'I don't really belong anywhere except the United States'

Two weeks ago, 86-year old hospice patient and Danish immigrant Svend Clement needed an oxygen tank and a wheelchair to get around his home in Barrington.

Friday, after graciously granting media interviews in his home and riding in a stretch limousine filled with balloons and banners, Svend proudly stood alone at the podium during a ceremony in Chicago.

As one of the United States' newest citizens, Svend, beaming and bold, led 192 other newly naturalized citizens in the Pledge of Allegiance while photographers and TV cameras captured his every move.

"This is a great honor for me to do this little job today as my first job in the United States," Svend told his fellow Americans. "This (Pledge of Allegiance) is a very important little document that goes back many years."

Her eyes a tad damp with emotion, Mary, his wife of 53 years, noted all the attention for her husband and quipped in mock indignation, "They didn't do this for me when I became a citizen (in 2002, a few months after the Sept. 11 attacks)."

Celebrating newfound citizenship tonight at a small dinner party with loved ones should be a wonderful highlight of a year that once seemed dim for the Clements. Mary, a part-time worker at the Barrington Public Library, started 2007 with heart-bypass surgery in South Africa, where the couple had lived most of their adult life until moving to Barrington in the late '90s.

She was still recuperating there when her husband suffered a serious head injury after falling on ice at their Barrington home -- in the spring, she says.

"March is not spring," corrects Svend with a chuckle. "It was cold."

A combination of ailments including his injury and chronic heart disease made the retired business executive eligible for end-of-life care of VITAS Innovative Hospice Care, of Lombard, and registered nurse Kim Alonzo.

While VITAS team manager Dawn Horn says the company's Foundation for End-of-Life Care provided the limo Friday, Alonzo says she and other VITAS healthcare workers known for helping people die with dignity actually helped Svend recover.

When Alonzo whispers, "I'm afraid Svend is not going to be with us much longer," it's not what you think. What she means is that his health has gotten so much better he may no longer qualify for hospice.

"It's been so fun," Svend says, "that I couldn't bear to die and let them down."

"Wait until you see the cake I baked you," Alonzo says of a confectionery wonder that includes an American flag and the message "Now You Belong."

"I do belong here," Svend says in the couple's home, which sits on the farm of their daughter, Jane, a pilot for American Airlines, her husband, Peter Wessel, and the Clements' 14-year-old grandson, Christopher.

The Clements' son, Brian, is immigrating to the United States from South Africa soon and hopes to become a citizen, too.

"America has been good to us," Svend says. "I have to belong somewhere, and I definitely don't belong in Denmark."

His wife interrupts in a natural, teasing way the couple has had decades to perfect.

"You mustn't say nasty things about the Danish just because you are becoming an American," she laughs.

Born in Denmark in 1921, Svend saw the Germans overrun his country during World War II.

"I ended up in the underground unit," Svend says, recalling how he'd stockpile American-made bazookas and automatic weapons for the resistance fighters. "Once, when the Germans were coming past, we gunned them down, but that is something I don't like to talk about."

His business career took him to South Africa, where he built a thriving import and export company and met the younger Mary, a British citizen who had grown up in Kenya.

"And before we knew, we had a cat and a dog and two children," Svend says.

They made a home in Johannesburg.

"I didn't want to have a South African passport because of that apartheid business," Svend says.

But after a lifetime away, he didn't regard Denmark as home. With frequent business trips to the United States, the Clements had come to feel at home here.

When the business climate changed in South Africa, Mary moved to the United States in 1997, and Svend came the following year. He cleared much of the landscape to have a beautiful view of the bucolic Barrington countryside.

"I'm happy to be an American," Svend says. "I feel at home with the Americans. I don't really belong anywhere but the United States."

As one of 700,000 new citizens added to the roll this year, Svend says he plans to be an active American.

"I read a newspaper a day, and I take an interest in politics," Svend says, noting the questions he answered correctly to pass the citizenship test were "really easy for me."

Immigrants often know more about their new country than do native-born Americans.

"Time and again, when I am talking to Americans about things I take for granted they would know, they don't," Svend says. "They don't realize how important politics is."

A videotaped message from President Bush welcomes Svend and the other new citizens to their lives as Americans, reminding them of their rights and responsibilities. Now that he's feeling better, Svend says he'll register to vote in the 2008 election to select a new U.S. president.

"I'm not quite happy with the one I've got now," Svend says.

Spoken like a real American.

• One of the duties of being a U.S. citizen is casting an informed vote. I didn't help that cause in Thursday's column about third-party candidates when I mistakenly called Richard Campagna the Libertarian Party's 2004 presidential candidate. Campagna was merely the running mate of Libertarian presidential candidate Michael J. Badnarik. I am sorry for my error.