Seriously Now — Where Would We Live in the USA?

"This land is your land, this land is my land,
From California, to the New York Island,
From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf Stream waters,
This land was made for you and me."*

Two blogposts ago I joked about the difficulty that eventual repatriation to the United States might present. I said that one of the obstacles to moving back was just plain not knowing where in the U.S. a person would repatriate to. There’s a lot more serious truth in that than just the jokey attitude I took in the blogpost. Sometimes when it’s late at night, and friends with whom we’ve shared a few bottles of wine have left, and Mark and I are alone on our terrace with our nightcaps, we get to talking. "Let’s say we had to go back," the conversation starts . . . (By the way, the motive for returning is never spelled out in these hazy dialogues in the dark. Have to go back? Are we being deported? We don’t ever explore that issue.) Okay, back to where we were, under the influence of a little buzz. "Let’s say we had to go back . . . where in the U.S. would we go?"



We’ve read all the articles, like The Ten Best U.S. Cities to Retire To, The Ten Cheapest U.S. Cities to Live In and The Ten Most Beautiful Cities in the U.S. We recently read America’s Ten Most Miserable Cities, too, thinking what the hell, maybe we could get a great deal on property! Anyway, it’s a big country, and you’d think we’d have no trouble choosing a new home. We’d just be looking for some place affordable, where the quality of life is high, and where there is excellent medical care (we're getting on in years). A big plus would be easy access to an international airport, for I suspect a steady stream of Brazilian friends would start to visit immediately. What seems to happen, though, is that instead of coming up with some easy, obvious options, we end up thwarted by an exhausting process of elimination.

We can’t go back to New York, it’s too expensive, too fast, too stressful. And what would we do, spend the rest of our days going to the free movies at the Museum of Modern Art? I’m pretty adamant about avoiding snow and ice and freezing wind, so that rules out the entire top tier of the United States, including Alaska. Let’s see — I was born in Florida and that state always looks enticing, but Florida is hurricane territory. My mother’s stories of her standing at the front door with a shovel, killing snakes as they slithered into the house after a hurricane, still reverberate. California, here I come** is fun to sing, but do I really need to test my earthquake survival skills? We’re thinking we should also avoid the entire tornado belt running down the middle of the country. Hawaii looks promising, until you start thinking about tsunamis. Not much left to the United States once you consider weather.

Around Cathedral Rock, photo by Bo Montenegro

Years ago we took a car trip around some of the southern and south Atlantic states, just to see if anything grabbed us. Nothing did, but I suspect our hearts weren’t really in it. Lately, we’ve been talking about a similar trip around the American southwest. A Brazilian friend of ours lives in Sedona, Arizona, and his gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous photographs have stimulated our interest. (Check out more pictures on his Web site, http://www.bomontenegro.com) It’s very tempting, but there is that little problem of Arizona being a Red State . . . I don’t know. For right now, we’ll keep thinking and talking. We’ll keep on staring out from our terrace, which just happens to be in a place where the quality of life is high and where there is excellent medical care. There’s also pretty easy access to an international airport. So, wait . . . what’s the problem?

*Woody Guthrie, music and lyrics
**Buddy DeSylva and Joseph Meyer, co-authors

Would I Ever Be Able To Repatriate?

Occasionally — very occasionally — I toy with the idea of returning to the United States, and wonder how easy or hard that might be. Would I be able to re-integrate? Because the longer I live outside the United States the less I know about how things work there, and the thought of what I don’t know anymore is paralyzing. How could I get anything done, order phone service, buy medicines, use a gas station? When I last visited the States four years ago I had no idea you had to swipe your own credit card at some cash registers. I stood in the drugstore like — well, like a foreigner, with my arm extended, trying to give the cashier my card. (A belated thank-you to the nice, patient person who explained what I needed to do in slow and clear English!)

I read somewhere recently that an expat is a foreigner in two countries, and there may be some truth to that. Besides the simple tasks I seem no longer to know how to accomplish in the States, there’s a whole vocabulary I no longer understand. When I left the United States, bundling meant wrapping yourself up in a warm blanket on a cold, winter night, hopefully with your honey to keep you warm; apple picking meant lifting up your arm under an apple tree and harvesting the fruit; an earworm would have been a terribly disgusting thing to have crawling inside your ears; to flog meant to beat someone with a whip or a stick; a hotspot was where it was happening, baby; and a tweet was the sound a bird might make. Do you see how out of it I am? I sometimes don’t have a clue as to what my American friends are talking about on Facebook, either. Example? A friend posted a question, which I didn’t understand, and here was the answer: The update comes with the background app refresh function on, which allows apps to refresh their content when using Wi-Fi or cellular in the background. Huh?

