We sat around with our brown-bag lunches,
in the relaxed mode of the midday break-- was it summertime?--
conversation droning on to nice places to live.
Dreams of earthly paradises-- among mountains, on rivers, lakes, seashores,
tropical idylls wih palm trees and nubile island girls.

For me, said Dusan, the most beautiful place in America,
is Elizabethport, New Jersey.

It was a place I knew,
a town you pass on the New Jersey Turnpike, a port with huge cranes
unloading container ships, hard by a huge oil refinery lit
up at night like Broadway the sky red from gas flares roaring out of stacks.
Thunderous rumble of low-flying airplanes dropping onto the end of the runway at
Newark Airport. A landscape of sooty stone houses onion-steepled churches dank
taverns smelling of stale beer cobblestone streets inlaid with tracks for trolley cars
that no lomger run years ago replaced by diesel-coughing buses.

No, he said. It's not the scenery or the weather that makes the place beautiful, it's
friends and love and people who talk your language-- talk like you talk from a
country or about art, music, books, maybe politics-- whatever it is-- the way
someone touches you or looks in your eyes or whatever it is that passes between people....

I had just come off the boat. In New York. Soon after the War--
From Yugoslavia. A man from an agency gave me a piece of paper the address of a
place that had a job. I took a train then walked around the streets a stranger in a
strange place showing people the piece of paper. They were kind gave me
directions pointed this way that way. Then I met a man who answered in
Yugoslavian language. He took me to the place of the job,showed me where to live
a neighborbood of Yugoslavian people

I have my first job and friends in America and soon a girl first my sweetheart then
my wife. We get married in an old church with a steeple like shape of an onion like
churches in some parts of Yugoslavia. Then everybody out of the church it's
nightime the sky red from the gas they burn in the refinery the whole place lit up
like Broadway even the trolley car tracks shining in the street. Airplane coming
down rumbling low over our heads we can see the flames blue from the engines.
Then all my friends everybody out to the tavern to celebrate. Now I have a
wonderful wife soon a baby later my own house more kids.

So that's how I like America and most beautiful city Elizabethport.

...................................................................................... Israel Lewis