Photo Essay: A Different View of Ordinary Stuff

by | Personal, Reflections & Stories

I like to take a walk and look at ordinary things in the environment from a different perspective. When I do, I’m often surprised, sometimes delighted, and occasionally grateful– if for nothing else just the ability to notice momentary beauty, oddity, interesting juxtapositions of lines and color, light and shadow.

 

Child's eye view of playground benches and table

Is this what you’d ordinarily see if you were the height of a 3-year old?

Close-up view of spiked fence photo by Christina Leimer

Feels kind of spikey. Why the single black spike among the gold?

The combination of blue shapes attracted my attention and the silver gray etching on the windows below the wave and the silver vent in the upper right give it contrast.

The combination of blue shapes at this building entrance attracted my attention. The silver gray etching on the windows below the wave and the silver vent in the upper right give it contrast.

Juxtaposition of curvy and straight lines, color and textures in this closeup photo of part of a jungle gym by Christina Leimer

What do you think this is? I like the juxtaposition of curvy and straight lines, complementary color and variety of textures. It’s part of a playground jungle gym.

Light and shadow repeating itself on a tall downtown apartment building in photo by Christina Leimer

I like the repeating sequence of dark and light blocks, staggered sets of vertical bars and long edge lines as the sun slants across them and shades the balconies on this tall downtown apartment building.

Photo with repeating pattern of light and shadow with depth of field

Another repeating pattern that caught my attention. The light and shadow in the downtown apartment building can look flat, depending on how you see it. In this set of stairs the depth is clear in the lighter background columns.

Water in a fountain looks like glass when you stop its action in a photo

Water in a fountain falling on rocks looks like old, rough glass when you stop its flow in a photo.

Women’s Rules

by | CounterSpeak, Feature 2, Personal

Women’s Rules

A female friend told me, with astonished curiosity: “I’ve never known a woman who’s so unaffected by the rules for women. You don’t even seem to know they exist.”

“What?! There are rules?” I grinned and rolled my eyes, waiving away the observation. But, it did make me wonder. Two decades later, after bumping head-long into a few of those rules, I think she was right. Somehow, I never got the rule book. Or I just never read it.

Growing up on a farm, the oldest child in the family, I was driving a tractor when I was so young I could barely see over the steering wheel. Chopping wood, feeding chickens, pushing the lawnmower, hauling hay—girls did any chores they were physically capable of doing. It was an all hands on deck environment. Lots of work to be done; few people to do it. When I wasn’t in school or working, I played in the woods and fields, climbed trees, hunted for arrowheads, and fished and swam in the pond, by myself or with neighbor kids, until I got hungry and went home. In my first 10 years, agency and independence were solidly engrained.

My favorite reading, in elementary school, was biographies. Mom would take me to the public library and I would bring home a stack of books, lay in the floor and soak in the lives of people doing extraordinary things, some overcoming extreme obstacles. All kinds of people. Colors. Genders. Disabilities. The message I got was, people do incredible things. Then, as I entered my second decade, along came the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Maude, and Helen Reddy singing “I Am Woman.”

These shows were groundbreaking for featuring independent women and the song became the anthem of the 1960s and 70s feminist movement. But I didn’t know that then. Without historical or political context, the women sitcom characters and music reinforced the conclusion I’d reached from the biographies. Women, like other people, can do professional work, live alone and say what they think.

In this context, I took my few childhood gender-biased battles as isolated individuals’ problems, not global expectations. In the fourth grade, there were enough boys in my class to field a softball team but most of them were not athletic. I was the only athletic girl. So I wanted to play on the boys’ softball team, making the argument that it was the only way our school could possibly win. When my female teacher refused to let me, I took the field anyway on game day.

She chased me inside the school building, hitting me in the back with her high-heeled shoe. Then, when the St. Louis Cardinals made the World Series, she brought a TV to school and let all the boys out of class to watch the games. Many of the boys didn’t care about sports. I did, but she wouldn’t let me watch. So I folded my arms at my desk and refused to do any school work. I didn’t know she was enforcing society’s gender rules. I just thought she was an ignorant, mean person who liked the boys better than me.

