I came to America in the early 70s with a suitcase full of ordinary things and a heart brimming with unreasonable hope. A purse. A few clothes. Family photos. Papers. Names and addresses, folded into my wallet. And a hunger so deep I could feel it in the way I looked at every door, every street, every face. I left in 2026 with a broken heart.
In between was a life. A whole, real, breathing life.
The America I stepped into was not perfect, but it had something rare — a muted, collective belief that anyone willing to work, to try, to show up deserved a chance. Not a guarantee. A chance. The vastness of everything. The noise. Somehow, the air smelled of possibility.
People asked where I was from. And they leaned in when I answered. Curious. Warm. They wanted to know my food, my language, my story. That openness felt radical. It felt like America saying: Come in, sit down, we have room for you.
So I stayed. And I built.
Block by block—year by year. I lived in neighborhoods where ten languages drifted out of ten windows on summer evenings. I worked alongside people whose grandparents had crossed the same oceans mine had. I’ve spent Thanksgiving with families who have been here for generations and those who have just arrived. Puerto Rico. Vietnam. Nigeria. Poland. Lebanon. Korea. Iran. Folks from every corner of the globe convened here. Many of them found a sense of belonging.
That was the real America. Not the storybook version. Not the myth. The real one — gritty, generous, imperfect, and deeply human.
The American Dream was real. I lived it. I showed up with ambition and little else — no connections, no safety net, a quiet, stubborn refusal to give up. Somehow, year by year, I built a life. Work I was proud of. A home that I felt was mine. A family I would have given anything for. A life my younger self, standing in that Boston airport in 1972, would not have dared to dream of.
They belonged. We belonged. We built this.
What I miss most is not a mythologized America. I miss the woman in my apartment building who learned twenty words in my language to make me feel welcome. I miss the unremarkable, unheroic, daily decency that never made the news — because it generated warmth, not outrage.
I miss the feeling that the country was still reaching toward something better.
Toxic politics doesn’t just hurt immigrants. It shrinks a nation’s soul. It turns neighbors into strangers and a shared story into a battlefield.
But something changed. Slowly. Then, all at once.
The curiosity that once greeted newcomers curdled into suspicion. The openness receded. The language shifted — and with it, the spirit. The story that we are a nation of immigrants was replaced by something harsher, colder, uglier. The newest arrivals were labeled as threats, criminals, and invaders.
I was one of those arrivals in the 70s. I was none of those things.
That America is still worth fighting for. Crossing Paths is my witness to it — and my plea that we don’t let it go.