coming on my right, and there would be a wildly gesticulating driver screeching to a halt inches from my left, because I was inadvertently turning onto the wrong side of the road in front of him. I trained myself to look left and right, and left and right again, before I dared to walk across the street. My orientation was still set for the southern hemisphere that July, and when I went into Washington I couldn’t tell where north was. The night sky was disorienting, too. The Southern Cross was not where it should have been. And bathwater ran out of the plug anti-clockwise ... or clockwise ... anyway, the opposite direction from the southern hemisphere. When I ventured out that day, it was like Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa in reverse. There was a confidence, an openness, a frankness in the people around me that was disarming and baffling. A perfect stranger happily embarked on her life story—yet that, it seemed, was that. The promising start came to nothing. It began with a crescendo and the rest was diminuendo. I had been used to exactly the opposite trajectory, where friendships grew, gradually, over years and cups of tea. One of my oldest friends has translucent, light blue eyes and a whispering, silvery voice that surprises you when it turns into a belly laugh. She is funny and fey and intuitive and kind, and she has such empathy that I feel as if I’m talking to my soul. And I love her, and I left her, in a cold, dry, wintry Johannesburg. When I ventured out on that July day, it was my first day as an immigrant in America. 100
I had come from everything that was familiar to everything that was not. I hadn’t yet understood how difficult it would be to make new friends. I hadn’t yet found where I would live or work or play. I had never yet celebrated Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July. I couldn’t yet tell the nickel from the dime. I hadn’t yet learned to turn the light switch up for on. I hadn’t yet discovered that I could feel patriotic. I didn’t yet know if this could feel like home, when I ventured out that day.