As an adult, moving to other parts of the U.S. and entering the professional world, I began to experience some jarring. As often happens when there’s something I need to understand, the women’s rules question from years earlier re-appeared. But where do I find these rules, I wondered. The answer: look to the broader culture. That’s where you’ll find the rule book. So tuning my radar to magazines, clothing, politics and my own experiences in different settings, I found some of the rules and realized some were finding me. Here’s what I learned, and how I measure up.

Based on women’s magazines, I’m supposed to be interested in:

✔  Health                           Not
✔ Beauty                           Not
✔ Relationships               Only the one I’m in.
✔ Food                             Love to eat. Not read about it.
✔ Fashion                        Some
✔ Celebrity                       Not

Of all the things there are to learn and think about, why would these topics pervade women’s reading material? I typically see these magazines in beauty shops and grocery store checkout lines. My mother owned a beauty shop, so these magazines must have been around our house when I was growing up. Yet I was so unconcerned with these parts of life that it took a graduate course in gender stratification to realize these topics reflect women’s traditional domain—home and family. And celebrity and gossip reflect women’s interest in people’s personal lives. Still? It’s 2016. I am an alien.

Based on clothing for adult females, I’m supposed to be:
Size  4-16

or maybe up to size 18 depending on the store or brand, or down to size 12W. Does the W mean woman, or wide? Based on an internet search where others asked this question—we’re not sure. Some say woman. But that makes no sense, since men’s and women’s clothes typically aren’t on the same rack or even in the same section of the store. Anyway, all sizes above this range are considered “plus.” I’m a plus woman. The plus size clothing is usually separate from the regular sizes, often on another floor. In one store, it was in the basement, next to the carpets and furniture. Can’t ignore the symbolism of that placement.

I’m inclined to take this “plus” moniker as meaning I’m a super woman or more than a woman. But that’s not the feel, when the salesperson silently points me to the basement. Why? The reality is there’s tremendous variation in women’s bodies. So why be accepting of such a limited range? Clothes sizing and labeling too is all over the map. Some adult females’ sizes are referred to as Junior or Misses. Does that make these females not yet women? Perhaps many of us are not regular women.

Based on women’s voices, I’m supposed to:
Speak softly, obliquely, in a high pitch.

But I’m loud, direct and tenor, or to use the gendered categories of classical music, contralto. Wikipedia says a contralto female voice is rare, maybe one percent of the female population. It’s in about the same range as the male countertenor. So, the reality is, some women’s and men’s voices overlap; they’re indistinguishable. Why then, must we assume people’s gender based on their voice? On the phone, people who don’t know me call me sir. I’ve been hung up on, told to go into a bank to get my business taken care of, and transferred to the fraud unit. Often, even after I’ve corrected the person’s mistaken gender attribution, if the conversation continues long enough, they revert to calling me sir. What’s up with that? Why does anyone even need to say yes sir, no sir, or thank you sir? Why isn’t yes, no, and thank you sufficient? Why do we need to genderize such speech?

Direct. If I was running for political office and asked about my hair, makeup, clothing, or spouse’s role, I’d respond Bernie Sanders’ style: “Do you have a serious question to ask?” Having received feedback, a.k.a. negative reinforcement, I’ve tried to be less direct, but then I find it annoys some men, makes me lose track of the point, allows others to miss the point, and makes my stomach turn at my own rambling and muddledness.

Loud. I enjoy wit and humor and laugh full-bodied when something strikes me as funny. When it’s just amusing, I only smile. When I’m impassioned, when I’m talking about something I strongly care about, my voice and bearing rise. Combine that with my plus size and contralto, and it equals, for some people—intimidating. Throttle back, was the message from a male supervisor. I’m to notice the space I take up, and take up less of it. “You could do something about your size,” was the advice of a petite female supervisor, conveyed with an undertone of, if you were only willing to. Hhmm, then I guess I should get bigger.

At work, I’m supposed to:
Bring the snacks, take the notes, and fetch anyone who hasn’t shown up on time at the conference room. I don’t. I’m supposed to allow men to restate my ideas as their own and not call them on it. Sometimes, I do, just to get along.

