Two Different Worlds

These thoughts were inspired by reading as much as by memory but are not focused on a book, so I'm putting them here, rather than on my main books blog. Also, they follow, at least partially, in some fashion, the previous post on this blog.

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Again and again, reading Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, I re-experienced scenes from childhood as memories surged forth. When Isenberg noted that gardening as recreation was an acceptable part of postwar middle-class life, but growing food on one’s small plot of land was not -- right there, in a single sentence, I saw again the contrast between my two sets of grandparents—my father’s father and stepmother in Columbus, Ohio, and my mother’s mother and stepfather on the edge of Springfield, Ohio.

Springfield grandparents and baby me

The Columbus grandparents led an urban life, the Springfield people rural. Well, kind of. In truth, both were in-between but in different ways. The Columbus neighborhood had probably been a suburb in the city’s early days, and the Springfield neighborhood was more a hodge-podge of poor folks outside the city limits. Lots in both places may have been forty feet wide, but the Springfield lots stretched back a long way from the road, and livestock and poultry were abundant.

In Springfield, the neighborhood had obviously grown up higgledy-piggledy, and the streets – roads? -- were still unpaved in the 1950s. Clay dust squished like talcum powder, deliciously, between bare toes. All up and down the road, in white families and black, the children went barefoot. Some may not have had shoes. I shed mine eagerly to be like the rest.

My grandparents’ street in Columbus was paved, and there were concrete sidewalks, too. Children did not go barefoot in public.

The house in Columbus was solid and, to my child’s eyes, stately, a two-story brick house with a painted concrete front porch the width of the house. The porch featured a rolled bamboo shade for privacy and was always cool in summer. Elements of the backyard were a luxurious lawn, a swing hung from another large shade tree, a hammock, my grandmother’s riotously colorful flowerbeds, and my grandfather’s prize tomatoes, of which he was inordinately proud. In the bathroom, tile gleamed and sparkled. Bedrooms upstairs on the second floor were filled with massive, dark, polished furniture, the beds so high we children had to mount them with footstools. Everything in the house bespoke solidity and respectability.

The frame house in Springfield was a single story and very plain. Originally only a large kitchen, small parlor, and two bedrooms, it had been expanded with a newer, smaller kitchen built around the water pump (thus bringing water into the house), but there was no bathroom at all. We washed at (or were washed in, when small) the kitchen sink, and an outhouse reached by a brick path, laid herringbone style under a long grape arbor, served other needs. The side yard was given over to chickens, the back to fruit trees, raspberry patch, and Grandpa’s large garden. Once the iceman came with his horse-drawn wagon and stopped in front of the house. Slivers of ice for all the children!

My Columbus grandfather was a high school graduate and a union member, engineer first on a steam train and later driver of a diesel engine. His job paid well. I remember my mother remarking once that my father’s family had had meat for dinner every night through the Depression. My father’s sister never had to go to school dressed in a flour sack. Sometimes cousins visited while we were at the Columbus house, but no one ever dropped in unannounced. Visits were arranged.

 My Springfield grandpa worked in a factory, and Grandma trekked to the farmers’ market in downtown Springfield to sell what food (eggs, fruit, vegetables) the family did not need or put up for winter. Their house had no bedroom doors, only sheets hung in the doorways, but their big dining table always had room to accommodate neighbors who dropped in around dinnertime, and my grandmother always found an extra plate and food to fill it.

I loved all four of my grandparents, blood and “step” relations, and did not, when small, differentiate between them on that basis. The differences in the way they lived, on the other hand, were obvious from the start. Both households had enough to eat and to share with grandchildren. Both grandfathers had jobs, and both grandmothers kept house. Still, even as a child I realized they occupied two very different worlds, and experiencing different ways of life from childhood is something I value in the way I grew up. 

Ladies Bountiful and Women in Need

Women's Health Day, up at the old hospital in Northport, started as an ordinary, pleasant, welcome annual event. It filled an important need. On that day uninsured and underinsured women in Leelanau County could receive a free health checkup, including mammogram. Health care was the object, but somehow it was a fun morning! Half the town was there, all ages, and it felt very egalitarian and social. There was nothing embarrassing about it. It was like going to vote, except that people had time to chat in the waiting room.

