When did immigrants become aliens?

Unless you are an American Indian (those of you who are politically correct will say Native Americans), some one in your family at some time between 1492 and today immigrated to the United States. My father always told me that we had American Indian blood in the veins but my wife proved that we were just like a lot of us in that we came from England and Scotland.

When I was growing up, those people who were not born in the town where I lived were considered as being from “off”–as in those people from off. However, in reality we knew that they were immigrants and had moved to our area or our country. During this same time period, everyone knew that an alien was a creature from outer space that arrived in Roswell New Mexico or Grand Junction, TN. These creatures had lots of legs, arms, scaly bodies and could only be killed by our film heroes in the Luez Theater.

Immigrants on the other hand were people who had moved into our country since we are the original melting pot and they had become productive citizens of our localities, states and nation. The federal government even had a Department of Immigration. Immigrants were no big deal because we all came from families who were immigrants.

Now in 2007, we never talk about immigrants. We talk about aliens either legal or illegal. The dictionary says that an immigrant is a person who leaves one country to live permanently in another. The same dictionary says that an alien is a person who is born in one country and is not a citizen of the second country. So maybe the immigrant planned on becoming citizens and the aliens do not. I do not know when we stopped calling people who moved to the US immigrants and started calling them aliens. Will the government set up a Department of Aliens? Will they ever tell us what really happened in Roswell? If you know Grand Junction, TN, you do not want to share any of its secrets with anyone.

This pondering probably makes no sense to any of you. I am not sure it makes any sense to me. Maybe if immigrants had arrived in Roswell and aliens had come over on the Mayflower and settled the Eastern United States, then maybe this question would never have crossed my mind.

Maybe my father was right and my family arrived at Roswell?

Watermelon Seeds

When I was a young boy growing up in rural West Tennessee in the 1950’s, I remember that one of our favorite summer pleasures was eating watermelons. My grandfather and many others grew their own watermelons; some young boys “borrowed” their melons from their neighbor’s patch; but my father had a grocery store so I got mine at the store.

I can remember many occasions on a hot summer night at church or family gatherings where many watermelons were enjoyed by all. I also can remember one other feature of those memorable summer gatherings–watermelon seed spitting contests.

Yes, as a ritual of a young boy in the 50’s, you had to be able to spit your watermelon seeds. There were contests for distance; accuracy–a tin can was often the target; and even sometimes we played war with watermelon seeds as our ammo. This was in an era before the dominance of TV or computers and before we all were too busy to enjoy life.

The seeds in our watermelons were always the same size and were most definitely were black. Those slippery little suckers were just the right size for our spitting contest and made a beautiful noise upon hitting the sides of those tin cans. It was a wonderful way to conclude a summer evening.

But what has happened?????? All the watermelon seeds that I see now are small white ones that are very very small. Someone will probably tell me that the watermelons are now hybrid varieties and they have been genetically altered so that the seeds are small. I protest!!!! How in the hell can you have a ole fashion watermelon seed spitting contest without the true seeds—those slippery black ones that I remember so well.