But snacks? We’re all capable of going shopping. No one has to make food from scratch anymore, so why would this task still fall to women? Taking notes? Often, I would prefer to take notes, because I like them short and concise, and it gives some power when you craft the record of the meeting—but that’s not the way it’s perceived. If men take notes, they get kudos for their egalitarianism; women get perceptually demoted. Fetching someone who’s late? Start without them, and don’t recap. Next time, they’ll arrive before the starting gun. It’s risky, as a woman, to set such boundaries and hold to professional expectations, especially when the colleagues who are late are men. Women are supposed to coddle. If we don’t, you know what we’re called.

Now that I’ve read the women’s rule book, it’s clear how misaligned my interests, thinking and behavior are with the expectations for American women. But why, I wondered, was there such a contradiction between my upbringing and societal expectations. At least a partial answer came, serendipitously, when my mother bought a new car. She called me, excited about her red Camaro. I returned the excitement, went to see it and went for a ride. Then she repeated her story the following week, and the next, until finally I said, with a bit more exasperation than was tolerable on the other end of the phone, “I know, mom, you told me! I saw it.”

She exploded. “You don’t understand!”

“Understand what?”

“This is the first car I’ve bought on MY own!! In MY own name!! With MY own money!!”

I was shocked. My strong-willed, business-owning mother, who was then nearing 50 years old, had always driven a car (my family had at least two) and earned money. I had no idea this all existed only because my dad allowed it. That the U.S. financial systems at the time would only lend money to men.

From my child’s vantage point, my mom was strong and independent, just like my dad. Neither of them ever told me I couldn’t do things because I was a girl. My dad taught me to drive the tractor, and before I started to school, I was his constant companion. My mom always told my brother, sister and me, “Be what you are, no matter what people think.”

This incident was such a revelation I started peeling back the surface. When I did, I saw a different world, one with a set of perspectives and experiences I perhaps should have known by the time I was an adult, but didn’t. Neither of my parents was politically active. I never heard them use the word “feminist,” yet that revolution was going on all around. While even today women’s parity is still far short of the goal, the impact of the 1960s and 70s women’s movement was so great that by the time I was living on my own, I could take for granted credit cards and car loans. I just got them when I needed them and could afford it. The fact that, had I been born 15 years earlier, my father, brother or a husband would have had to sign for my financial needs, makes me shudder.

Throughout my life, I’ve not identified much as female. I never doubted I was a girl. My body has the requisite feminine parts. But I thought of myself as human, or androgynous, and reveled in all the variety and contrasts that entails. Even now, if I pictured my version of my identity as a four-slice pie, woman might be one slice, maybe a slice and a half. Yet, regardless of my way of thinking and feeling about my identity, the world identifies me as a woman, and therefore, subject to women’s rules.

It’s this forced identity that chafes me. Women’s interests, women’s clothes, women’s voices and work expectations, what I see when I look at what our culture shows us about women is so narrow. Even when your exterior is granite, over time, with frequency, the feedback works like acid rain, either we chip away parts of ourselves or others do it for us. Some of us elbow the box, squirming and trying for more room, finding our niche within these broad social constraints. But what do we, and the world, lose in the process?

What we see and experience is how we learn. It gives us our framework for interpreting meaning, making sense of the world and our lives. In the world of my dreams, we nourish the diversity that’s in each of us. The complexity that is human. We give our daughters, and our sons, more ways of being in the world, more opportunities to express their innate talent, vision and ideas. And we celebrate and display that richer picture. If that happens, there will be different lessons. Instead of women’s rules and men’s rules, perhaps they, and we, will learn the rules for being human.

Tree Friends

by | Personal, Reflections & Stories

Tree Friends

When I was about 7 or 8 years old, occasionally my dad would decide it was time to cut down a pear tree that had grown up in the fence row. “It’s messing up the fence and producing spotty fruit,” he’d say. “I’m gonna cut ‘er down.”

