In the spring of 1951—the year Lucy met Ricky, Anna first danced on Broadway with the King of Siam, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sentenced to death by electrocution—my parents had a blind date. A drive-in movie. He had returned to Raleigh from California’s Gold Coast where he was studying the up-and-coming field of aeronautical engineering. She had moved from her coastal hometown of Wrightsville Beach to the state’s capital to start a new life. It was postwar America; anything could happen.
               While my parents courted, America was coming of age. She was no longer a graceless debutante on the world stage but had shed her subservient colonial heritage and boasting flamboyant industrial and military brawn, demanded attention. Nouveau riche, she now flaunted herself draped in garish iron and steel, and unlike other newcomers, didn’t bow with deference nor speak in hushed tones. From afar we were shrill and crass but up close there was something disarming about our naïve self-assuredness.
                On May 17, 1961, I was born in High Point, North Carolina, a city that would become known as the furniture capital of the world. Exactly seven years prior, the Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegregation ruling. Exactly eight days later, President John F. Kennedy told the world that within a decade America would put a man on the moon. We did just that.
                That August the Berlin Wall was erected. When we did not recant our Western decadence, our novelty waned. In those early ‘60s, through the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy’s assassination, and the Vietnam War, while I was searching for my first words, my parents were searching for a place to call home.
                Is there such a thing as a typical American family? We were certainly one type well represented in the pages of Williams and Welty. My father was from a named family that alas, came with no money to speak of. But in the South ancestry is more valuable than gold. Smitten by our roots, my grandmother traced our genealogy back to England’s Corfe Castle which kinswoman Lady Bankes once defended by tossing hot embers onto would-be attackers. She was destined for American lineage.
                By contrast, my mother’s family was working-class Irish, her father a fisherman. In the backyard of her childhood home, he designed and built a commercial fishing boat that he captained throughout his life to support his family of seven. She was the youngest by five years—a child of love.
                My parents traded their happiness for our American Dream. They aspired, to exhaustion. Between twelve moves and five pregnancies, my mother took correspondence courses to further herself. She did more than yearn for our better life; she forged it through sheer will.
               We landed in Memphis. The Mississippi, King Cotton, Beale Street, Elvis Presley—it was a quintessential American city. I hated it; we all did. Not for its Americanness but for reasons too long to list even if I understood them. When I was a boy, the National Guard was called in three times. Twice for civil service strikes—sanitation workers, firemen—and again after Martin Luther King’s assassination. The city stank, burned, and wept. Such was the lore of my youth.
               In 1969, the year Woodstock raged, my mother secured a job as an executive secretary for Malone & Hyde Corporation, a family-owned grocery business turned multi-billion dollar conglomerate. She served three successive generations of Hydes and got her American Dream. So did I. With the Hydes’ influence came Memphis University School, an exclusive prep school where I took courses the likes of Philosophy of Religion and Utopian Satire. The year I entered this educational elite, Nixon resigned; the year after I graduated, Reagan won. In between we had survived the energy crisis, our first post-industrial recession, and disco.
               From prep school, a privilege for which my mother had kicked down a few doors, the world would indeed become my oyster. In the ‘80s I did many oysterish things like switching majors willy-nilly to the uncertain field of computer science, running off for a requisite two-year stint in the New York arts scene, and bringing a black girlfriend home a month after coming out as gay to my family. It was the land of Contra-funding milk and S&L honey. But not enough to protect a young teacher in her quest for the stars or battle a new strange disease called AIDS.
                Then I grew up. After my third graduation ceremony in a decade, one where cancer patient and former senator Paul Tsongas spoke of the rising tide of democracy, I drove across the country with my dad to see America. On this three-week trip our car was stolen, I met my life partner, protesting students were squelched in Tiananmen Square, and I almost hit a buffalo. It was a very American journey. That November the Berlin Wall was toppled.
                Two years later I moved to DC just long enough for disillusion. While I was there, Paul Tsongas, in remission, ran for the Democratic presidential nomination but was beaten by yet another Southern intellectual. I ignored the political upheaval around me and charged ahead with my future atop a Silicon Valley tsunami. We thought we were saving the world with computer visualization. Forget that people used our supercomputers to design bombs and that we sold a few to the Far and Middle East. We also sold to Mexico; maybe they could visualize a more valuable peso. In 1997 Paul Tsongas died. Trying.
                On the eve of the third millennium, as the Eiffel Tower twinkled and London’s Eye twitched, I celebrated in San Francisco as a first-time published author with a just-renovated Victorian. Soon after, when the dotcom bubble burst, I got drenched. My life partner walked out of our future, and I took off to see the world. In my travels I have never been met with hostility except from other Americans when I dared question America. Does the world hate Americans or does the world hate America? The world doesn’t hate. Especially up close over a bottle of red wine.
                These days I’m grappling with what I call a second coming of age, mid-life crisis to others. I’ve succeeded in my chosen career; now I’m reinventing myself, starting my own business, and writing in genres totally foreign to me. I think I can have it all, and maybe I can. I don’t mean to sound insolent; I appreciate what it has taken to get here. In fact, I would not have it any other way.
                We Americans believe that achievement through struggle is where it’s at. It’s good for the soul and society. Though the zeal fades over time, the good-life entitlement of both excluded and entrenched bloodlines, the sentiment still runs deep. It’s the unifying American theory. Even those who forever disagree, agree on this. Liberals fight to lay a foundation where achievement is possible for any American, and conservatives fight to maintain an incentive structure so that the achievement is worth the struggle. We all respect hard work and aren’t particularly impressed by things that come easy.
                Consider other American characteristics. Our good ones: confidence, creativity, candor, and our bad: arrogance, aggression, anti-intellectualism, all stem from this admiration for blazing our own trails. Our heroes—Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt—are people who persevered.
                Like me, America is facing a second coming of age or mid-life crisis. She has fought for and won her Manifest Destiny, triumphing over the Depression, industrialization, and many wars in the name of democracy. She’s made it through Y2K and has been rocked to her core by 9/11. Now terrorism, disease, and poverty are encroaching, along with disbelief, envy, and yes, hatred. From the world, no, rather from individuals blighted by pain. In our unilateralism, can we turn a blind eye to global need while tightening our grip on the global marketplace? All charity begins at home. But with national boundaries eroding, where is home, what is all, and can we have it? Are we reinventing America, and if so, as what? The world leader, arbiter of global truth, all for one, and one for all? Whatever her destiny, it is no longer manifest. As we stand upon the threshold of tomorrow, I strive to keep aflame that American spirit within myself and pray that for guidance we look back, as well as forward. If we persevere, the world may once again become our oyster.