THIS WEEK IN AMERICA
There is a strange moment that happens after you have lived in another country long enough.
At first, everything feels like something you are watching from the outside.
The weather. The roads. Schools. Politics. The way people talk. The things they argue about. How a school bus can stop an entire road. The way a stranger can tell you their life story in the supermarket. The way people say “bless your heart” and somehow make you wonder if you have been hugged or stabbed.
For years, America felt like that to me. A place I lived in, yes, but also a place I was constantly interpreting.
Then, somewhere along the way, the distance started to shrink.
You stop asking, “Why do they do that?”
You start asking, “Why do we do that?”
That is a very strange little word to find yourself using. We.
The America That Happens Around You
This week in Tennessee, we finally got rain.
Proper rain.
The kind where the sky goes black in the middle of the afternoon and you briefly wonder whether the weather has skipped straight to the final scene.
We had not had rain for ages, so I should have been grateful. The lawn certainly was. The trees were. Everyone with allergies probably looked at the sky with cautious optimism.
But Tennessee weather still catches me off guard. The sky can go from ordinary afternoon to biblical warning system in about seven minutes.
That used to feel like one more strange American thing I was observing. Now it is just part of the rhythm of living here. I check the sky. I check the radar. Wonder whether school pickup is about to become an extreme sport.
That is how belonging often sneaks up on you. Not through flags or ceremonies or grand speeches, but through repetition.
You learn the storms.
The roads.
You learn which grocery store has the decent bread.
Which local traffic lights are going to test your faith.
Eventually, the place becomes less of a spectacle and more of a set of instincts.
The Ordinary Weirdness of Everyday Life
Some parts of American life still feel surreal, of course.
Regular readers may remember that I work part time at a storage facility. This has given me a much deeper education in American life than I ever expected.
You think storage facilities are about boxes, padlocks and people forgetting which unit they rented.
Sometimes they are.
Other times, you find yourself dealing with a tenant who appears to have mistaken her storage unit for a very illegal studio apartment.
Recently, we went to speak with her around 11 a.m. She was clearly inside the unit. Clearly had been sleeping there. She would not open the door all the way, and she would not come out to talk.
Which is always a strong sign that everything is completely above board.
Eventually, the ultimatum had to be given. If she is on the property again after 10 p.m., the unit gets evicted.
It is a strange job sometimes. You think you are working at a storage facility. Then suddenly you are enforcing the basic concept that storage units are for storing things, not people. But that is part of the real America I keep discovering. Not the glossy version. Not the postcard version. The one that happens in parking lots, workplaces, school calendars, weather alerts and awkward conversations with people who may or may not be sleeping behind a roll up door.
The Country You Learn Through Your Kids
My daughters are growing up American.
That sentence still feels odd sometimes.
They have Australian parents, but their childhood is American in ways mine never was. School buses. Fall break. Summer camps. Dance competitions in hotel ballrooms. Theatre camps during school holidays. The casual assumption that every child needs at least four activities, two costumes, three water bottles and a parent willing to drive across town at inconvenient hours.
Georgia’s dance competition schedule came out for the new season recently, which means our family calendar has once again been taken over by hairspray, hotel bookings, early mornings, costume fees and the quiet financial terror of children’s extracurricular activities.
This season includes our first trip to Lexington, Kentucky. Next summer, we are back in Daytona for a week at the beach, because apparently competitive dance is not content with taking your weekends. It would also like your summer.
To be fair, Daytona is not the worst place to be trapped by sequins and stage makeup.
The girls are also on fall break, which means they are having a rare break from dance.
By doing a week long theatre camp.
Aladdin.
Because in our house, rest means changing costumes in a different building.
The thing about living here, though, is that there really is something for kids to do all the time. Dance. Theatre. Sports. Church groups. Art classes. Camps for summer break, fall break, winter break and probably the tiny gap between two other camps if someone can find a way to charge for it.
America has turned childhood activities into an entire parallel economy.
I do not say that entirely as criticism. My girls have had opportunities here I never had growing up. There are places to go, skills to learn, teams to join, stages to stand on and adults whose whole job is to help kids find their thing.
But it is relentless.
Every opportunity seems to arrive with a registration fee, a costume fee, a camp shirt, a snack requirement, a performance ticket and at least one email reminding you that payment is due Friday.
That is not a complaint exactly. It is more of a weary salute from one parent’s bank account to another.
The School Bus Moment
The moment that stayed with me most this week was not funny at all.
