The Paper That Proved I Belonged

A Life Between Checkpoints

“Where were you born?”

“Lebanon.”

The border guard’s eyes flicked to my license, then back to me, sitting in the driver’s seat of my car. His gaze hung there for a beat too long. In those days, you didn’t need a passport to cross into Canada through the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, but sometimes you needed something else. Proof. An explanation. The right kind of paper.

I reached into the glovebox and handed my naturalization certificate across the window’s threshold. The guard studied it, flipping it over like there might be something hidden on the back. It was a single sheet of thick paper with a black-and-white photo of a five-year-old boy in a bow tie, stamped beneath the Great Seal of the United States.

“Had more hair in those days. Shaved that morning, too,” I said, nodding toward the photo. His mouth didn’t move, but I caught the flicker of amusement in his eyes. He handed the certificate back. I drove on.

It’s something my father would have said. He could soften the air in a room that didn’t trust him yet. He could carry moments like these with a light touch, giving people something that made the whole thing easier to close.

---

I’d signed that paper in the spring of 1959, slow and careful, the way we were taught in school. I was so focused on getting it right that I didn’t notice my middle name running out of space. Someone cleared their throat and tapped me on the shoulder. I reset my hand in time to squeeze in my last name.

That was that. The document was complete. I was now an American.

Afterwards, I remember sitting in that Fresno courtroom where the air smelled like varnish and winter coats. My feet didn’t touch the floor. My mother was hugely pregnant, due literally any minute (she gave birth the next day) and kept one hand on the bench and one on her belly. My father was in a mood, cracking jokes with the judge who asked if he had anything he’d like to say.

Dad grinned and said, “Your honor, if we don’t wrap this up soon, my son won’t be the youngest citizen in this courtroom.”

Everyone laughed. The judge smiled. A reporter raised his boxy Speed Graphic camera, squinted through the viewfinder, and a split second later, the flashbulb popped with a brilliant white burst, hissing and smoking as it cooled. I wondered if anyone knew I had a marble in my pocket.

We had come from a place, Beirut, that probably no one in the courtroom could find on a map. We were living then in Fowler, California, a small farm town outside Fresno, where the fields stretched wide with grapes and almonds. My father was the pastor of the Armenian Congregational Church. The non-Armenians in town pronounced our last name four different ways, all wrong, or just called us “those folks from over there.” We didn’t argue. We nodded, smiled, and blended in.

I had no idea what a naturalization certificate was. No idea what we were becoming or what we were leaving behind. I just knew I was supposed to sit still and do what the grown-ups said. The bow tie pinched. But the paper was real.

I didn’t think about it again for decades. Not until after the towers fell and everything turned into checkpoints and questions. I was older then, grayer, and had long since stopped thinking of myself as anything but American. But more often than I liked, at airports, they’d scrawl four S’s on my boarding pass (“Secondary Security Screening Selection”) and cut me from the herd.

This was before the implementation of Real IDs and passport requirements for domestic flights. I’d get pulled aside, asked more than once if I was born here. After a while, I started carrying that certificate with me to and from the airport. Between trips, it was in a folder with my kids’ old report cards and a Xerox copy of my marriage license.

Usually, the gate agents would glance at the photo of the five-year-old boy in the bow tie, then back at me. I’d pat my stomach and say, “Still fits.” Sometimes I’d lean in, drop my voice, and add, “Didn’t wear my bow tie today. Trying to keep a low profile.”
Sometimes they laughed. Sometimes they didn’t. Either way, I’d nod and move on.

It was something my Dad would have said. He taught me how to ease a tight moment until the other person let you through.

---

What I remember most clearly from that day in the courtroom was the feel of the wooden bench, the sound of someone flipping through a legal pad behind me, and how quiet the room became when they said the word “citizen.”

The truth is, I didn’t feel anything at the time. I didn’t feel transformed. There was no swelling music, no feeling of arrival. That would come much later, in a different city, under a different sky. I was back in Beirut then, standing outside the apartment building where my uncle still lived, thinking, “This is where I’m from, but it’s not where I belong.”

It’s strange to be given an identity before you have a self. To be told what you are before you’ve figured out who you are. That day in Fresno, I became American the same way a sapling gets planted in someone else’s yard—firmly, legally, and without context.

The border guard handed the certificate back to me without another word.

I drove into the tunnel.

That piece of paper still lives in a drawer in my house. I keep it near the front, in case anyone ever asks again.

Not because I doubt who I am. But because “they” might.