America For Me

At exactly 2:21 pm on Monday afternoon, I sat in the Toronto Airport, tired, hungry and grumbling. After a cramped 9 hour flight beside a portly gentleman (who slyly finished my greasy, discarded airline meal while I was “napping”), I was already terribly homesick for Vienna. I was murmuring to myself about how distracting the Canadian television station was because it was in English, how prices were no longer listed in Euro, and how there were no Viennese bakeries for miles. Additionally, my nerves were rather raw after a delay with US Customs that resulted in me missing my flight home. Basically, I was having an rough couple of hours and I wanted to go right back to Austria.

But then. . .that was in Canada.

An hour later, I was comfortably curled up in an empty row on my favorite airline. There was a soft, pearly heaven outside my window soothing my eyes and nerves, and I was praying to feel happy and content even while leaving a place I had learned to love so much.  Over my earphones, Trace Adkins' song “Just Fishin’” came on, I remembered how much I liked my good ol’ country music, and I smiled because I was going home.

 As the warm colors melted  from the clouds, heaped up like Austria’s rich whipped cream, and lingered, blazing, in a streak of deep red on the horizon, Dvorak’s magnificent New World Symphony poured  in through my headset. Goosebumps came out along my arms. It thrilled me with its glory and my heart rejoiced to go back to my beautiful country.

Finally, as I watched the sunset deepen into the infinite calm of grey-blue twilight, the triumphant “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (sung by the BYU Combined Men’s choir) played next in my queue.  “Christ he died to make men holy/ Let us live to make men free!”

Then, I knew just how happy I was to go home to the United States of America, where Lady Liberty holds her hands out to “your tired, your poor, your huddling masses yearning to breathe free” and “lift[s her] lamp beside the golden door.”

How proud and thankful and privileged I am to call myself an American. What an honor is that title! How great and sacred is our responsibility to strive diligently, tirelessly for what we know is right and good in our noble country. Oh, I love America, my “sweet land of liberty!"

 As our friendly pilot announced that we would be landing in Boston shortly, I remembered a poem I had memorized once upon a time and it expressed everything I felt in that moment.

'Tis fine to see the Old World, and travel up and down

Among the famous palaces and cities of renown

To admire the crumbling castles and the statues of the kings,

But now I think I've had enough of antiquated things.

So it's home again, and home again, America for me!

My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be

In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars

Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.

Oh London is a man's town, there's power in the air

And Paris is a woman's town, with flowers in her hair;

And it's sweet to dream in Venice, and it's great to study Rome;

But when it comes to living there is no place like home.

I like the German fir-woods, in green battalions drilled

I like the gardens of Versailles with flashing fountains filled;

But, oh, to take your hand, my dear, and ramble for a day

In the friendly western woodland where Nature has her way!

I know that Europe's wonderful, yet something seems to lack:

 The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back. 

But the glory of the Present is to make the Future free,

We love our land for what she is and what she is to be.

Oh, it's home again, and home again, America for me!

I want a ship that's westward bound to plough the rolling sea,

To the blessed Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,

Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.

May God bless our beautiful country and home!