ACROSS THE OCEAN

Some of us are born, marry and will die in the same town. For others, being born somewhere only means that we're given a challenge.

The challenge to seek, to explore, to wonder. What lays beyond that fence? On the other side of the forest? At the end of the river? On the other side of the ocean?

I heeded to that challenge and followed my call.

Knowing about life in Europe wasn't enough. I had to learn more, and learn I did. As one of the Eagles mentioned when they relocated to London, for a while it felt as if I had sat on top of a rocket and had landed on the Moon.

My mother thought her daughter was crazy to embark in a journey that would take her half a world away. What had she done to deserve such a radical separation?

I stood by the wallflower-papered wall at parties trying to meld with the flowers rather than the people, listening in vain to the chatter around me. It was incomprehensible, and yet, I had studied English in school.

Language, they say, is alive. It follows daily events. People relate to each other by sharing common experiences. What did I, a foreigner from Europe, share with a New Yorker? I knew no baseball or football stories, and the names of players were a mystery to me. I hadn't gone to school in a neighboring establishment. I hadn't been there for any event everyone else knew about. And most of all, I didn't watch any of their favorite television shows. What in earth could I share with these people? I had more things in common with the wallflowers on the wall; at least, they had pretty colors and reminded me of the tulips my mother had planted as garden ornaments.

Time was on my side, as I live in a world that shrank around me. In a short time, international supplanted national. Now people do talk about things happening in Europe as easily as they chatter about the United States. Today, whether by their own will or necessity, many people cross the oceans, and find a new way of life in a far away country.

There are language barriers, different lifestyles, religious differences, resistance to change, to adapt, to accept. But when kids grow together and learn to be friends, their bond will last a lifetime, regardless of all the differences in their upbringing.

In the end, I gained an enormous amount of knowledge, and the interaction with so many people so different from me made me realize that we, after all, are all very much the same. It's up to us to accept, embrace those differences.