Parallel experience

My wife read this blog for the first time last night and learned about reading serial blog entries: you start at the bottom and work up.

While driving me to the airport this morning she told me she fully understood what I'd been through in leaving Midland because she had been through much the same. When she was 6 her family moved from the U.S. to Antwerp where she started school (a French convent school: she had to learn French, Latin and Vlaams/Flemish). Antwerp soon became home, very firmly so.

Then, at the same age I was when I left Midland, she was uprooted from everything she knew, friends and all, to move to Stockholm. My one advantage, I guess, was that I didn't have to learn a new foreign language. But it was equally a bad time for her.

When she finally returned to the U.S. to stay, she was effectively a foreigner. She says that was one of the common grounds we had when we met in California.

We visited Antwerp in 1998 (after my meetings in Brussels), and it wasn't just her love for the place that infected me. Nor was it that her old neighborhood looked a lot like Midland -- except for the thatched roofs. It was the people there.

Her family are New England Yankee from way back; she's never been to Michigan. But I know she is going to love the people here.