Gil's An interesting childhood

Gil O. Email 9/11/2014 1:33 PM

    Almost always when someone finds out that I grew up in India, one of their first comments is to say what an interesting childhood I must have had.  I expect all of you have had the same experience.  I used to say that their childhood’s seemed pretty exotic to me too but this comment never seemed to make much of an impression.  I’ve been thinking about all this again because a friend of 40 years mentioned my unusual childhood yet again and because an 18 year old granddaughter has just gone off to college which is, of course, a huge deal for her.  I think her childhood is as hard for me to imagine as mine is for her.  What is it like to live your whole childhood in one town without leaving home except for a few summer camps that lasted two weeks or less?  She’s just an hour away from home at Sacramento State and will be seeing her parents often during the school year.  My parents furlough coincided with my freshman year in college but after that they went back to India and I didn’t see them for several years. 

    I remember when I applied for a security clearance when I was in the army and I had to list every address I had ever lived at.  This meant four listings for most years - our village, than boarding at Woodstock, a house on the hillside when my mother came up and then back to boarding.  I also had to list every place outside the US that I had visited.  I had to attach additional sheets to the form to have room for everything.  To my surprise my security clearance was approved before that of any of my classmates.  I’ve always wondered if the FBI just decided I couldn’t be making all of this stuff up and just rubber stamped my clearance. 

    My granddaughter has no doubt about where her home is but it was a confusing business for me.  My parents often talked about “going home” which for them meant the US which was much more foreign to me than India was.  Going Down Day felt more like going home than anything else when I was growing up but much more of my childhood was spent in Mussoorie than on the plains.  As an adult I’ve had two extraordinary experiences of going home.  One was our 1982 reunion in Tennessee when I found myself back in the culture I grew up in for the first time in 23 years.  The other was my trip to India in 1987, the only time I’ve been back.  When I got up that first morning in Delhi and went outside I felt like I’d awoken from a 28 year dream and was back where I belonged.  As my trip went on, however, I realized that while India felt like home in a geographic sense all the people that I felt most at home with were in the US.  I now call Mussoorie my hometown but where I really grew up was in the missionary subculture that was neither India nor America but an amalgam of both.  I’ve lived in Eugene now far longer than I ever lived in India and it has become home but a part of me will always remain in that “interesting” childhood in India.

Gil