Then I’d throw a fit, arguing that you can’t just cut down a perfectly good tree because of where it lives. It didn’t bother me that it didn’t produce edible fruit, or any fruit at all. And the fence didn’t appear to me to be suffering. Besides, you can always move a fence.

Ultimately my dad relented and the tree was safe until the next time it annoyed him.

Eventually we moved away and most of the farm was sold, turned into a subdivision with streets, houses and no fences. But at times I wondered about that fruit tree.

As an adult, my affinity for plants is the way others feel about their pets. I can’t say I have the greenest of thumbs, but I feel a protectiveness and companionship. My living space isn’t complete without plants. When we move, I rent a vehicle specifically to move my plants. Even though I don’t have that many of them, I want them to be comfortable and to survive.

So it was out of character, in preparing for a cross-country move, when I thought about leaving a plant behind. It had lost all but one of its leaves and was nothing more than twigs on a quarter-round trunk-like stalk. “I don’t know what to do with it. I can’t throw it away and no one would want it,” I told my partner. “If it’s still bare when we leave, maybe I’ll just set it in the vacant lot beside our house. Then it’s on its own.”

Within a week, buds popped up on its twigs. By the time we were ready to go, it had sprouted three leaves, all on the same side of its trunk. “I guess it wants to go with us,” I said, amazed at its effort to show it was alive.

A few months ago I visited my hometown after decades away. Driving by the farmhouse I was born in, on the edge of the subdivision that used to be our farm, I thought about the fruit tree I’d fought to save as a kid. Then I noticed, about where I remembered it should be, an old tree and a single fence post. Surely not, I thought.

I turned into the drive, got out of my car, walked to the tree and felt an elated sense of anticipation and discovery. I looked under it, around it, touched its crispy, tattered leaves. Took one and examined its lightly serrated edges. It’s an old tree, for sure. Split and speckled. And an old fencepost, pocked and shredded. Could it really be?

Returning home, I checked the web. Pear trees in the wild can live more than 50 years. That meant, it could be my childhood tree! I was ecstatic. The tree I’d defended was still alive, anchored in land I once loved.

But then, as I so often do, I questioned. Is it even a pear tree? I’m not sure how to tell. Maybe it’s a different tree planted later in the same spot, I reasoned. But why would someone plant a new tree in a fence row? And if that was the case, why leave the fence post but take away the fence?

I couldn’t just let the questions go unanswered, so I shared the tree’s picture with the Missouri Native Plant Society to find out what kind of tree it is. Probably a plum tree, they think. Well, what to make of that? Maybe I’m misremembering the fruit. According to my research, it’s uncommon, but some plum trees are known to live 30 years in the wild. That timespan, though, wouldn’t be long enough to make it my tree.

So I don’t know if it’s my tree. But does a “yes it is” or “no it’s not” really matter? Facts are important. But sometimes they’re not the takeaway from an experience. When our house plant quickly sprouted leaves, I simply accepted my immediate sense that it wanted to go with us. I didn’t second-guess my interpretation. Nor did I struggle to explain its sudden growth spurt. Through multiple moves, I’ve watched, with pleasure, its continued leafing. It now sits on our porch, content and full. My immediate sense of the old plum-pear tree felt like embracing a long lost friend, one I’d helped to survive. Perhaps that’s the takeaway. Whether my tree lived only 5 more years and was replaced, or lived 50 more and still exists, it was a visceral reminder that, like friends, plants and people can connect, the life force of each enlivening the other.

Today, as I’ve been worrying about the facts, my brother sent a photo. That old tree is blooming, and it’s a cherry tree. Black cherry trees can live up to 250 years.

Simple Things

by | Personal, Reflections & Stories

Simple Things

An odd thing happened the morning we all learned, what for many of us was, the unthinkable results of our presidential election. Interspersed with the anger, fear, and emotional chaos of a world that suddenly seems on the precipice of catastrophe, sparks, like fire flies on a Midwest summer night, appeared unexpected—blinking and disappearing, yet soothing and sublime.

