Posted on by rjonakait

The Class of the Bar

          I was in a hole-in-the-wall, neighborhood bar. I had never been there before. I didn’t often walk in its direction, but on this day, I was passing it, saw empty seats at the bar, and stopped in. It almost immediately put me in a bad mood. At the biergarten where I often went, I not surprisingly got beer. This place had liquor bottles behind the bartender, and after toying with the notion of wine, I said, “Give me some sort of Scotch.” The barkeep held up a bottle and said, “Oban?” I replied, “It doesn’t have to be that good.” He then rattled off the names of three more single malts. Expensive Scotch is all they had. I took the Oban, but I was annoyed. I became more annoyed when I found, although this was a few years back, that it cost $20. I silently vowed that this would be my only visit to the nameless-to-me place.

          I sipped my drink and took out my book. I wanted to be out of there, but I also wanted to get my money’s worth. As my carefully-measured-to-make-sure-you-do-not-get-too-much-even-though-it-cost-two-sawbucks (does anyone say “sawbuck” anymore?) drink was nearing its end, a woman, gesturing at the stool on my right, asked, “Is anyone sitting here?” I replied that it was open, and she and another woman sat down. I only glanced at them. The one nearer me was perhaps late 30s and the other a few years younger.

          I returned to my Scarlett Thomas novel. The two women talked to each other. I did not hear their conversation, but after a few minutes, the one nearer me, Kris, I soon found out, said, “That’s a nice jacket,” and gingerly rolled some of my sleeve’s fabric between her fingers. I thanked her, not knowing what to make of the compliment. The jacket was an old Harris tweed. I had bought it fifteen years ago in a secondhand store. She went on to say that a tweed was always good. “You can wear it everywhere. You can wear it to a wedding.”

          We three started chatting. I asked what they did. The older one was the athletic director and soccer coach at a famous private school in Brooklyn, and the other was a PE teacher and lacrosse coach there. I joked, but I am not sure they realized that I was joking, that they must make a lot of money considering how much tuition their school charged. They quickly rejoined that they did not get paid much and not nearly what public school teachers get.

          I found out the older one was from Rhode Island, and she smilingly confirmed that everyone in the state not only knew each other but that almost everybody was her uncle. She told me that she went to Assumption College, and then added, “In Massachusetts.” The other one, Margaret or Maggie, said she was from Connecticut but was quick to add, “Northern Connecticut.” She had gone to Marquette University, and she had enjoyed Milwaukee.

          One of them asked about the tee shirt I had on under the Harris tweed. It had a circle on the chest with “73” on it. I said, “It’s the best number.” Margaret wanted to know why. I said that not only was 73 a prime number, its two digits are prime numbers, reversing the digits yields another prime number, and that 73 was the 21st prime number, and 21 was the product of 7 and 3. I said that I had learned this from Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory, who went on to give other noteworthy aspects of the number 73 that I no longer remembered. (I was surprised when I learned that 73 has its own Wikipedia page.) Margaret said that she did not know what a prime number was; Kris rolled her eyes and said, “A Marquette education.” (I was surprised about the professed ignorance since I thought that prime numbers were a basic part of education and a simple concept. A few days later, however, I was still reading the mystery/romantic/math book PopCo that I had in the bar, and I found the narrator’s grandfather saying, “No one knows very much about how primes behave, that’s the problem. Problems to do with primes have puzzled the greatest mathematicians.” Ok. I guess they aren’t that basic and simple after all.)

          Margaret said, “You must be smart.” I repeated that my 73 knowledge came from The Big Bang Theory. Kris said, “I figured 73 could not mean your age.” I replied, “It once was my age.” I was flattered that she said, “No way. I thought that you were 60 or something.” But my ego did not stay inflated long, for Kris soon labeled me “cute.” The inflection for this cute was not one announced about a boy band member or a young man or woman spotted in a bar or even for a puppy or a baby. No, this inflected “cute” was the kind used in conjunction with describing your great grandpa.

          The two told me that some of the students in their expensive private school acted entitled, but most were good kids and that no parent had unduly tried to influence them. I had asked about this both because of the then-recent scandals involving fake athletic credentials and college admissions and because I was told that a professional at a local squash club had been berated by a parent when the pro had moved a kid to a lower place in the club’s squash hierarchy. The parent, apparently, was worried that the demotion would harm the chances of the beloved and very special child going to some selective school.

