Recently I attended a 90th birthday party for a woman who raised her family across the street from my husband’s family in San Francisco’s Outer Mission district. Held at a park in Novato, there were more than 100 people attending, including her children and their spouses/significant others, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, neighborhood friends, and others I couldn’t begin to identify. Growing up within a few city blocks of each other, my Irish husband and in-laws reunited with childhood neighbors from El Salvador, Hawaii, Samoa, China, Mexico, and Italy, to name a few. People who in some cases hadn’t seen each other in decades, immediately bonded over shared memories and experiences.

My childhood was vastly different, but at the same time very much the same. At age 9 I moved with my family to Napa, long before Napa was synonymous with fine wines and chic living. My mother was involved in the exchange-student program through Napa Community College, where she was involved with students from across the country and from Africa, the Middle East and Western Asia. Because they were living so far away from their families, my mother invited them over for all the big American holidays. A typical Thanksgiving or Christmas or Fourth of July included my parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles and about 8 or 10 students from around the globe. Some four decades later, many of these former foreign students are still family friends.

These experiences have taught us that as different as our cultural expectations are, people everywhere really want the same things: acceptance, friendship, respect and inclusion.

Posted by:  Deborah Byrne