Passionate Discourse

(Discourse entirely in Lithuanian...translation provided for Dear Reader’s convenience)

We were sitting street side at the inaptly named “California Tapas Bar.” Beer and wine flowed freely, punctuated by plates of cheeses, sausages and sundry morsels (some quite tasty but all decidedly NOT Spanish in either heritage or spirit).

To my right sat three comely women who had been drinking Chardonnay gratis, courtesy of the four vagrants from America. Two were embarrassingly young, one faintly Eurasian, the other definitively Aryan. The third older, harder-edged.

“You’re not Lithuanian” spake the hard-edged one.

“Once you’ve left the country, you cannot claim to be Lithuanian.”

My uncle blanched. His hackles did what hackles do when provoked. But he was flummoxed, speechless, taken aback by the very notion that someone didn’t consider him a Lithuanian despite the fact that he was born in Raseinei, that he cavorted in the native soil as a young child until the Russians came, imprisoned his father and left him an orphan, a homeless refugee...at eight years of age.

He’d spent his entire life aching.

Me? I kinda missed most of that conversation. Pity.

I kinda caught the tail end.

I turned to the hard-edged gal (whom I considered rather attractive), raised my glass in a toast to her and her compatriots and intoned the following (more or less):

“I was born in Canada because my parents were war refugees. My family, for the most part, perished in Siberia. My parents had little choice. Flee...or die.

So I came to be born in Canada, but my family moved to America. I grew up in the United States. Spent my entire adult life in America.

Both countries consider me a citizen, and I love both countries in return.

But we spoke only Lithuanian at home. I spent each Saturday in Lithuanian School, studying grammar, the literature, history and geography of a country I’d never seem but came to love as a sort of Camelot.

Sundays? I was a Lithuanian Boy Scout. I did all the “scout things.” Went to scout camp each summer.

So, here I am. Born in Canada, raised in America, and loving Lithuania from afar my entire life.

What am I? I don’t know.

You tell me.”

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