My final essay for my English class
Christmas has always been an interesting holiday for me. Growing up, my family unit consisted of my mother and myself. Every year until I turned 16, the Sunday after school closed for the holidays we would get on a plane and go to Jamaica where my maternal grandparents still lived. My mother would stay up late packing and early on Sunday morning a family friend would swing by and manhandle the two giant suitcase in the back of his car and take us to the airport.
Getting from our house in Trinidad to my grandparent’s house in Jamaica took a day. We would leave our house around 5:30am and drive eastward into the sun towards the airport. The flight was always full and check-in, then boarding felt indeterminable. There were no direct flights from Trinidad to Jamaica and our flight usually had three or four stops which turned a four hour trip into six or seven. The length of the trip was compounded by two problems I faced as a child – the excruciating ear pain pain I would experience on take off and landing and my propensity for throwing up airline meals.
I think the two might have been related but the limited window of the pain and regurgitation did nothing to temper the excitement of seeing my grandparents and participating in one of the best Christmas traditions – making fruit cake or as it’s known in the Caribbean, black cake. Most people hear fruit cake and think of a dry, tasteless log that gets passed from family member to family member like a lodestone, Caribbean fruit cake is completely different animal. The day after we arrived my mother and I would head to the supermarket and purchase the approximately 12-16 combined pounds of fruit, flour, sugar, eggs and butter as well as a large quantity of alcohol. We would then head back to the house where my job was the grind all the fruit – prunes, raisins, currants and into a huge metal bowl that existed only for this purpose.
Once the fruit was ground, my grandmother would pull out another metal bowl and jars of fruit that had been soaking in alcohol from the previous year and we would take turns mixing in the other ingredients until we had cake batter. The current year’s fruit I had ground went into the jars, got liberally covered with white rum and put into the pantry to soak for the next year. Once the batter was made it, the next step was greasing and lining the pans. My grandmother’s cake was the stuff of legend, my mother would take five or six cakes home with us and dole slices out to her close friends and confidantes. My grandfather’s clients and business partners would swing by during the holidays to get a slice. This was our tradition, this is how the holidays truly began for me.
The year I turned 16, my grandfather died and mother strong armed and her mother into moving to Trinidad with us. That Christmas we tried making black cake but somehow my mother managed to fall asleep and let the cakes burn. This became the excuse for a massive fight every year between my mother and grandmother which pretty much turned me off the whole holiday. The Christmas after I emigrated to the US, my wife who loves the holidays, thought it would be a good idea for use to attempt to restart this tradition. After some fits and starts we have finally perfected my grandmother’s black cake recipe. Our new tradition is to make a quarter batch in cupcake molds and share them with friends.
In Nashville it is very common to hear people make ugly comments about illegal immigrants. The city has even gone as far as allowing law enforcement officials to detain people they believe to be in the country illegally. The process to become a legal immigrant is long and costly. Contrary to the Hollywood version, marrying a US citizen does not automatically bestow citizenship upon you. My wife and I were married in 2002 and it took two years of paperwork and petitioning and a change to immigration law called the Life Act before I could even move to the United States.
In order to emigrate to the United States ther are a number of different visas which can be simplified into the following categories: family, employee, and humanitarian. Each visa has specific application paperwork with multiple pages to be filled in and requires different kinds of supporting documentation and attendant fees. These fees run in the hundreds of dollars and are non-refundable and the slightest error in your paperwork or missing documentation could result in your application being rejected. Hiring an immigration lawyer is an option but has no guarantee of success. My wife and I are both native English speakers and fairly intelligent but struggled at times to fill out the forms, which at times seemed to contain contradictory instructions. Finally we came up with a plan to fill the forms out in pencil then go over the requirements before we committed.
Having your paperwork approved is only the first step, usually there is an in-person interview. The in-person interview happens in most cases in a consular office or embassy if you are still outside the United States or a “local” field office if you are already in the country. These heavily guarded offices usually require the interviewees to arrive hours in advance and endure the elements before having their case decided in minutes by an immigration officer whose decision is final and cannot be appealed. For our final interview for my permanent resident visa, or green card as it is commonly known, my wife and I travelled to the Memphis field office. We spent the night in Memphis and arrived at the office at 7am and there were already people waiting. We were not allowed into the building until 9am and were not called for our interview until close to 11am. Our interview lasted approximately 20 minutes with an immigration officer who looked up briefly from the file in front of him to ask us for copies of our divorce decrees and marriage certificate. At the interview, we were told that my application was approved and I would receive the card in the mail. To this point we had spent approximately $5000 over a four-year period and didn’t know what the outcome would be. For families seeking a better life, that is a gamble they may not be willing to make.
I live in East Nashville, which has quickly become one of the most gentrified areas of the city. There are houses that are being sold for close to $500,000 on the same block with Section 8 housing. The dichotomy of this extends beyond the property values to something more essential – food. A food desert is defined as any census tract that isn’t within half-mile to a mile of a full-service grocery store or supermarket and are serviced instead by convenience and corner stores.
In East Nashville, the closest grocery store to the low income housing is a natural food market with prices geared towards the upper and middle income families that have moved into the neighborhood. The closest chain supermarket is about two miles away and due to the nature of Nashville’s public transit, would take four buses for a return trip. That leaves two convenience stores that are at least six blocks in either direction and neither carries a selection of fresh vegetables or fruit.
The solution to the issue of food deserts is multifaceted and requires not just access to affordable, fresh fruit and vegetables but education on how to prepare quick and meals using these items.
There are a number of things I’m good at. Some of them are not meant to discussed in polite company. I’m also really good at my job but I can’t explain what makes me so good without violating some section of the terms of my employment. I think I’m a good writer but there are so many people in my immediate circle that are much better than I am so on to something else. That leaves one of my favorite activities – driving.
I can drive but so can a billion other people. The skills that I have that set me apart from the multitudes are as follows: I can drive a variety of different vehicle types, I have the uncanny ability to find the closest parking spot to wherever I’m headed to and I very rarely get lost. I learned to drive with a manual transmission on the left hand side of small, busy streets in Trinidad, since then I’ve driven a variety cars, buses and trucks. The first time I drove on a different side of the road was a in manual transmission Rover on the Autobahn as Porsches and Audis whizzed by. I’ve navigated streets barely wide enough for a single car in London, drove from Seattle to Nashville in 5 days, safely delivered 15 people in a van on ice covered roads in North Carolina and before the end of this year I will be doing laps on the famed Nürburgring.
My friends joke that finding parking spaces is my superpower. I can go to almost any mall and find parking about three spaces from where I need to be, the kryptonite to my superpower seems to be Opry Mills Mall. This superpower of mine seems to extend to any vehicle I’m in and to my wife to some extent, it comes in very handy during the holidays when you work retail. I guess with this particular set of skills I would make a good getaway driver.