I saw a child nearly get hit by a truck as he got off a school bus.
A pickup decided to overtake the bus.
Not a subtle bus. Not an unmarked van. A full American school bus. Bright yellow. Flashing red lights. Stop signs sticking out the side like the country itself is saying, do not move.
This guy just went around it.
I do not know how he missed the child. I honestly do not.
The driver kept going, which may have been the only thing that saved him from the group of furious parents and neighbours who saw it happen. People were angry, and rightly so.
That is one thing America gets very right, at least in theory. The school bus is treated almost like sacred ground. When those lights come on, everyone stops. The whole road pauses because children are crossing.
Coming from Australia, school buses were never quite as iconic to me. We had buses, obviously, but not this giant yellow symbol of childhood that can bring traffic to a halt.
After seeing that this week, I understood the rules in a much deeper way.
Some rules are not bureaucracy.
Some rules are society saying, “This matters. Stop.”
The Internet Version of America
Of course, these days, you do not just live in a country physically. You also live in whatever version of it the internet decides to argue about.
A video I made about Americans talking to strangers has entered what I can only describe as the reaction video economy.
I think we are up to at least ten reaction videos now.
There are people in Europe watching an Australian in Tennessee talk about Americans talking to strangers, and then explaining what they think about that.
Which is a very strange sentence.
Some of them credit the original video properly. Sometimes they link back. Some will tell people to watch the whole thing.
Others are a little more interesting.
Let’s just say there are a few people getting very healthy views from my video while I sit over here wondering whether exposure can be exchanged for groceries at Publix.
But the funniest side argument was not even about talking to strangers.
It was about me saying I live in America.
A very small number of people got genuinely upset about that. Apparently, I am not allowed to say I live in America because America is not America. It is North America and South America and there are many countries in the Americas.
One person even listed a whole stack of countries and demanded to know which one I lived in.
Which was helpful, because until that moment I had completely forgotten Brazil existed.
Obviously, I know there are other countries in the Americas. I am Australian. Yes, we had maps where I went to school.
But in normal everyday speech, Australians say America all the time. Americans say America. Half the world says America.
If someone in Australia says, “I’m going to America,” nobody says, “Lovely, are you moving to Paraguay?”
They mean the United States.
If I say I live in America, I mean I live in Tennessee. I am not claiming ownership of Canada. Planning on annexing Peru. I am not even erasing Costa Rica from the atlas.
I am just using the word the way ordinary people use it in ordinary conversation. But that is one of the strange things about putting videos online. Most people understand exactly what you mean. Then a tiny handful decide that understanding you would rob them of the chance to be annoyed.
Citizenship Is Not Just a Ceremony
The strangest American moment of my week was quieter than all of that.
Less than a year ago, I stood in a room and took the oath of citizenship.
This week, I got a personal reply from a Tennessee state senator after writing about execution protocols and the long term cost of lethal injection drugs.
That is a very odd immigrant milestone.
Not the one they put in the brochure, admittedly.
But there is something quietly powerful about it.
For years, I paid attention to America as an outsider. I lived here. I worked here. My children were growing up here. I had opinions, questions, frustrations and affection for the place. But there was still a line between observing the country and participating in it.
Citizenship changes that line.
You vote. Write to representatives. You care about school buses not as a cultural symbol, but because children in your community are crossing the road. Think about state laws because they are your state laws. You read the news and realise it is not happening “over there.”
It is happening here.
And here is where you live.
Sometimes that voice says, “I love this country.”
Sometimes it says, “Why are your toilet water levels so high?”
At times it says, “Yes, I live in America, and everyone knows what I mean.” Sometimes, apparently, it says, “Senator, can we talk about the long term cost of lethal injection drugs?”
When “They” Becomes “We”
That might be the strange lesson of the week.
At some point, the foreign country is not quite foreign anymore.
It is still confusing.
Obviously.
But it is also yours now.
Not perfectly or simply. Not without questions.
But enough that when something happens, you do not only ask, “What are they doing over there?”
You ask, “What are we doing?”
That is a small word.
But for an immigrant, it is not a small shift.
It means the weather is yours. The roads are yours. The school buses are yours. The arguments are yours. The systems are yours to question. The problems are yours to notice. The beauty is yours to feel.
America is still something I observe. I do not think that will ever completely go away. I will probably always notice things differently because I came from somewhere else.
But I am no longer just watching from the edge of the room.
I am in it now. And that, more than anything, is the part I am still learning how to explain.
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