So I Did It Again!

So I Did It Again!

After 35 years in America, I decided that it was time to move on, which is to say move again to another country – this time to the country where I was born 66 years ago.

Prior to arriving to San Francisco where I did not know a single soul, I spent over a year working and waiting in West Germany for a US immigrant visa. 37 years ago, it was possible for refugees from communist countries to immigrate to United States, they just had to find a sponsor in United States, apply for a visa and go through the procedure. So I did that because I’ve always wanted to see America and live there, ever since I was a teenager.

The catch was that people like me could never return to their country – not even for a visit – because the communist government considered people who failed to obediently return to their designated spot behind watch towers and barbed wire traitors and criminals.

Like most people, I thought that the iron curtain would still be there for another half a century. I felt that I had to do something about it, so I chose emigration, a fairly common form of protest back then and after a year and a half, I arrived to San Francisco.

America has been good to this immigrant, and I will always be grateful to this huge country that is so different from any other country that I have lived in or been to – a country that still has space for me and took me in when I needed it most, a country where people treated me like everybody else, just like they have been treating for a few centuries millions of other immigrants with a funny accent, a plan and a determination to make it, no matter what. I can only hope this is a tradition that will continue for a few more centuries.

My plan eventually worked and I was able to start a successful, highly specialized, small translation business that still exists, even though I am officially retired now and live on a different continent. Just yesterday I gave a quote for a fairly substantial translation project, and today I was given green light by the customer and started working on it.

After 33 years of a tempestuous and ultimately tenuous marriage, now that the children don’t need us anymore, it was time for me and my wife to get a divorce so that each of us could go their own way. My wife (ex-wife now) will be returning to Japan soon, and I too have returned to where I came from.

After living for many years in a big American house (huge by European standards), with four bathrooms, nine rooms and a big two-car garage, I now live in a small studio and for the first time in almost 30 years, I don’t even have a car. What I now have instead of a car is an ID for seniors, which I can use to ride the buses and trams in the town of České Budějovice for free and buses and trains in the entire country for 75% off the full cost of the bus or train fare.

I remember that in early eighties, buses, trams and cable cars used to cost a nickel for senior citizens in San Francisco. I wonder how much they are now. Given how things have changed after the arrival of high-tech companies a couple of decades to the city that I loved so much for so long, I am sure they are not a nickel anymore.

From what I read in newspapers and see on Internet, the greed of high-tech companies like Apple and Facebook turned San Francisco from one of the most livable cities into one of the most unlivable cities in America. At least I still got to live there when people who were not necessarily rich were able to enjoy the parks, the ocean, the galleries, the many restaurants and the incredible nature surrounding San Francisco.

Do I miss my spacious, comfortable American house in Virginia? You bet I do, a little bit, anyway. Even more than the house I miss the squirrels, birds and turtles who were coming to our backyard looking for food as we were feeding and watching them from our kitchen. My wife picked fitting names for the little creatures: the hungriest squirrel was Chuppee, and the hungriest cardinal was named Pete. Their offspring got their name too, up to third generation. It was a real ZOO there! I also miss the eerily primeval smell of mud and water at the pier not far from our house, the dozens of crabs scampering about on the mud when the tide was going out at an incredible speed, sideways as if they lived in a different world, where directions, dimensions, colors and smells are very different from those that humans know from their world …. which they do.

I even miss the violent subtropical storms with pouring rain, thunder and lightning that sometime knocked out the power for hours so that we had to switch to candles, as if we were suddenly going back in time some two hundred years.

I definitely do not miss the humidity and the hurricanes though, especially the days and weeks when we had to follow the track of a hurricane on TV news, trying to figure out how close to us or how far from us the next hurricane would land. And once a hurricane landed far enough, another one was forming already again somewhere in the ocean.

The house was much too big for us once the children moved out and the dogs died, one after another, which was more than ten years ago …. and I definitely do not miss the bills that come with having a big house like that.

So after 18 years in California and 17 years in Dixie, I am back on may native, South Bohemian soil where I saw the light of this world for the first time.

Things have changed so much during the years when I lived in other countries … Germany, Japan and United States, that I feel very much again like an immigrant in a strange, unfamiliar country.

In other words … the great adventure continues.