as long as there's a 'tick tick' followed by that BUMP

It's the unexpected that delights. Or maybe the hidden. The surreptitious, unforeseen truth of the self rubbed against circumstance and reality.

A girl knows she wouldn't miss the arrogant Dually drivers with gun racks in the back. Because you can't miss them. Obvious is the whole intent. It's just the same with the religious right and the ubiquitous insular mind set.

The land of the too much and the home of the scared.

You know what it is that I do miss? I miss African American culture. It has weaved itself so profoundly that I wasn't even able to distinguish that it is indistinguishable. It is the bedrock of my country. It is the womb from which we were all nourished but cannot remember. We talk about and think about the founding white fathers and the battles of this and that. And then as an addendum, slavery and it's end, and civil rights and Rosa Parks and George Washington Carver. But, I could never see up close so accurately what is obvious from a far vantage point.

The wealthy white men who created the power structure and the less wealthy whites who were settlers did not make America what is so uniquely America. It was the people who were brought against their will to this new continent who grew the crops and harvested the crops and dug the canals and built the tracks and not only survived intolerable cruelty, but then gave their new land a gift even greater than it's physical structure and economic wealth. They gave it music and movement and poetry and language. They made it. They fashioned my country into something that can be missed. The country they created is the one I am proud of, the one that swells my heart when I think of it.

When BBC broadcasted a program on American history and politics, ending with the inauguration of Obama, I was crying.

Yes, that's my country. When they interviewed the daughter of a civil rights activist and she sang "This Little Light of Mine" with the kind of common and exquisite quality heard on sunday mornings all over the nation, I felt enraptured. That's my country.

It is easy to feel at home here. Take away left side driving and mushy voweled accents and things feel comfortably similar. But, there is a gap that fuzzy flightless birds and jaw-dropping scenery cannot fill.

And, I'm glad for it.

So, if I ask you to accompany me to a church in Saginaw on a Sunday morning, you'll know I'm paying homage. To the soul of our home.