36 Years in America

For some time now, people have told me "you should write your story" , so maybe I will. My father dreamed of immigrating to Canada, and later encouraged my brother and sisters and I to immigrate to the United States. I have been a citizen of this unique country since September 29th, 1994, something of which I remain very proud. These are curious times, but there is a spirit and resilience to this large and fascinating country that keeps drawing people in from all over the world. My country of origin happened to be Belgium. I am Flemish, from a town about half an hour from Oostende, where my father's mother and his youngest sister lived, a town called Roeselare. From the age of eight on, I started dreaming of moving to the US, as I would watch episodes of "Flipper"and imagine that the actor who played Sandy,would ask me to marry him. I so wanted to meet him, I wondered in my naive child's mind if he ever vacationed in Oostende for the summer? The memory of these childhood thoughts still make me smile. Little did I know that I would eventually marry an equally handsome American,my Californian born husband, Michael. But that was much later,and not until I had spent ten years in Texas.
Texas is tied in with my first experience with television.I was five years old, my father turned on our very first black and white TV, and what I saw was President Kennedy shot in his Cadillac, in Dallas, Texas. Fourteen years later, I would spend a year in Richardson,Texas, near Dallas as an exchange student. I ended up going to college in nearby Fort Worth, at TCU for four years, before going to graduate school in Austin,Texas for a master' s degree in Spanish and Latin American literature, where I met my husband. So Texas is very special to me. My parents and two younger sisters have died, but my younger brother still lives in Fort Worth and a very dear artist friend of mine lives in Weatherford. When I moved to Washington State in1988, I joined a black Baptist Church six years later, and our senior pastor and his wife are both from Texas,which only endears them more to me.