And should it ever happen that I do decide to repatriate, where would I repatriate to? With no fixed address anymore, the entire country spreads out before me. That, too, is paralyzing. I’ve always been drawn to the Northeast, but my mantra is NO MORE SNOW, so that would seem to rule out the very area I’m most drawn to. I don’t think that at this late stage of my life I could tolerate living in Red America, so that rules out some of the most beautiful and scenic states like, say, Arizona. Should I follow a much earlier fantasy of mine, and move to France? No, wait, that’s just more ex-patriating, more culture shock, with a language I once spoke but don’t anymore, more mountains of bureaucracy to plow through. Mon dieu!

And what on earth has happened to my husband, Mark, in this blog full of "I, I, I?" Well, while I’m fantasizing about moving and wondering about reverse culture shock, he’s as happy in Brazil as a pinto no lixo. Perhaps happier. He says he feels more at home in Brazil than anywhere else he's ever lived. No, this strange feeling of being vaguely betwixt and between is mine alone. But there’s something else lurking behind any worry I might have about repatriation difficulties. It’s something I read in a book by Tony Parsons called "One For My Baby," where the main character speaks of "the sense of endless possibility that every expat experiences, the feeling that your life has somehow opened up, that you are finally free to become exactly who you want to be. When you come back home you discover that you are suddenly your old self again." Wow. Return to being my old self? That, too, is a paralyzing thought.

Paying Taxes

Today is Tax Day in Brazil! All people who are required to file an income tax declaration must do so by midnight tonight. Mark and I filed our Brazil taxes weeks ago, right after we filed our United States taxes. Right, Brazil and the United States do not have a tax treaty, and right, that means we have to file double taxes. Both countries make a tax claim on the worldwide income of their citizens and resident foreigners. At least that's the law. But income tax is a delicate subject to approach. People have their own ideas of how/when/who to pay. They also fall into so many different categories, with so many exceptions and deductions and readjustments that it's hard to organize a discussion. Anyway, among people we know there are those who don't agree with me that filing double taxes is a legal requirement. Some of our friends admit to doing a bit of fudging, or even a lot of fudging, and just hope to stay under the radar. But Mark and I long ago decided to comply as best we could when it comes to the dreaded T-word.

In Brazil, the tax-filing process is first-world: fast, efficient, safe, private and worry-free. You collect your documents and your numbers, prepare your taxes right on the computer using the government's secure program (where the calculations are all done for you). You then file directly to the government at the click of a mouse. You receive an immediate acknowledgment of receipt, plus an all-important receipt number, and with that receipt number you follow the progress of your declaration from the status of "received," to "being processed," to "processed" or — should worse come to worst — to "under analysis," the status you don't want to see. (If you get that status, you can start to worry.) This process I've just described is how Mark and I have been filing our Brazilian income taxes for years. On the Internet. For free. Our status right now? Processed.

As for the United States, the tax-filing process for us at least is third-world: slow, cumbersome, manual, done on paper and sent via the postal system. The forms and the instructions might be available online, but if you want to file electronically you cannot have a foreign address. So Mark and I — and millions of others — have to file our United States income taxes the old-fashioned way. But even if we lived in the States and wanted to file electronically, would we be able to? By ourselves, I mean, and for free, the way we file in Brazil. No matter how much googling I do, or how many friends I ask, I get contradictory information. It does seem that you can file online but only by using some IRS-endorsed "electronic return transmitter," as they're called, to whom you pay a fee. So if I understand correctly, if you do your own work without using a tax preparer, you then send your work — and all your private information — to some third party you pay to click the "send" button for you. On the face of it I must say that sounds ridiculous. I don't care if these companies are endorsed or not, they're collecting information about us. Requiring people to use  an intermediary seems so backwards.

Albert Einstein once said that "the hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax." He of course was right, irony and humor aside. Some people try to do the right thing. Some people make honest mistakes, and rectify them. And some people do their utmost to defraud governments all over the world. It takes a long time for their comeuppance to come up, but here are a few tax evaders from around the world:

Paulo Maluf, Brazil, starting to sweat

Silvio Berlusconi, Italy, still smiling

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia

Ponty Chadha, India

Odd Nerdrum, Norway

Douglas Bruce, fine example of a Colorado State legislator