My Walt Whitman

Much like the speaker of Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California,” I, too, have thoughts of Walt Whitman tonight. I, too, wonder where his beard points.
I cannot avoid him. I find in my Argentine self an American strain, though I bear no shred of American blood: my grandparents lived in New York for five years, from 1963 to 1968, but they returned to Argentina a month before their daughter, my mother, was born. In his final months, my grandfather told me, when I was American-college-bound, that returning to Argentina was his greatest mistake. Yet American life, cold and individual and work-obsessed, exhausted my grandparents. Though he died penniless, supported almost entirely by my parents (and a generous late-in-life partner), I don’t think my grandfather’s return was an error. I suspect that a part of me was driven northward, to America, in search of intergenerational vindication. Perhaps leaving Argentina was the point. Travel, the road, self-transformation: I have always dreamt of becoming American, but what I really wanted was to transcend myself. I learned, eventually, that the road that Yankees—habitually shameless—claim for themselves was mine.