During these few weeks…

  • In my tiny town, on the edge of San Francisco Bay, the shortest Main Street in America turns into Ark Row, named because its buildings were once houseboats. Draped by massive trees that raise the sidewalk and bend around buildings, the narrow street curves, offering little space for cars. A woman stepped off the curb to get into her parked car, then noticed on the windshield a pie pan sized leaf, blazing green and unblemished. She picked it up, glancing down, then up, furtively, just as I walked by. I smiled, she returned the smile. I said “a gift for you.”  I was thinking about taking it home, she said. And she did.

 

  • Sitting with my morning coffee, facing the living room window, the sun streaming in backlit the steam rising from my coffee cup—a swirling white ring spinning along its rim, volcano-like as it rose and dispersed, twisting wisps, a lazy cyclone, billowing, tapering, fading away.

 

  • On December 21st, we listened to Windham Hill’s Winter Solstice Concert, acoustic guitar, piano, cello. At moments, I melted into the music, enfolded in beauty free of words, relaxed into a sense of being without edges, on the longest night of the year—the dividing line, when light will begin again.

 

  • It’s migration season and the air is so filled with birds that part of the bay is off limits to give them safe harbor. At times, hundreds fly so low, they seem to be skittering—running on water. Seals and sea lions break the surface, from a distance–the head of a dog, back undulating like an eel. I watch in reverie when suddenly, a porpoise bursts straight up, fully out of the water, arches and dives beneath the waves. My body tingles with delight. Then anticipation, of another leap.

 

  • The softness of my wife’s hand, silky, warm down; and my own, coarser—pressing the skin between my index finger and thumb. It doesn’t spring back immediately, like it used to—but it feels right.

 

Such simple things. They feed us, and bring light to the darkness. They’re there all the time, but at least for me, they stand out most clearly against the night.

Out of Class

by | CounterSpeak, Personal

Out of Class

I work at a community college, but rarely interact with students. I count them, analyze their enrollment patterns, their graduation rates and grade point averages. I keep track of the types of degrees awarded, the demographic composition of the student body, and the classes students complete so administrators can make decisions about running the college.

What I do is called institutional research. So when I answered my phone one day, the student voice surprised me. Her words sent me back decades.

“I need financial aid to go to college but my mom won’t sign the papers,” she said. “I’m 18, what can I do?”

I know that story. I never expected to hear it from anyone else though. I thought I was the only person in the U.S. whose parents refused to help their children go to college. With all the politicking and pushing today for everyone to go to college, and the cultural belief in family support and pride in each other’s success, it’s easy to feel like an alien when you have to go it alone.

It must be your own fault, too. Presidents Clinton to Bush to Obama, through one plan or another, have intended to make college accessible to every kid who graduates from high school. So hey, all you got to do is make it through 12 years. Then, the world is your oyster as you head off to college and take your rightful place in making each generation more successful than the last. In recent years, we’ve recognized that foster kids might need extra help, but otherwise, of course we’ve all got parents who push us, prod us, and support us on to that great equalizer, college.

Every scholarly study on the benefits of higher education relates college degrees to earning power. Without a college degree, you make very little money, say the studies. Without a college degree, you can’t hope to reap the fruits of America’s orchard. Go to college. Get a degree. Maybe even two. Without it, you’re zero. You’ll amount to nothing in America. You’ll be broke and miserable and wind up on the street sleeping under cardboard. Begging for scraps from the educated. Who, by the way, will step over you on their way to a seaside restaurant. It’s your own damn fault, they’ll say. Should have gone to college.

And whether your culture values higher education or not, mainstream culture does, and that’s what counts.

For me though, money wasn’t the motivator. Every study of employee motivation tells us that, yes, money is appreciated, we can always use more of it, but money alone won’t make us happy with our job, won’t make us want to improve the widget-making process or streamline the paperwork. The paycheck boost looks good, for a couple of months, but then we start wondering how long it’ll take to get the next one.

Money isn’t enough of a motivator to get through 12 years of working toward a four-year degree. That’s how long it took me, working a full-time job and supporting myself, to earn a Bachelor’s degree. College for me was about learning, about understanding the world around me, and before me. It was about how the world might be different in the future than it is today. It was about how I might change the world. Before I started the first grade, I was a reader. Every week, my mom gave me carte blanche at our small town’s public library. Into the big kid’s section I’d go. No baby books for me. And when, in the third grade, I found the adult section, the librarian had a heart to heart with my mother. My mother won. So did I.