          But, still, I thought to myself, even if my two new companions did not feel any overt pressures from the school’s parents, many of them most certainly are status conscious. Without consciously registering why—perhaps if I were a good psychologist, sociologist, or novelist, I would have the reasons–the two struck me with an aura of lower middle classdom that they had not completely transcended. It certainly was not their clothing because their dress fitted in well to a Brooklyn neighborhood bar where just about anything goes. I don’t think it was accents or speech patterns because nothing had stood out to me. It was partly from some of their comments. When Margaret stressed that she was from northern Connecticut, she was indicating that she did not want to be associated with what many see as the rich part of the state. Somehow the comment that my old Harris tweed jacket made good wedding apparel said something to me. But it was more than just a few comments. It was no doubt congeries of factors hitting me subconsciously that led me to the feeling of their social status.

          It made me feel a kinship with them because I, too, come from the lower middle class, or at least on a good day I did; right after the father’s payday, my childhood family might have made it all the way up there. I don’t think, however, that I now give the immediate impression that this is my origin. I wondered why and found that I was not sure of an answer.

          I did consciously change some of my mannerisms because of experiences at my expensive college. I found that my ties were not the right width and that it was acceptable to wear a blue Oxford button-down with a frayed collar and that some of my pronunciations seemed funny to others—e.g., the-ate-er. Some of my lessons caused me a bit more discomfort than others. For example, in my first year at college, I spent the night at the home of a very rich girl. Her grandfather had invented something essential for airplanes that had made a lot of money, and the house where I was staying was the grandest I had ever been in. I had hardly ever slept overnight in anyone else’s house before, and not surprisingly, I had not slept well in this one. The next morning when I wandered out bleary eyed, the mother pointed down a hall and told me to go to the breakfast nook and have something to eat. Maybe I had heard of a breakfast nook, but I had never before seen, much less eaten in one. No one else was there. I sat down on the bench seating. On the table was a box of cornflakes, one of my least favorite cereals, and a pitcher (certainly not a carton) of milk. I thought that I could get those dry, tasteless flakes palatable if I made them extra, extra sweet. The only other item on the table was a tiny, tiny bowl of a white substance with an even tinier spoon. It seemed odd that the sugar was in such miniscule container, but there it was. I scooped well into the double digits of the sugar onto my Kellogg’s. I was about to start eating when the mother returned and said, “I am so sorry. I forgot to put the sugar out.” Thinking as fast as I could, I put a spoonful of cornflakes into my mouth, chewed, swallowed, and said, “No problem. I don’t put sugar on my cereal.” It may have been the saltiest food I ever ate.

          But even if I came off as working class in a way that might have held me back when I was nineteen, I have shed that cloak. When I was an adult, my parents, however, reminded me in countless little ways of my less-than-upper-class origins. For example, I told my parents that I would be visiting them and that I would arrive in time for dinner. Hey, when do you eat dinner? I had forgotten that for my parents, dinner was the noon meal. I showed up five hours after they had the table set and the food prepared, which was, how shall I put it, a little dry by that point. Another example: The father was visiting us in Brooklyn. The parlor floor of our brownstone house had ceilings twelve feet high with plaster moldings and plaster rosettes that dated back to the 1870s. The father almost immediately after his arrival started explaining to me how I could lower the ceilings to a more sensible eight feet, a change that would save me much in heating costs. On the other hand, those interesting, pleasant women in that no-name-to-me bar seemed to retain a lower-middle-class aura. I realize that that made me feel superior to them, and I did not like that feeling. I have been lucky in so many ways. I was born into a time when social mobility in this country was real. Today, a child born into the bottom half of society has a much lower chance of moving out of that status than in almost any other developed country and much lower than when I was born. (You can look it up.) We still have a Horatio Alger myth, but it is a myth. The income gap is real, and the rich have insulated themselves and their families from invasion from the “unworthy.”

          My encounter with the two women in the bar led me to think about another young woman I met in a bar. She was tending bar, and her surname, she told me, was Dumas with the “s” pronounced, and I always addressed her by that last name. If you had asked me after I first met her, “Was she from the lower middle class?”, I would have said definitely not. But I could not have said what it was about her that led me to that opinion. I was not surprised, then, to learn eventually that her father was a doctor in South Carolina, where she grew up, her older brother was a partner in a prestigious law firm, and her younger brother was attending a top-tier law school. When I found out that she was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, I said, “Oh, you are one of those fucking smart women.” She paused, smiled, and replied, “Yes, I am one of those fucking smart women.”

