AMERICAN BEAUTY

I became aware of my first American in 1960 age 10 on a trip with my parents. It was a shock. He was very different from anyone I’d come across before.

There was something big about his character & a warmth I hadn’t experienced before.

From that morning in some breakfast room in a tourist town until now I’ve always tended to have a soft spot for Americans.

It would be some twelve more years before I’d come across my next American but I never forgot that fellow. He seemed to embrace the room and everyone in its in a way that fascinated me at the time as a young boy. What kind of a wonderful alien being is this, so unlike the staid people I was aware of in my own land. I liked his openness, his good humor and most of all his clear delight in communication.

I’ve found 99% of Americans I’ve ever known in my life (I am 70 now) extremely personable. I’ve liked them VERY much. I’ve liked how they are mostly willing to engage you naturally with straight-forward personalities that seek to be affable and courteous. Maybe I’ve been lucky and it’s true that most Americans I have met have been travelers outside their country, but this is my constant perception on them.

I’ve traveled quite a bit in America down the years, first starting some 25 years back when I spent two weeks in New York. Later I made trips with my wife when we toured Florida and enjoyed cruises around the Caribbean sharing evening round the dinner table with a group of six Americans who lived in a gated community in Florida. We had many great conversations. This was just before the 2016 presidential election. They were all Trump supporters and i got to see that you didn’t have to be any kind of a racist bigot to be a Trump supporter, these people could not have been nicer.

Later on our tour around Florida we were able to visit our dinner partners in their homes and then walk through their town center to where the rest of their community were having a communal meal together in one of the town’s restaurants. We were made to feel very much at home. Everyone we met confirmed that first impression I’d had at age ten of Americans, that they were fine people who enjoyed the company of others and were supremely affable.

Now I know that all Americans won’t be the kind of supremely nice ones that I have always visualized Americans to be in my mind, there will be unpleasant Americans no doubt, I have simply never met one to date and to be honest, I hope I never will.

Every American I have met until now I have admired for the selfsame qualities I found on the occasion of my first experience of them 60 years ago, long ago and far away. And it is these qualities that I will always carry in my mind in association with Americans.

I have a good friend who is America who lives in the same city as me, far from his native land. His name is Jonathan. We meet for a beer or two now and then. We talk... what else?... politics. American politics. He leans to the right, is moderately conservative and doesn’t agree with my somewhat negative view on Trump but that’s okay, like most Americans I have met he is willing to talk, happy to talk, and enjoys shooting the breeze with a calm understanding that there can be differences of opinion... and with a characteristic I have observed in all the Americans I have liked so much, a curiosity to know more. More about where he or she is, to know more about you and your life, to know more concerning the world around them, including what their darned politicians are doing.

American politicians, especially those who seek to lay their preconceived ideas on us out here in the rest of the world are the ones that have been the cause of my upset over the years, not everyday Americans. With all my diatribes about successive American governments this is something I probably should have made clear earlier. It is the governance of America that bugs me, everyday Americans I have always enjoyed for their warmth, amiable personalities and openly expressed curiosity about the world.

This is one of the very many aspects of the Americans I have met that I have almost universally liked. They are people with an admirable curiosity to match their openness and warmth of character. I love that combination of characteristics. For me they are the primary characteristics that for me constitute the main reasons I like them so much and what I consider to be the essence of a very real American Beauty.