Lewiston hasn't been a paper town for a long while, although there used to be quite a few on the Androscoggin River. (Starting at Berlin, NH, which still smells like farts.)
Pretty much every town that is on the 'scoggin smelled like farts for years, especially on a rainy day (Brunswick being one of the towns near the end of the river, and with a paper mill on in in the next town over). I was not surprised to find out that at the height of it's use, it was one of the 10 most polluted rivers in the world. They've done a pretty good job of cleaning it up (pink foam is a thing of the semi-distant past, for instance), but you still couldn't pay me to put any part of my body in it.
If I have to think of myself as an ethnicity, my true first answer is "Pennsylvanian." If I'm pressed for ancestry, I say "English-German, with some Irish and Dutch". But ethnicity was never a part of my worldview growing up.
Yeah, that's kind of what I meant when I said I'm as American as it gets: One of my grandfathers immigrated from Germany, the other from Ireland. The German married a Choctaw, and the Irish guy married a DAR scion....so of course culturally I grew up strongly Hispanic.
Here, I'm either identified as Irish or Australian.
but she says things like "close the light"
This is how Mal's learning, open and close the light.
Lola, I was writing a blog for a while called "Life in Hellas" about living here, but as it turned out my ability to immerse myself in Greece has been greatly hampered by having a baby. I arrived here at the tail end of the Olympics, so the euro was just getting established - you'd still see prices listed in drachmas, and the older folks were as lost with the coin of the realm as I was. More, actually. I can't compare, but everyone I talk to, Americans and Brits and Greeks, seems to think things have gotten worse. Consumer prices are twice that of any other EU capital, but average income is only 65%.
Some things are getting better, but slowly. In 5 or 10 years things might be on track.
I don't remember what ethnicity was subbed in around Boston. (My guess would have been Portuguese, the Irish having a long history of professional ethnic pride.)
Italian, at least north of Boston.
You never heard Irish jokes in New England, Cindy? Maybe that's more of a Boston thing.
I never heard
Polish
jokes. I heard plenty of Irish jokes (but they often had to do with drinking, religion, or repression). What a lot of the country knows as Polish jokes (often, these are based on the premise that the ethnic group is stupid) were told as Italian jokes, here (which roughly equate to Newfie jokes in Maritime Canada).
I grew up about 7 miles from Boston. The T and the commuter rail had stops in my hometown, so there wasn't a big separation between Boston and my town.
It's American. Will you white people stop drawing lines? You have perfectly good non-white people to differentiate yourselves from.
I dunno, I've always thought of myself as "French". From Maine, and French. Probably because my last name is so blatantly French that it's constantly mispronunskiated.
That link I put up is very interesting. It looks like the Italians edge out the Germans in sheer numbers on immigration. I think the Germans tended to spread out more, though, getting farms out in the countryside, so their influence is more widespread.
It's funny...I think I'm fascinated by all the ethnic and regional shit that my grandparents moved out to the middle of the desert to get away from.
I didn't see Japanese anywhere. Did I miss them? Or are we statistically insignificant?
Not that I identified myself as Japanese in the last census. I think I went with "other."
I don't know if all the people here, when asked "What are you?" and say "American" are optimistic or just ignorant. Of course, my experience shows some overlap, and then again, I'm only two generations removed from Ellis Island and the Trail Of Tears(neither side being "easy breeders," you might say, and being late,) so that might color that perspective.
