen of a country that not only has full equality, but actually wanted me as an immigrant. And none of this being asked to wait should surprise me because I am, after all, a woman.

From the American Revolution to the civil rights movement, women are always participating on the front line, only to be told that they were only helpmeets. To demand their rights then and there would not be supportive of the menfolk. Just wait, ladies, we are forever being told.

More than twenty years ago, Anita Hill went up against then-nominee for the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas. An all-white, almost all-male Senate watched a black woman take on a black man in his confirmation hearings. One of them had to lose. Justice Thomas is on the Court today, but the message then was that there was a ladder of importance in America, and women of color were on the bottom rung. Where would Anita Hill have been if she were a lesbian? Down in the dirt?

Next month, according to the Times article, this very Supreme Court will be hearing cases that also have a bearing on our situation, including one about the “Defense of Marriage Act.” That, you may recall, is the federal law which (among other things) makes it impossible for the U. S. to recognize citizens' same-sex partnerships, even if the states do. The Court is a bit more diverse, by ethnicity and gender, than it was twenty years ago, but I am still out here.

The bus of U.S. immigration reform is leaving. It remains to be seen whether we will be in the back of the bus, or thrown under it.

Holding out for a hero

My guest blog at Women and Words is here. I'm also one of 20 authors answering the same question this month: Which of your own characters would you date? For fascinating responses, including disclaimers (about dating imaginary people?) and classic lesbian discussions of What Dating Means, please read here. Thanks much!