I am an immigrant. Came to New York at 22; didn’t speak the language or know the mores. Didn’t understand that CAW-fee came in different iterations, that “regular” meant cream and sugar added. Ordering a ham-and-cheese sandwich, I was flummoxed to be asked, “what kind of bread?” Where I came from, bread was bread. White. “Wonder.” In the hinterlands, I hadn’t been aware of a diversity of loaves.

Still here, though, after 55 years, a resident alien of sorts. Not based in Gotham itself—Manhattan—though I briefly shared a studio apartment long ago with a college acquaintance on the fashionable East Side before settling in a LAWN-Guyland suburb. Found a wife locally—a citizen spouse!—and assimilated. (No green card necessary.) Got a nice job. Paid taxes. Was never a danger to anyone but myself.

But, yes, an immigrant—a person generally defined as coming “from outside one’s community.” Immigrants are much in the news these days, prompting this consideration of my status as, technically, a furriner: born in Louisiana—raised in Texas, California and New Mexico and schooled in Missouri—before arriving in New York as what Australians call a “blow-in,” a non-native.

Can’t say I felt dismissed as “the other,” as some exotic invader to be shunned or disparaged. There was a time when some fellow college students—aware I had gone to high school in New Mexico and apparently oblivious to the “New” in that state’s name—seemed to find great humor in addressing me as “Gringo.” There are far worse maledictions.

Anyway. Though not actually from another nation (though I have been to Ellis Island among some huddled masses who also were visiting the Statue of Liberty), I would argue that New York is quite unlike the regions of America where I grew up, the way London isn’t the same as England and Shanghai is an entirely different version of China.

I certainly had never eaten a bagel nor ridden a subway before arriving. A person could live in the nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles—as I did during part of my childhood—and have no comparison to what life was like in the Big Town or its environs. As Groucho Marx once observed on that matter, “When it’s 9:30 in New York, it’s 1937 in Los Angeles.”

Voluntarily uprooted, drawn to a job in New York and existing for a time as a stranger in a strange land, I never experienced any untoward discomfort. (Guilty of a few bumpkin faux pas, likely.) But as celebrated journalist Clive Barnes wrote in his introduction to a 1985 collection of essays on New York, it is “a city of born-again natives,” people from Out There Somewhere who came in quest of something and set down permanent roots. To live in New York is to be surrounded by ex-pats. Standard procedure. We’re all really in the same boat.

There is a song by Paul Simon—who was born in New Jersey, by the way; he immigrated with his family to the borough of Queens as a pre-schooler—that evokes the defining American story of immigrant millions bringing of hundreds of languages and customs to New York:

We come on the ship they call The Mayflower/We come on the ship that sailed the moon/We come in the age’s most uncertain hours/And sing an American tune.

Some of us came by way of Wink, Tex., Hobbs, N.M., and Columbia, Mo. Yet happy to say I haven’t been deported. And starting to feel acclimated.