          She may have been smart, but she did tell me that she had not read much since leaving Penn. I gave her my autographed copy of The Black Count: Glory, Evolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss, the Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the father of the author Alexandre Dumas. I told her that she ought to learn more about her ancestors. (She was as white as the snow that does not fall in Charleston, and I am not sure that she got the racial joke in the gift.) She stopped working in the bar shortly after I gave her the book, and I never found out what she thought of it or whether she even read the biography.

          Dumas was different from other bartenders and servers in the biergarten not only because she was an Ivy League graduate. Almost everyone who worked there had some sort of other career that they were pursuing—actor, videographer, music editor, writer, podcast comedian, lead singer in a covers band, Ph.D candidate, psychologist, potential bar owner, tour guide—but she mentioned no aspirations. This also made her different from the athletic director whom I met in the offended-me bar.

          Kris had mentioned that she had a master’s degree, but I did not get in what or from where, but when Maggie mentioned the book I had put down in front of the way-too-expensive Scotch, Kris said that she would like to read more books but that she did not have the time. Most people who claim to want to read and say they don’t have the time are really saying they prefer watching TV or listening to podcasts or searching for online videos or playing videogames in their leisure time rather than reading. They make the perfectly acceptable choice to do something other than crack a book.

          Kris, however, went on to say that in addition to her two jobs as athletic director and soccer coach that she was studying for a Ph.D. I was not familiar with the field — educational leadership — and I did not know the school–the University of New England. She was pursuing her degree online. When she got home at night, she turned to studying for that Ph.D. I asked if this was hard, and she spit out, “Oh, yes. It is a lot different and easier going to classes with lots of other people than it is sitting by yourself in front of a computer.” But she was determined to get the degree. She was determined to learn more; she was determined to educate herself and move up in the world.

          But the deck is stacked against her in ways that it was not for me. In this land of opportunity, opportunity is increasingly available only if you are “to the manor born.” In a better country, the strivers like Kris would make it to the head of the class. I hope she does.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

A federal judge has ordered the appointment of a special master to see if any of the federal records recovered from Mar-a-Lago are protected by “executive privilege.” Dobbs, the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, held in essence that because a right to privacy is not explicitly stated in the Constitution, a right to abortion could not be inferred from the charter’s text. Like abortion, executive privilege is not in the Constitution’s text. That privilege is inferred from the Constitution’s structure which supposedly mandates a Separation of Powers. Many constitutional rights are not stated in the Constitution but inferred from its structure and text. But not the right to choose for women.

Stories about Mikhail Gorbachev’s death report that he ended the cold war. And right after that, the American defense budget decreased. Oh, wait, it didn’t. Apparently like death and taxes, increased defense spending is inevitable.

 For tennis and some other televised sports, the graphics indicate the home country of a competitor with a flag. This is of little use to me since I don’t know the difference between Spain’s flag and Portugal’s, Chile’s and Argentina’s, Bulgaria’s, and Belarus’s. And come on, how many of you know the colors of Liechtenstein’s standard? If only I could find vexillographer Sheldon Cooper’s podcasts of “Fun with Flags.”

Each tennis player had won a point. The umpire intoned the score: “Fifteen all.” Would it be more grammatically correct or more accurate if she had said, “Fifteen both”?

If there is a connection between the singing of the national anthem and patriotism, then sports fans must love this country much more than those who do not know what a pick-off move is. I have heard in person or on broadcasts the national anthem before car races and baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and soccer games. Until this year, I had not heard it before a tennis match, but then I heard the “Star-Spangled Banner” sung on the first night of the U.S. Open this year. But even though I have heard it said that professional golfers are the most conservative of professional athletes and that golfers in general are more conservative than those who indulge in other pursuits, I have not heard the Anthem as part of the too-many golf telecasts I have seen. May I consequently assume that those at a golf event are less patriotic than those at a football or baseball game?  I wonder if our previous Golfer-in-Chief ever sang “The Star-Spangled Banner”—assuming he knows the words—before he plopped down in a golf cart for his frequent eighteen holes. Perhaps if he had sung the National Anthem more, he would have supported the Capitol Police. But then again, would you be surprised that as a result of the new golf organization, that Has Been Guy wants to learn the national anthem of Saudi Arabia?

