thanks for having me, for real

gratitude, when it isn't guaranteed.

i lit fireworks in a field in kentucky last night. me. a kid from kfar saba, in the middle of america, on the night it turned two hundred and fifty.

someone handed me the lighter like it was nothing, and i ran from the fuse like everyone else, half laughing, half scared, holding a beer in a koozie with george washington's face on it. at some point i held up a sparkler and wrote four words under it. “thanks for having me”. then i added two more, because i needed the sentence to know i wasn’t being cute. “for real.”

here’s the thing about for real. gratitude is easy when you're sure of your place. mine isn't. and i’ve started to think that’s the only reason it means anything.

i didn’t cross an ocean for the fireworks. i crossed it for the songs. i grew up on the other side of the world learning an american songbook i had no right to love, memorizing a whole country through its choruses before i’d really been there. somewhere around seventeen i decided i wanted to build a life in the place that made them. that is an insane thing to decide about a country you’ve only been to once before, when you were six years old and the twin towers were still there. i decided it anyway, and i’ve been quietly trying to earn my way in ever since.

this weekend the songwriter i crossed that ocean for got married at madison square garden. taylor. the closest thing the american songbook has to a queen, throwing the most american wedding there is, in the exact city i’m still asking permission to stay in. i wasn’t there. i was in a field in kentucky lighting someone else’s fireworks. and instead of feeling small about it, i felt something closer to proof. the songs i came here for are real enough to fill the garden. the wanting was never a delusion.

because here is the part i can’t get over. i came to learn america’s songs. i didn’t expect anyone here to learn mine. but while my phone’s been dying in a glovebox this weekend, people i have never met have been pressing play on a song i wrote about staying in one place. the quietest thing i’ve ever made is the one getting heard the farthest from home, and it’s a song about not going anywhere.

so that’s where i am on the two hundred and fiftieth birthday of a country that hasn’t finished deciding whether i can stay. a song about staying, getting heard, sung by a guy still waiting to be told he’s allowed to. both true at once. the door half open, and me already halfway through it, singing before anyone said “come in.”

i don’t know when the yes comes. maybe soon. maybe i’m standing in another field next fourth of july, still holding a sparkler, still waiting. but i meant those four words, and now you know what they cost to write.

you can love a place before it decides to keep you. it might be the only honest kind of love there is.

thanks for having me. for real. especially the part that isn’t final yet.