My favorite grandma, my second mom, my ‘maia’ loved the beach. It was her happy place and she didn’t stop going to it every year till she got really, really sick, right before she died. Romania doesn’t have palm trees though, but she lived for almost 75 years dreaming about seeing one, one day. I remember her buying fabric with palm tree patterns for summer dresses.
When I landed in America, 27 years ago today, life or fate, or some happenstance brought me to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. This is not where you dream of migrating when you dream about moving to America. You usually are told America is New York and Miami and Los Angeles, and anyone you know who moves here shoots for one of these places. Well, my story brought me to Myrtle Beach. My first home was on the beach - I thought I literally won the lottery.
Every day, I would look at nothing but palm trees and think of ‘maia’. It kept me going, knowing she would never say ‘no’ to living on this new planet where it was so easy to take every tree for granted.
I had nothing but a head full of dreams and absolutely no idea how I would make them come true. Those who know my story know by now that dad had one dream for us: to make America our home. I went out into the world on his specific promise that America is the only place where our character, our education, our upbringing, our talents will not go to waste. This was our pie-in-the-sky. The possibility of failure was never factored in. That was not a chance in the world that would happen.
Over the years, I have looked back, and realized every time that I did make those dreams come true. I was lucky enough to learn how, and I was even luckier to know people who helped me out to facilitate them. Those who did all that know who they are and they also know (I hope) that I will forever be grateful to them.
This immigrant girl didn’t know how to put gas in a car, or how to write a check, much less how to get and pay for a mortgage or a car loan. I didn’t know how to pay taxes or how to navigate the complex and disorderly, a-logical dark alleys of health insurance companies. I learned everything from scratch, at the age of 23: how to get and keep a job with no credentials or history in one of the most competitive places on the planet, how to survive an abusive marriage, how to keep a household, how to make friends who had no cultural common ground with me, and so much more ...
When I look back and think of the past 27 years, I literally shiver. It’s more than half my life! Where has it all gone and who am I today?!
People have asked me over the years if I ever regretted coming here - if I ever got scared when I landed here, amongst strangers, in a foreign land, and wanted to run back. Are you freakin’ kidding me? Look where I landed! Palm trees, pools, and the roaring Atlantic Ocean in my backyard. I was 23! Do you think any 23 year old would say no to that? I knew I had to work hard to make all that my own (and I learned over the years that the beach is really not my jam), but I wanted nothing but to make this land my true home.
America held such promise in 1998! Back then, I never even thought about the politics in America because its reputation preceded it. I knew politics-wise, America’s got it figured out. They would always offer the best place to live anywhere in the world, I was sure of it. From my small Romanian town, it was heaven on earth and things just “worked” here because everyone is responsible and everyone pulls together. Someone reaching out a hand to give you help to move here, in this blessed land was the type of fortune that movies are made of. That’s how you know what a dreamer I was ...
I was a literature and music buff and America offered a never-ending playground for both.
I came to walk in Jim Morrison’s steps on Venice Beach, California, and breathe in the chilly, piney breezes of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks magnificent Douglas firs in the Pacific Northwest. For me, New York and Los Angeles presented no pull. But I wanted more than anything to live in the desert of Arizona or the mountains of Montana. I wanted to live in and to understand the complicated South which I grew to love after reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone With the Wind, among other things.
I came here to drive on Route 66 and chase Elvis’s Tennessee-born music; I came here to be “on the road again” like Willie Nelson promised and take the vastness of this land in, to learn it like the back of my hand; I came here to see if the stories told by Mark Twain and the criticism of Henry James towards Americans bear any truth. I came here to see Hemingway’s hangouts, homes and learn where his kitties spent their days. I came here to hear the blues in Chicago and the zydeco in New Orleans. I came to make the land of original blue jeans and bandanas (some of my favorite pieces of clothing growing up) my own.
More than anything in the world, I came here for freedom. True, unbridled freedom, the kind of which no nation under the sun promised to know how to make. As I found out later through knowing the work and activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. "the goal of America is freedom." I thought that and to some extent still do, to my core. I figured then as I figure it now, 27 years later, America't got what I am after, and I have what she needs to give her, too. How could it go wrong?!
In the past 27 years, I did all these and so much more. In the process of slowly making America my home, I have learned that there are few things in the world as decadently delicious as hushpuppies, or fresh backyard bar-b-que. I also learned that the worst thing you can ever put in your mouth is without a doubt a peanut butter sandwich. Now, this one is one of the things that America got wrong.
It was not until recently that I doubted the freedom part, but that is now the saddest realization yet. As Bill Clinton was saying in an interview "no victory is ever eternal" (or something similar).
I lived in Myrtle Beach only for about 10 months after I came over. Life and my new family moved me around to North Carolina, to Utah and back to North Carolina. While I was living close still, I used to go to Myrtle Beach every year after 1998 on my “off the boat” anniversary, which is today - January 19. After moving away for some time and during the pandemic the tradition went stale, but I felt the strong pull to start it again today.
We went to some new places that I had never visited before (who would have known that after visiting my first American home for almost 12 years after I came here, every year, there would be any “new” places to see?), and I recreated the journey from my first home to my old beach and further to my office back when I made it here, and to one of my favorite places for food - a little old place called Sea Captain’s House that is still there and still offers delicious food and quirky Southern hospitality. Walking around my old neighborhood felt so familiar and welcoming. Like time never washed over anything ... Just like the waves washing on the same shore - the wave, always different, the shore permanent and steadfast ...
In front of my former home. Look at all the those palm trees.
We booked an ocean-front room when we got here. I woke up this morning yearning for a gorgeous sunrise. But it was so overcast I did not even see one ray of sunshine. It was so windy that all the birds were flying backwards. I thought to myself: what an interesting coincidence that the weather, and the general mood of the beach matches the world of today, January 19, 2025: not a ray of hope is left for so many of us today, on this day; and just like the birds going backwards, some of us want to go back for better times, some of us are taking all of us back from ignorance. But we’re all looking back, for one reason or another.
When they pushed me out of my home country and into America, they told me that this is the land of opportunity; that there is nothing you cannot achieve here if you set your mind to it and work hard. The one thing they didn’t mention is that the land of all opportunity also includes the opportunity to fail. The opportunity to lose sense of who you are and what right and wrong is and how to tell the difference.
I didn’t fail, or at least I didn’t fail me, but at times this country that held so much promise and that I cherished, has failed me.
But if I were given the opportunity to come here again, knowing what I know now, I would do it again in a heart-beat! Even if one day, I can say that I came to witness the fall of the greatest empire of my generation, that, too, is a (strange) privilege and a chance of a lifetime. So, I would do it again.
I used to sit like the picture shows on my patio and look at the ocean in front of our condo, thinking that at the other end of all that water are the people I love but that I am here, in this safe boat and if I steer it right, I could make my own and their lives better, fuller, more meaningful.
Nowadays, I don’t feel like I’m on that safe boat anymore. I feel like not just me, the whole country is on The Titanic. The people who see the iceberg have no power, nor authority to steer the boat away and avoid hitting it. The people who have the authority and the power cannot see the iceberg and are heading straight for it, and they are so ignorant or controlling they are not listening to the people on the same boat to go around it.
In the end, I feel like we’re all headed for peril. But only one half will know why and that it could have been avoided. The other half will blame the iceberg.
As we were walking out of Barefoot Landing in North Myrtle Beach, the speakers were shouting as a sad reminder: "Bye, bye, Miss American pie ...".
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