This is about my father.

It's also about being led down a false path and not seeing obvious signs.

For a while now, a year or two at least, I have thought a lot about immigration.

People I worked with as a teenager at the cannery.

People who spoke maybe a word or two of English.

You know, I could speak a word or two of Spanish,

and we didn't talk much with each other, if at all.

But we worked side by side, sifting green beans, potatoes, whatever raw vegetable came sliding

down the conveyor belt.

And sometimes, not often, but more often than you'd think, there would be a non-vegetable,

a hazard item, like a piece of glass or a rat's decapitated head.

So one of us had to press a button to stop the belt and the remaining product was sifted

through, double checked that there weren't other hazard items that could be, you know, wind

up in the cooker or the boiler somewhere in the whole canning process.

And I guess I've always thought that it's a privilege that I got to be born where I was born,

who I was born as, despite having some tough events, namely my dad just not being around,

other very difficult childhood things that

I don't really want to get into at the moment. And that my coworkers at the canary, some who hadn't

been born here, came here to work, to provide for their families, that they were actively

earning their right to live here. That if I were to do the same to go to another country, that they were actively earning their right to live here.

That if I were to do the same to go to another country, that I would also have to earn my way to become a citizen.

But it's a funny thing to not have to earn it, to just have it, to not have any threat of ever losing it.

...