Constitutional Light

My Bosnian neighbors had their annual, spring body-waxing the other day—the men that is. The men between 11 and 35 years of age. Older than that, and they just don’t seem to care. Without my glasses, it appears they’ve gone through more body-lightening than Michael Jackson.

Yesterday, shirtless and glistening, they shot hoops in the drive next door as the wood fire in the back yard burned down to the proper mix: flames and embers. Another Bosnian holiday! Can’t keep track of all their holidays, but the smell of wood smoke alerts me to the arrival of each one.

The Bosnian butcher sent the usual pair. White soda-jerk uniforms--paper hats atop their heads. They rumbled up in an ancient, white panel truck to deliver the “baby sheep”—skinned, dressed, and bound hands and feet to a pole. (Occasionally they deliver a goat.)

There are 3 houses within 2 blocks of me filled with one giant, extended Bosnian family. They add color to the neighborhood and make the rest of us (and we’re a racially and ethnically mixed lot) look paler than boring.

Two years ago, in a single batch, they all became citizens. Ran around the neighborhood waiving spanking new US passports. And even though the rest of us have to call the cops when they feast well past midnight out beneath the stars, and even after the time I had to sic the law on Nedad after he started a home-based, metal-salvage business right next door (packed the yard with rusting engines, exhaust systems, and—inexplicably—upright vacuum cleaners), when they celebrate, I get a rush. Even if our country’s founding principles seem so difficult to glimpse in American political life today, they are still the shining light to so many from beyond our borders.