Justifying my life to my wife
Didn’t think I needed to do that. She just told me I don’t like people. Maybe she got it from her daughter who lives here rent free and recently told me I’m “a horrible human being.”
I made the mistake of telling my wife I don’t like people anymore, which I don’t. I meant that as a change of state. But she corrected me. “You don’t like people period. Never have. You just lecture them. You don’t like Jews, for example.” She could have added black people, which she thinks I also don’t like, because she believes I’m a WASP racist. Because she’s an Irish Catholic who has never had much contact with Jews, black people, etc, and the Irish are famously tolerant of everyone of every Irish Catholic vicissitude.
She backed off after a while, blaming her grumpiness on body pain.
The truth does out. It is what she thinks.
Not going to justify myself to her or anyone. I’m already on record. My views on people, my affections, likes, dislikes, are already abundantly available in print and on the Internet.
I have lost my liking for people in general. That’s a fairly recent development. Like every man, I have always been ambivalent about women. They are both better and lesser than men. Pretenses about equality are ridiculous. Doesn’t make me a misogynist. We’re different. Will always be. Why the whole transgender flap is so absurd. Men can never be women, and women can never be men. No surgery can change a mind or a soul.
Like every Christian I have differences with Jews. Our traditions, histories, and life experiences are at odds. Always had differences with Roman Catholics too. I am a WASP.
I was raised in a way of life that is now completely gone, despised, even reviled. Extinct. What was unique about us? We were Episcopalians, a vanished denomination that has become the opposite of my upbringing. Why I’m too old to survive in the new order. We had an interpretation of Christianity which despite its fidelity and faith in the Nicene Creed was entirely separate from the Roman Catholic interpretation.
We were not afraid of God. Our bad, I guess. We had our own kind of contract with the Lord and Creator of the Universe. For example, we took the Ten Commandments seriously. We were raised to believe in the efficacy of rectitude. Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t want what other people have, be polite to parents and everyone else, don’t swear, don’t despise your neighbor but help him if you can, and in the words of the King James Bible, “Do no murder.” If these simple rules were in your heart, you could stand in the pew and face God like a man (or woman), and you could trust in God to approve your decisions. We had no confession booth with screens and Rosaries and Hail Mary’s. We had a General Confession in the Book of Common Prayer, whose language repeated verbatim time after time reminded you that you were a miserable sinner, and don’t forget it. (My paternal grandfather and namesake — the finest man I ever knew — was fond of saying, “I may be a sinner, but I’m not miserable.” That was Episcopalian rectitude in a nutshell.)
I grew up wanting to be like my grandfather. Did we look down on everyone else? No, I don’t think so. I went to a private elementary school my grandfather organized, and the student body was 40 percent Jews and 20 percent Catholic. The purpose of the school was education. We wore uniforms, so economic differences would not be obvious. Did I notice differences between my sister and me and the Jews and Catholics? Yes. Did our parents all socialize together? No. Were they excluded from our country clubs? Not that I ever knew. My first huge crush was on an Italian Catholic girl named Madelyn who had seven brothers and sisters, one of whom, Ira, became a kind a kind of school mascot because he was so cute. One time we had a school bus accident, and all the children on the bus were most distressed not by the accident but by a nasty cut on Ira’s eyelid. Madelyn never gave me the time of day, probably because I wasn’t Catholic. All but one of the bullies I encountered as the “brain” of the school were Jewish. Mostly they came from richer families than mine. I got picked last for sports. I was an obvious target for the ones who were ambitious in sports. Truthfully, I never made the connection to Jewish doctors and factory owners. My dad’s advice about bullies was always the same. “Punch them in the nose.” But Billy Sussman and Buddy Levitt were always kind to me.
We had some nasty WASPs of our own, usually girls. Their fathers were also doctors, etc. But you couldn’t punch them in the nose. You couldn’t ever hit a girl. And there was also the WASP who befriended me, the incredibly spoiled son of a factory owner who delighted in borderline cruel practical jokes involving electricity and other things he knew more about than anybody else. (Yeah, I had a Jewish friend in first grade whose parents had been in Auschwitz and whose mother died one weekend in first grade. I can still remember the sound of the wet fallen brown leaves we shuffled through when he told me. I had seen their tattoos. He wasn’t back the next year. I remember his name, Julian, and his gifted cantor brother, David.)
Except for the factory owner and doctor kids, we were all living in the country. We had all kinds of non-WASPS, non-Jews, and non-Catholics in our lives. Black, Native American (Indian then), Puerto Rican, and most importantly in my case, Moor. They were the support system that fixed things, looked after children, toted crop baskets, and were embedded in everyone’s everyday rural life. Emma raised the Hine kids while their parents were in the Bahamas and ‘half-breed’ (her Moor husband Nelson’s monicker for her) Ann did everyone’s laundry, folded and ironed and perfect every time. Our requirement? You addressed the men as Mister until they instructed otherwise, the women as Missus until they instructed otherwise, and you looked them in the eye. Except for the migrant workers, who refused to notice you in person but would wave from a truck-bed on a dirt road between fields, just never in the general store. They didn’t smell good, but your mother explained they had no running water in their barracks. Oh.
My grandmother had two black women who helped her take care of my ailing grandfather. I grew up with those ladies, Rosa and Elizabeth (Catholic!). I can tell you honestly they were better women than my grandmother was, no matter how many hats Grandma had to wear to church. My other grandfather had a best buddy from work named Gibby, who did all the painting for everyone’s houses in our extended family, and he always had a spotless black Mercury sedan less than two years old. Always a cool hat too. He would have done anything for my grandfather, whom he called “Cap,” even though Grampa sometimes slipped and used the N-Word when he was talking politics. He was a Methodist, not an Episcopalian. He was also from Ohio. So we made allowances.
Gramma’s wife had a hired man named Henry who came and did work at our house from time to time. I thought Henry was a Superman. We had this 19th century carriage shed, three bays and it included corn cribs, a big building it was, and the back of it had poison Ivy growing all the way to the roof, with branching trunks the size of men’s thighs. When my dad and I were building our tennis court out of a field, he thought the back of the carriage house was unsightly and asked if Henry could remove the poison ivy monster. Henry always looked the same. He wore bib overalls, needed a six egg lunch and a ride back to Penns Grove and he had too few dollars for even a WASP to admit. He was also immune to poison ivy. He cleared the entire carriage shed of the tree-sized vines in a single day. Never seen anyone in my life who could do so much work so quickly without ever moving fast. Like some inevitable force of nature. When your mom dropped him off outside that hedge in Penns Grove you wanted to say something to him more than thank you, but you were too young to think what that might be.
Have I talked about the Moorish divas of Cumberland County, Lillian, Rose, Priscilla… Oh never mind.
People who grow up in suburban Camden County know a lot more than I do about who can relate to people and who’s a racist and not than I ever could.
Justify? Who’s talkin’?
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