7/12 Naturalized. Staff in the courthouse has obviously been instructioned to add the word congratulations to every interaction, and so does everybody from the security guard at the metal detector to the gentleman assigning the seats.

From there on, a stunning display of inefficiency. There’s 160 new citizens in the court room, plus relatives, and each of the handful of personnel in the front walks up and down, moves stacks of paper from one place to another, chats with co-workers, for an entire hour after the official start of the proceeding, before the new citizens are even addressed for the first time. 

What follows is another hour of lining up in front of two desks where everybody presents their invitation, hands in their green card, and then gets to see their naturalization certificate to check it for errors. It is not handed out yet, that will happen after the oath ceremony, which begins two hours after the scheduled time. A youngish judge in his forties administers it, speaking randomly to the left and the right of the microphone, which makes his volume bounce up and down. 

For the oath, everybody rises, everybody repeats after the judge in units of three to five words. He concludes with a speech, a kind of sermon in which I am hardly able to make out any sense, not because it’s not audible, but because it consists of nothing but phrases with not enough gravitational pull to turn the phrases into actual meaning. Not even the story of his grandmother who came from Italy all on her own, as a sixteen-year old girl, and who would be so proud to see him, now, welcoming new citizens into the country.

After the sermon, everybody lines up again to be handed their naturalization certificate with a handshake from the judge, and afterwards, is free to leave.

I had scheduled my passport appointment on the Upper West Side at 12.30 and almost did not make it. Come to think of it, the passport is basically a more robust, more counterfeit-proof version of the naturalization certificate, which, in the words of my daughter, looks more like a super-sized dollar bill.

J bought ducks in red, white and blue, whiskey glasses with a label of Undeportable, and a candle on which it says Look At You Becoming An American Citizen And Shit. She says she weirdly felt a bit moved by the ceremony.