Everyone in the Gulf is introduced by their name, which is immediately followed by their nationality.  Rather than remain simply American, I decided to use my heritage to bridge the communication gap with other ex-patriates.

 A friend explained that Caledonia wasn’t an island some mercenaries were fighting over, but the old name for Scotland, so I attended a Caledonian party. I badgered everyone to educate me about my heritage.  I learned about “haggis”:  a big rat which limps on Scottish mountains and is cooked  in a sheep’s stomach.  I thought people had ceased eating rats after the Black Death.

 I asked for some Scottish stereotypes. Everyone agreed on one: stingy.  They disputed possession of a sense of humor, but agreed red hair and freckles were Scottish.  “I thought those were Irish!” I protested.  The Scots then explained some Scottish facts of life to me. 

 My father loves Robert Burns, kilts and bagpipes.  I called him on Robert Burns’s Birthday.  I feel less and less American the longer I’m an ex-patriate, so I asked him if I had any American Indian blood because of my high cheekbones.

 Eighty-year old men get upset with such questions of their ancestry. 

 “NO!” he shouted. “And haggis is what poor people in Scotland eat. Only fools who left Scotland would romanticize eating dead rats!”

 The longer I stay in Arabia, the more Arabic I become: I wear kohl eye liner, fragrant my house and clothes with frankincense, abstain from foreign risqué dress (usually), disapprove of most consumption of alcohol,  love the desert, and respect the all-consuming extended family.  Slowly, my inherited blood is being transformed by this foreign Arabian oxygen.

 Europeans laugh at Americans’ blood claim to the old countries.  But expatriates are similar mixtures because they are changing their blood with foreign air, food and lifestyles they live year in and year out.  I’m now Irish, Scotch, English and Pennsylvania Dutch by blood; Canadian, Arabian and Indonesian by oxygen; with tourist traces of Mexico, France, Italy, Hungary and Oman. I’m finally the “woman of the world” I wrote about in a poem nearly 20 years ago.      

I’m two-thirds Irish. Although it took ten years of collecting paperwork, I acquired an Irish passport while living in South Korea. My Irish grandmother from County Court impressed upon my mother that we were IRISH-Catholics, as if some special club. So yes, my identity is not just American, but Irish-American from around 1900.  Employment signs said NO IRISH, NO N……., NO DOGS. My grandfather became a Chicago policeman, shot while on duty in 1928. An uncle and many of his male children also became cops. Now, a sister’s children are police officers in Arizona!  (One quit teaching to join the police force, saying teaching was too stressful.)  I never used my Irish passport for European jobs because they paid so little compared to jobs in the Gulf. But now I live legally in the EU on my Irish passport!