My parents were blue collar small business people in the rural Mid-West. College wasn’t necessary to make a good living then. You just needed to work hard.

To my dad, that meant physical labor. Thinking was NOT work. Writing, drawing, playing music, that was NOT work. If you didn’t sweat. If your muscles didn’t bulge and pop and occasionally get bruised, then you weren’t working. You were lazy, loafing, living off the labor of others.

Even so, as long as my mom was around, I assumed I’d go to college. My teachers encouraged it. I should be a teacher, or a nurse, they said. Ugh, I thought. A scientist maybe. An artist maybe. Or an explorer. I had a couple of distant cousins, my parents’ age, who had college degrees, so college wasn’t completely unheard of. Even though these cousins lived in big cities, far away from us, and we never saw them. One of them was crazy, my dad said. College made him that way. The other one, who’d grown up in the city, had no common sense. He thought he could live on the land. Grow his own food. Build his own house powered by the sun. Provide for himself. College made him stupid, my dad said.

When my mom left us, my parents divorced, and it was the end of my college dreams. My dad had the money. He had custody of my brother, sister and me. And he hated college. Besides making people crazy and stupid, it turned them into smart alecky, know-it-alls. At 13, I was that already.

The next several years were a rough ride for all of us. Living on my own at 17 and working the graveyard shift in a nursing home, I finished high school.

I was a writer. Interested in journalism, my work was the backbone of our high school newspaper and literary magazine, and the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism was considering offering me a scholarship, as were local businesses and organizations. “Take my name off the scholarship list,” I told our high school counselor. I couldn’t see it working. Four years was eternity. And the idea of moving into a tiny dorm room with 18-year-old women who were just out of high school and living away from home for the first time, whose concerns would be different than mine, seemed unbearably isolating.

Before the summer was over, I realized my mistake. I couldn’t live without going to college. But how?

Off I went to the financial aid office at the local university asking the same question the young woman asked me on the phone. The financial aid officers needed my dad’s income information and signature. I knew he wouldn’t give it, but I asked. He didn’t. There was little the university could do. The minuscule scholarships still available weren’t even enough to pay for books. I had to work for another year then file an income tax return to prove financial independence, so I could get loans.

By that time, my old Chevy died, so I had to borrow a few hundred dollars to buy another used car. At minimum wage, paychecks didn’t always cover the rent, and I fell behind. I was living on 19 cent boxes of macaroni and cheese from the thrift store. Debts were accumulating from everywhere. It was gonna be a long haul.

*****

I mentioned the student’s phone call to our Dean of Student Development Services. “I hear that a lot from our students,” she said. “Some parents think their job’s done when their kid turns 18. They’re on their own. They don’t seem to care if their child does better than they did.”

Some parents don’t want their children to do better. That’s a fact that our cultural myths and rhetoric about family hides.

A professor, whose son entered his father’s field and was beginning to win awards and garner attention, told me that he was proud but jealous. He wanted his son to do well, but not surpass his own achievements. In the case of a working class family, sending a child to college may, as it did for my dad, counter their own values. A college education is not considered “better.” For other working class parents, there’s the fear of losing their children if they send them to college. What will they learn? Who will they be when they finish their degree? Will they still be part of the family? Will they want to come home? Working class culture, is not educated professional culture.

*****

For working class people, colleges are remote, even when they live nearby. So the first semester I went to enroll at the university, my younger sister went with me. She didn’t know any more about what we were doing than I did, but she was at least a familiar face, in an otherwise foreign environment. Besides, if she decided to go to college in a few years, she’d have a bit of experience to make it less daunting. We met my advisor in a big hall where other students were doing the same thing at tables scattered around the room. My sister and I sat down across the card table from her but she told my sister to go sit in a row of chairs by the wall until we were finished. I wonder if she would have shooed away a parent who was accompanying their child.

