HE'S STRANGE to me and I'm strange to him. Strange is as strange does and who's the more outlandish is settled by strict percentages. If I were in his country, I'd be the foreigner. But, I'm not, and he is. He has to adapt as well as he can, because there's no going back.
Homesick for the familiar, for his household gods, hungry for his mother's food, ears aching for the language known from birth. All denied him, the stranger in a strange land.*
The custom and habit of another country, carried as luggage that, once he arrived, became an encumbrance. Mouth stubbornly refuses to form itself around the sounds of the common language, his children look down on him as the outlander that he is. Their tongues welcome the foreign syllables, their bodies are grown of food that did not feed their fathers. Theirs are the eyes that look forward rather than back. They are the new men.
*I have been a stranger in a strange land. -- Exodus 2:22
3/17/99
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