sunday night, after a hard day of pumping out dirty water and cleaning out the left overs of my neighbor's large beautiful tree that hurricane Katrina toppled into my pool, my mother informed me that Nani-ammi's oath ceremony is at 8am tomorrow morning....
i go to sleep thinking "oh great!!! its raining like crazy outside".
Citizenship is a wonderful thing...
i served as my grandmother's translator as she went through the face to face citizenship interview and oral exam. she passed! and now, monday morning, the big day had come. the oath taking ceremony, the final step in a process that began when she first arrived here in the mid 1980s...
i woke up at 6 am. i had to go pick her up and then drive to the miami beach convention center during rush hour. but before that... the pump i rented to drain the pool is due at 8:30, the place opens at 7. i better leave the house by 6:30 to pick up my Nani... from her house it will take one hour to get to the beach. but before i leave, can i go one more round of pumping?... Yeah! the rain from the night before must be drained for me to continue cleaning my pool......
...6:45 i'm running to pack up the pump into my mother's car so that she can return it for me. Damn! I'm LATE!!!! Early morning traffic has built up on Hialeah's streets and there is no way i'm going to make it.
...7:30 we are on the road, Nani-ammi is amazingly calm for someone who is about to miss the ceremony, and I'm driving as fast as i can when you have a grandmother in the passenger seat next to you. she tells me about how she has no metel boxes in her purse this time (to carry her pan) she has eaten it before we left
...8:00 we finally make it to the Highway to Downtown. and by this time we start talking about what we will need to do to get into the ceremony at Noon. The noon ceremony is when my Aunt and my cousin are scheduled to take their oath. What can we do? Will they reschedule? What will they say? How hard will it be? I hope I haven't caused a major delay in her process... everything was going so well.
...9:00 we finally find a parking spot as close as you can get to the convention center entrance. Thanks to my father's diabetes I have inhereted his Disabled Parking Permit. I was probably meant to have it just for this occasion. we approach the security guard at the closed doors to Hall C, the one her invitation letter tells her to report to...
"better run if you plan on get through those doors before they close!... Enter through Hall D" he says.
WHAT???
ONE HOUR LATE!
and I still made it!!
We are among the last to enter the hall...
I see them closing the doors behind us...
We are rushed towards the next Hall and told that they are about to start. Its so exciting! I'm so emotional at this point, so happy that I have to hold back an unusual desire to cry as I walk hand in hand with my Nani as fast as she can towards her assigned section...
Thank God its the first section!
The ceremony begins a couple of minutes after we take our seat...
imagine "we would have been sitting hear for an hour" she says to me....
we better tell my sister to get here early for the noon ceremony...
some thoughts that came to mind that can be developed in later posts:
-the MC says that he will call out the countries of origin that are present and asks folks to rise when their's is named. cheers and claps are heard when a country is called. its strange how people retain a pride of their former place of citizenship, yet also don't feel it is important enough to live there anymore. is this unique to the american experience?...
-in the oath the new citizens vow to defend and fight for the nation by joining its military if the law makes them, being a born citizen myself, i never had to take such an explicit vow, maybe if i did, i would see loyalty, patriotism, and war differently...
-i'm amazed in the way you can replace the words "america" and "democracy" with "islam" and nothing would change in the way you talk about the two, does this mean that they inevitably become competeing forces when they become imperial. i guess not, because they are not equal at the moment, the rise of america has come long after the decline of islam. the difference is that while islam is spoken of in imperial ways it is only talk based on what used to be, while america is happening now...
-i'm amazed as to how much reference there is of God during the ceremony they play the song "God Bless the USA," the new citizens are led by one of their own as they say the pledge of alegience "...one nation under God" it just makes me think about the point i made earlier in the similarity and apparent conflict with islam...
-as my grandmother rises when the MC calls out Pakistan, i rise with her, so while i never really was "from pakistan", i kind of acknowledged it now in some way, i was conscious of this idea as i was standing there...
-many americans take some sort of formal oath that makes them conscious of their duties as a citizen, i think there should be some sort of formal oath to make those of us born here that aren't in the military, or naturalized immigrants, aware of our rights and responsibilities. maybe it should take place on a state by state basis. when a born citizen of a state becomes 18 they should be forced by law to register to vote and serve for a 2 year term as a member of the national guard of the state, maybe only 2 months minimum of which should be "active service" for your fellow citizens, and the first time they go to vote or do their service, at the polling place or at the guard training center they would take the oath. i think our country as a whole would benefit from something like this in each state. those of us that are born here would be just as conscious of our citizenship as those who choose to become americans are.
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