119.366 - 2016 project and Clovis, New Mexico, 1954-55

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

Clovis, New Mexico, 1954-55

really?  1954-55?  I will never get the arithmetic of my life figured out.  but I know I graduated from high school in 1960, and counting back from that, yes, 1954-55 would have been the time we spent in Clovis.  I can't tell you that Clovis was particularly accepting.  we were just another white family moving into and out of the town.  Clovis had an Air Force base, so white families did that all the time.  but it must not have been unaccepting either.  as well as I knew, the congregation of First Baptist Church loved their pastor and didn't particularly give a damn one way or the other about his family.  that's what made it so good for us.  we'd been ripped apart a year before, yanked out of Brasil, dumped in the United States, separated - my sister and I stayed with one aunt for a while then with another.  no one ever explained anything to the kids.  my little brothers thought the rest of us had died.  then suddenly my folks were back together, smiling, collecting my sister and I, smiling, collecting my little brothers, smiling, and carrying us off to Clovis.  we may not have been strange to Clovis, but Clovis was alien to us.  I learned to play baseball there, or something like it.  I rode my bicycle everywhere it would go, including out of town.  I learned the meaning of caliche.  I learned to repair my own bicycle.  I got a job and could buy my own bicycle parts without asking my folks for money.  that is, I began to make a new "normal" for me, and accepted that nothing would ever be the same as it had been in Brasil.  I may have been a foreigner in Brasil, but I was an alien in this country.  oh!  I think I learned to sound like an American in Clovis, except I spoke written English.  I had no idea what language the kids around me spoke, but that was part of the new "normal" too.  thank you, Clovis, for mostly ignoring all that, and just providing a space in which I - and I think my sister and brothers - could begin to adjust.  we were immigrants in a country everyone told us was our home.