The advisor then tried to convince me to register for basic English, Math and Science courses. I had other plans. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get through college in four years, so I wanted to take courses that interested me and that might help me earn more than minimum wage before I finished college. She didn’t get it. There were specified courses for freshmen, she explained. There were course sequences. There were prerequisites. I insisted. She insisted. After multiple volleys, I ended up taking an English course and a History course, to satisfy the university, and Journalism courses, to satisfy me.

I don’t know how much this experience affected my sister’s view of higher education. We never commented on it, working class people don’t mention humiliations. She never finished high school. Neither did my brother, whose artistic talents shine even without nurturing. He uses them in building. Construction or carpentry, now that’s something a working class man does. He doesn’t draw or paint on a canvas. Reading and writing books, that’s not what a working class woman does. She gets married, has babies, works on the farm, in a factory or as a waitress, hairdresser or clerk in a retail store or fast food restaurant. She doesn’t travel around the world, go to museums and film festivals, or live independently in the city.

*****

I didn’t notice the social class differences much while working on my undergraduate degree. I hit the campus for class, then left for my full-time job, so I didn’t know other students or professors. Whatever happened on campus, short of its closing down, was irrelevant to me.

In graduate school, however, three years after I finished my bachelor’s degree, social class distinctions were obvious, even pointed at times.

Attending full-time on an assistantship, I spent every day with my peers and professors. In this program, there was a not-so-subtle distinction between students who were doctoral material and those who intended to end their education with a Masters. As a student deemed doctoral worthy, I was expected to attend professional conferences and present my work. The problem was, I was actually trying to live off of my assistantship, with no supplemental money flowing in from home. Pointing out my lack of funds made some of my friends and professors uncomfortable. How could I be there, looking like them, doing credible scholarly work, yet not have the same financial resources and family support. They weren’t privileged, after all. Just middle class. Must be that I was scared, or resisting. I just didn’t want to do the things that would bolster my career. When I declined acceptance into a Ph.D. program, one professor told me, dismissively, that I could do it if it was important enough to me. I just wasn’t willing to sacrifice.

*****

That summer, I went to my dad’s house for dinner. It was the first time we’d seen each other in 20 years. His stepson, who I remember at about age 9 chopping up the plants in my room, and generally being annoying, immediately told a story about spinning his truck’s wheels to fling gravel onto the fancy car of some “city slickers” who were driving on a country road.

What do you say to each other after 20 years’ and two college degrees worth of separation?

Relying on the presence of food and neighbors, my dad was clearly hoping for a smooth visit. The questions were superficial, intended to be non-confrontational, but even these bland queries couldn’t avoid the class differences. “What kind of car do you drive,” he asked. When I told him a Honda, his wife laughed and hit me on the shoulder. “So aren’t you gonna talk about people who drive those foreign cars, the way you usually do?” “Nah,” my dad said, trying to get along, “that’s the kind of car professors drive.”

None of my first cousins or aunts and uncles went to college, and sometimes, in each other’s company, it’s as if they don’t know who they’re talking to. I’m a stranger that they’re supposed to know, but aren’t quite sure they do. Sometimes I’m not sure myself, about how much I’ve really changed. I’m not a professor. I told my dad before, in explaining my job, that I don’t teach. But educated people are foreign, unknown entities. There are few books in my dad’s house, and that’s what educated people do, don’t they? Write books.

Their world feels foreign to me too, but in some ways it always did. Which was part of why I knew I had to go to college. Sometimes it’s difficult to separate the class distinctions from the jagged edges my family’s divorce and disruption caused. My brother and I talk, tentatively, cautiously. But eventually there’s a place where our souls connect, a place where we know and remember each other. It’s a place where life is what it is, regardless of class and distance and pain. I tell him about the trip I’m taking to Europe in the fall. He tells me, standing on the front porch of his cabin he built himself from scrap wood, that he’ll never have the money to travel, but he’d like to. I’ll never have the money to buy a house, I say. I got started too late. We’d both like to do it all. But we have to choose.

That year, finally, I paid off my student loans. But another young woman was just starting the trek.