Previously: 40 Years in Beer, Part Twenty-Four: That infamous Madrid episode, and a necessary curtailment.
According to conventional sources of Internet wisdom, a Europhile is “a person who is fond of, admires, or loves European culture, society, history, food, music etc.”
It must be conceded from the outset that certain other digital sources are neither benign nor forgiving, suggesting instead that Europhilia is a self-inflicted mental illness prompting sufferers to lose sight of their blind, rabid, and often delusional America-first patriotism.
It will have become evident to readers of this series that I can only shrug and expedite the tendering of my guilty plea. That’s me, to a tee—a Europhile, by both definitions, lacking any inclination whatever to apologize for it.
Europhilia has defined my very existence since college, and traveling through the continent more than forty times since the mid-1980s naturally has cemented these bonds, which leads to a legitimate question: Shouldn’t I have long since pulled up stakes, opted for full immersion, and chosen to become a an expatriate? I know several Americans who have opted for this remedy, and envy them unreservedly.
All I can say is, “Welcome to my personal existential struggle.”
It remains that I’ve always been a slow learner, a late bloomer, and prone to a tenacious (some might say consistently self-defeating) stubbornness. Becoming an expatriate as recourse to the foolishness of American exceptionalism has appealed to me for decades, but fleeing the country hasn’t ever seemed an honorable response.
Rather, a long time ago I grudgingly accepted the drunken stork’s tragic error in unceremoniously depositing me atop the Ohio River mud flats rather than near the Rhine, Danube or Tagus, and as a way of sublimating my eternal Euro itch, I’ve resolved to scratch it by counter-intuitively staying put: teaching, sharing experiences, and when I’m lucky, annoying the boastful America-first Know-Nothings.
Taking all this into consideration, we return to the end of my travel year 1989, when this internal dialectic began releasing its findings. In retrospect, I felt an expanding urge to bring a little bit of Europe back to Indiana, if only inside the four walls of home or work, and the collision of this impulse with my escalating beer enthusiasm produced a tectonic resolve.
On a prosaic level, once returned to New Albany from Copenhagen, I began waiting tables at Sportstime Pizza during daytime hours in late November, 1989, just in time to view CNN’s coverage of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution...Read more