 Life expectancy has dropped for the last two years. Another way to state that is the decline in life expectancy that started under Donald Trump has continued.

I admire people who follow their principles at a personal cost, but how should I react when I think those principles are silly? I am looking at you, Novak Djokovic.

Posted on by rjonakait

Clothes Make the Man-Child

NBP Guest Post

As a little kid, I was always partial to boys’ clothes. My parents were fairly fashion liberal from the start and let me off the hook from forcing me to wear the uberest of girlish clothes…for the most part. Upon ability to communicate (which, as you know, was rather delayed), I made it clear that pink was not my color. Before I had any say in it, though, I did wear dresses—even pink frilly ones with tights (barf). There are even photographs of me in dresses (gross). But my hatred of dresses literally reared its ugly head at a very early age. I couldn’t have been more than three when a “lovely velvet smocked dress” arrived as a gift from one of my mother’s friends. “Just try it,” my mom cajoled. I acquiesced enough to let her place the dreaded garment over my head. The contorted face that emerged from the neck hole disturbed her so much that the devil-made garment was immediately ripped off me. My face relaxed and the dress photos became a thing of the past. Soon after there was nary a ruffle nor a hint of pink in sight.

I was then allowed to dress in little shirts with stripes and collars and matching running shorts or T-shirts, button-downs, and even sweater vests (think, like, total ‘80s). When I played dress-up, I wore my father’s clothes. I required only a button-down shirt and a vest—maybe a baseball cap to top it off. I liked to play dress-up so much that eventually I received my own little red tie that I would don to feel dapper. It was pre-tied and went around my neck with an elastic band. I wore that tie as much as possible until the elastic wore out.

By the time I was in school my mom and I had arrived at a uniform that was acceptable to us both. No more girly surprises for me and no more wretched faces for my mom. My uniform consisted of a striped rugby shirt and matching sweatpants. I had multiple sets in a range of primary colors. When I had worn out or outgrown one set, we could just open to the corresponding pages in the latest Lands’ End catalogue (in the boys’ section no less!) and pick out my new colors and sizes. On any given day, I could be seen sporting green sweatpants with a green and black striped rugby shirt or perhaps blue sweatpants with a blue and red rugby shirt or perhaps even red sweatpants with a red and yellow top! Oh, I was so eclectic and fashion-forward!

In these clothes, I could pass for a real boy (Pinocchio, eat your heart out!). But looking like a real boy had its own problems. The image I presented to strangers was of a little boy, but my name was clearly that of a little girl. Strangers—waiters, teachers, shopkeepers—all thought I was a boy…until they heard my name. Then sometimes they’d ask for confirmation. Their eyes surely didn’t deceive them. I did. They judged this book by its cover, and were oh so right, but technically oh so wrong.

My hairstyle added to this confusion. In kindergarten and early elementary school, it was cut short. I paid very little attention to it. It was there on my head, but it didn’t look girly, and it existed easily without being combed or brushed. It was perfect!

Those awful mandatory school pictures where each kid is individually posed sitting at a desk reveal the evolution of my hair. It’s boy-short in the styling of Sheldon Cooper on the Big Bang Theory in kindergarten and then gets progressively longer, so that by second grade I have become Kenneth Parcell of 30 Rock. By third grade it is longer still, mostly in the back. I won’t make you read between the lines. I was unwittingly cultivating a mullet (eeek and oops!). All I knew was that longer hair meant girl and shorter meant boy. My unconscious solution, I guess, was to have both. The mullet marked the beginning of gender conformity. It was the perfect allegory for me: I needed to be part male to match how I felt on the inside, but part female to match my anatomy outside and my name. Unfortunately, as most of you know, mullets should never be the solution. Sigh, I was trying so hard to live on both sides of the fence.