Then one year it was taken over by a large group of volunteers, women who had no need of the services but a great need to be needed. They put on a big brunch spread and then, having really nothing more to do but not wanting to feel useless, went around the room urging the women who had come for their checkups to avail themselves of the buffet. They themselves were not going to the buffet; nor were they in need of free checkups. Medical attention and food were for the others. 

For the first time, the event was structured by class: on one hand there was the host of ladies bountiful, on the other a crowd of women in need. Those of us who came for the checkup, the supplicants, were dressed casually, many in blue jeans, while the ladies bountiful were set apart in dresses and heels. The fun was gone! The following year I skipped the whole thing. Now the hospital is gone, and so is the event.

I bring it up because of something that concerns me with many do-good projects. So often, in a way, the volunteers are as needy as the recipients of the bounty to be distributed. The givers need projects and purpose and meaning in their lives. They need to feel needed and need to give and need to be recognized as givers. But they don't usually see themselves as needy. They do see themselves, in a helping context. Do they, I wonder, always see those they are so eager to help? 

I don't mean to ignore or deny the genuine humanitarian impulse. It's good to want to do good in the world, and doing good probably needs to be encouraged and, yes, rewarded, too! I'm also sure it's easiest for all of us to see ourselves in positive roles, wherever we are in life, and hardest to see others differently situated in as positive a guise. I don't mean to point fingers. Really. 

But if you think about it for a minute, you know, whatever your station and condition in life, that it can be a lot harder to receive than to give. And when only one group is acknowledged as givers, the other defined as beneficiaries, a dynamic set up: the first group is one-up, the second one-down. And so, while what's given is helpful in one way, it can be destructive in other ways. 

This is a digression, but one of the most memorable lessons life ever gave me was in the example of a friend who suffered severe physical trauma, losing much of the ordinary health and strength the fortunate among us take for granted every day. After the incident that nearly took her life, and after a long, painful period of recuperation, my friend, unable drive a car and without not stamina to walk to and stand at a bus stop, was dependent on friends to drive her to the grocery store. Once there she needed to tour the store in a motorized chair. She needed someone to carry her groceries out to the car and into her house. She needed a lot of help. And yet – this was the miracle and the lesson – she never expressed pity for herself, never apologized for needing help, and neither did she demand assistance in a resentful or autocratic way. She was natural about it all, graciously graceful. It was just the way things were, and we were friends, and we did things together. That was all. And so the way she received the help she needed was a gift she gave to us, her friends. Not many people could pull that off! I doubt I could ever do it with her grace, but if I am ever in a similar position, I hope I will remember her example and try!

I feel uniquely positioned in Leelanau County, with a foot in each camp, not a full-fledged member of either group. For twenty years, before eligible for Medicare, I went without health insurance (Women's Health Day was a godsend to me!), and I have no retirement pension waiting for me down the road. But by education and as a local business owner for nearly a quarter of a century, I am at least a nominal member of the privileged group. 

I understand the desire to help and to give, as well as the need for recognition. My own charitable giving means a lot to me, I am very careful about causes I choose to support, and I wish I could do more. At the same time, I also know, from not having had health insurance for so long and being still unable to sign blank checks for expensive health care, the sting of being designated as "needy," when I work very hard to be independent and provide for myself!

None of this is meant as criticism of any individuals or groups. I “bring it to the table” because the people around the table are generally in the bountiful givers group, and that's no accident. They are the ones with free time, and they are also the ones who feel comfortable and welcome at the table. They are seen as – and feel themselves as -- belonging there.

But those not at the table are "stake-holders," too. They have a stake in the economic wellbeing of their community, in the education provided for their children, and in being recognized as community members.

I don't see inviting the two groups to the table together, however, as the solution or even the beginning of a solution. 

So what is??? 

I suspect a "solution" to the gap in class and need may be something no group can invent, regardless how many hours are spent brainstorming. Maybe it just takes one-on-one conversations, in casual encounters, with a lot more listening on both sides. It might also take, for every single one of us -- me, included! -- looking into our own hearts and being honest with ourselves about what we see there.

What will we find? Then, what will we do with what we find? I don't know.

Sorry this is inconclusive. I have no recipe to offer, only my perspective from the gap, from the social chasm, between rich and poor.