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Last night, I attended a Red Sox game in Fenway Park. Not too unusual for a born-and-raised Baystater.

And per usual, the national anthem was sung, people stood up, took off their hats and some covered their hearts with their right hand.

Recently this formerly-normal part of sporting events has come into the spotlight as San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick says he won’t stand “to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people.”

I’m not here to discuss his choice (it’s a free country, after all), but as I stood in those historic grandstand seats last night in Boston, I couldn’t help but think of what happened just down the road from Fenway some 50 years ago.

On May 7, 1966, my grandparents and their seven children arrived in Boston from the Cape Verde islands after a month of travel. My father, at the time, was only 6 months old. While talking to my grandmother a few months ago, she told me that she arrived in Boston to family members hugging and reuniting — it’d been more than a decade since she’d seen her mother. Her father had died on the voyage over.

My grandmother was already married when her parents left, meaning she couldn’t go with them to America according to the current immigration rules. But when President Kennedy changed America’s immigration policy, it finally made it legal for her to join her family in America: a country of hope and promise that would give her children the chance to get a good education.

America has a lot of issues. We don’t get everything right. I’m not defending our oppressive history, current police brutality, or our latest presidential candidates.

But when I stood at that ballgame, hand over heart, eyes locked on the flag, and the national anthem resounding through the speakers, all I could think of was how proud I am to be an American.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting ready to leave this country in just two days, but my eyes welled up with tears as I mouthed the words, trying to listen to the a capella group’s beautiful version of the song and all that it means to me as a second-generation immigrant.

If my grandparents and great-grandparents hadn’t risked it all to leave their tiny third-world island country off the coast of Africa and sail/fly to Boston, I doubt I would have been at that game, standing with my husband, sister and her boyfriend — all of us college-educated — laughing at the drunk man darting across the field and getting tackled by security, or watching Big Papi hit a home run in his last season. I wouldn’t be packing my bags to leave this amazing country for a year and travel the world beyond our safe American bubble.

My “Vovos” saw something in America that I hope I never fail to see: a country that, despite it’s many faults, is a country worth sacrificing for, a country worth chasing after, a country worth honoring, and a country worth standing for.

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