I’ve owned this mug for twenty-five years now. Bought in the gift shop of the Metropolitan Opera in New York on my first ever trip to America, which I doubt I shall ever visit again. The mug, in art nouveau style, celebrates Pucchini’s La Bohème, which we might have seen there. I forget what we saw from the cheap seats, high up. The colours are badly faded after a quarter-century of machine washing, which suggests that its manufacture was cheap, though it has served me well through different places. Sometimes it disappeared for weeks on end into other people’s offices and I had to mark “property of Chris Bertram” in indelible marker on the base. But all sign of that writing has now gone.
Clinton was President then, and the Twin Towers still standing. We went to the top. Terrible things had already happened in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, but we didn’t think they might happen to us too, as now we do.
I was surprised by America, how cheerful people were and large the food portions. It all seemed to work and the buildings went upwards forever. We stood in the street and looked up, up, up. That journey made me see America as human and not just an abstraction of ideas and power. When 9/11 happened I got angry at my British friends who said they got what they deserved. Those were actual people in a place that really existed.
My youngest child got sick there on that trip. Appendicitis. Luckily we had insurance, which paid. We resisted their demand that one parent should fly back with the other child, not knowing if the operation had succeeded, or not. Lenox Hill Hospital was nice once you got past the ER with people shouting about gunshot wounds and others behind transparent screens demanding that you show that insurance. The nurses, mostly black, were friendly and made conversation with us about the NHS.
The mug is not all that remains. I have some amber cuff-links from the New York Public Library gift shop, a tie bought at Macy’s, photos (one with a banner behind us “CAPITALISM MADE FRESH DAILY”),the drawings our children made of the skyline and a cartoon book about the appendicitis. But the mug I see daily.
I’ve been back many times, visited many US cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Providence, Boston, Chicago, Madison, Tucson. But nothing quite matches that first glimpse of Manhattan out of a plane window, the immediate raucousness of the airport, the taxi ride from JFK, the first multi-decker sandwich with pastrami, the cacophony of different voices, colours, accents, possibilities. So much gone, and I will not return. But I still drink my morning coffee from that mug.
(Inspired by Jenny Erpenbeck’s “The Pressure Cooker” in her Not a Novel.)
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Ingrid Robeyns 07.09.25 at 7:59 am
This is both beautiful and sad. I’m in the state of mind thinking that “I will not return for the next couple of years”, hoping and believing this cannot go on forever and the USA will become safe against for outspoken progressives from other countries to visit. And of course, the real horror is on what this does to the country and those who live there, and how this evil ideology and power grab is also spreading to other countries, and supporting evil powers in other countries.
engels 07.09.25 at 11:31 am
I haven’t been to US since 2016. Sadly I don’t much in the way of souvenirs, apart from a plastic carrier bag from Gristedes (an eye-watering expensive NY minimarket) emblazoned with the silhouette of the twin towers and the words “always in our minds, always in our hearts, never forget what they did”.
Adam 07.09.25 at 2:11 pm
Evocative and melancholy. It echos how I feel about Europe with the rise of far right and neo-fascist political parties. Italy. Germany. Finland. Netherlands. Etc.
Here in the US at least my state (Michigan) and city (Detroit) on many levels are more salient to me than the national government. I’ve started to wonder if we’ll see more realignments towards state governments as the national government becomes less capable.
Doug K 07.09.25 at 2:55 pm
I remember immigrating to the USA, and the way the smothering fog of guilt and oppression from my native country, just lifted and dispersed, melted into air. This was common to many other countries, the same thing happened upon visiting Zimbabwe (in 1988 for the Amnesty International concert). The attraction of the USA was, I thought it could not happen here. But here we are living in a police state again, with rulers even more wicked than the managers of apartheid.
My brother in Australia and I were planning a retirement trip to fish in Alaska. Now he’s unwilling to travel here and we are thinking of Canada. It may be dangerous for me to cross the border back into USA though, might have to cross on foot over some mountain pass or river canyon.
“Another Country” William Plomer
‘Let us go to another country,
Not yours or mine,
And start again.’
To another country? Which?
One without fires, where fever
Lurks under leaves, and water
Is sold to those who thirst?
And carry drugs or papers
In our shoes to save us starving?
‘Hope would be our passport;
The rest is understood.’
Deserters of the vein
And true continuousness,
How should we face on landing
The waiting car, in snow or sand,
The alien capital?
Necessity forbids.
(Not that reproachful look!
So might violets
Hurt an old heart.)
This is that other country
We two populate,
Land of a brief and brilliant
Aurora, noon and night,
The stratosphere of love
From which we must descend,
And leaving this rare country
Must each to his own
Return alone.
Sandwichman 07.09.25 at 4:48 pm
I was born in San Francisco. Grew up down the Peninsula. Left for Canada during the Vietnam war and didn’t return for six years because I was a fugitive from injustice. I am a Canadian citizen but retained my U.S. citizenship and have a current passport. I doubt I will ever visit the U.S.A. again.