I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

The noun, Alien has multiple meanings.

One definition is an extraterrestrial, like E.T. from the classic Spielberg film, a creature from another planet.

Another definition is a person from a foreign country. Both definitions describe someone

who is an outsider. The adjective alien means strange or foreign. Some dictionary definitions

even lend it a more negative connotation, unfamiliar and disturbing.

What all of these definitions have in common is otherness.

The language suggests a lack of belonging and even a lack of being welcome in a place.

I think as humans we have a familiarity bias, which is to say we have an ugly knack for rejecting difference.

No wonder people new to a place try to assimilate, to blend in.

Today's poem dreams its way into an imagined scenario, finding oneself on this planet, an alien, a stranger, and doing one's best to be seen as belonging, so as to stay.

Leave taking by Rita Dove from the retirement annals.

I was sitting at home with my daughter, who was young again, a child with a child's wish to do things over and over.

So when she named an old film, even I liked, we popped in the disc and sat back to watch,

until daughter and living room faded.

That is, I kept watching, but the movie began to dream.

I became a stranger set down on earth in the late 20th century, at a pool in midsummer.

Everyone with towels slung over their shoulders, children splashing each other, cackling as they kicked the blue water.

Beyond this activity, a field stretched green, until it reached an end and began to climb, gently sloping skyward, like a runway to heaven.

I was waiting. I knew they were coming, over the hill. I knew the moment I stepped out, onto the grass,

I too would disappear.

What a curious sensation being the stranger.

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