Biology though dictated that I was on the girls’ team whether I liked it or not. If I were to be truly accepted, I would need to act…and look like…a girl person, and this was going to require a conscious and concerted effort. In the early years, I had tried to dress in a way that would help me disappear into the woodwork. But those rugby shirts and sweatpants made me look like a nerdy little boy. Unfortunately, I realize now that particular outfit highlighted the fact that I was the weird girl who looked like a boy. I clearly had not yet learned the subtle art of tailoring the appropriate suit. And now, I had to; the school outlawed sweatpants! How could they?!? Change was coming, but it wasn’t going to be easy.

(concluded January 17)

Posted on by rjonakait

The Class of the Bar

          I was in a hole-in-the-wall, neighborhood bar. I had never been there before. I don’t often walk in its direction, but on this day, I was passing it, saw empty seats at the bar, and stopped in. It almost immediately put me in a bad mood. At the biergarten where I often go, I not surprisingly get beer. This place had liquor bottles behind the bartender, and after toying with the notion of wine, I said, “Give me some sort of Scotch.” The barkeep held up a bottle and said “Oban?” I replied, “It doesn’t have to be that good.” He then rattled off the names of three more single malts. Expensive Scotch is all they had. I took the Oban, but I was annoyed. I became more annoyed when I found that it cost $20. I silently vowed that this would be my only visit to the nameless-to-me place.

          I sipped my drink and took out my book. I both wanted to be out of there and to get my money’s worth. As my carefully-measured-to-make-sure-you-will-not-get-too-much-even-though-it-cost-two-sawbucks (does anyone say “sawbuck” anymore?) drink was nearing its end, a woman, gesturing at the stool on my right, asked “Is anyone sitting here?” I replied that it was open, and she and another woman sat down. I only glanced at them. The one nearer me was perhaps late 30s and the other a few years younger.

          I returned to my Scarlett Thomas novel. The two women talked to each other. I did not hear their conversation, but after a few minutes, the one nearer me, Kris, I soon found out, said, “That’s a nice jacket,” and gingerly rolled some of my sleeve’s fabric between her fingers. I thanked her, not knowing what to make of the compliment. The jacket is an old Harris tweed. I bought it fifteen years ago in a secondhand store. She went on to say that a tweed was always good. “You can wear it everywhere. You can wear it to a wedding.”

          We three started chatting. I asked what they did. The older one was the athletic director and soccer coach at a famous private school in Brooklyn, and the other was a PE teacher and lacrosse coach there. I joked, but I am not sure they realized that I was joking, that they must make a lot of money considering how much tuition their school charged. They quickly rejoined that they did not get paid much and not nearly what public school teachers get.

          I found out the older one was from Rhode Island, and she smilingly confirmed that everyone in the state not only knew each other but that almost everybody was her uncle. She told me that she went to Assumption College, and then added, “In Massachusetts.” The other one, Margaret or Maggie, said she was from Connecticut but was quick to add, “Northern Connecticut.” She had gone to Marquette University, and she had enjoyed Milwaukee.

          One of them asked about the tee shirt I had on under the Harris tweed. It had a circle on the chest with “73” on it. I said, “It’s the best number.” Margaret wanted to know why. I said that not only was 73 a prime number, its two digits are prime numbers, reversing the digits yields another prime number, and that 73 was the 21st prime number, and 21 was the product of 7 and 3. I said that I had learned this from Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory, who went on to give other noteworthy aspects of the number 73 that I no longer remembered. (I was surprised when I learned that 73 has its own Wikipedia page. Do all numbers?) Margaret said that she did not know what a prime number was; Kris rolled her eyes and said, “A Marquette education.” (I was surprised about the professed ignorance since I thought that prime numbers were a basic part of education and a simple concept. A few days later, however, I was still reading the mystery/romantic/math book PopCo that I had in the bar, and I found the narrator’s grandfather saying, “No one knows very much about how primes behave, that’s the problem. Problems to do with primes have puzzled the greatest mathematicians.” Ok. They aren’t that basic and simple.)

          Margaret said, “You must be smart.” I repeated that my 73 knowledge came from The Big Bang Theory. Kris said, “I figured 73 could not mean your age.” I replied, “It once was my age.” I was flattered that she said, “No way. I thought that you were 60 or something.” But my ego did not stay inflated long, for Kris soon labeled me “cute.” The inflection for this cute was not one announced about a boy band member or a young man or woman spotted in a bar or even for a puppy or baby. No, this inflected “cute” was the kind used in conjunction with describing your great grandpa.

(continued December 6)