June 16, 2024
Welcome, dear followers, readers, and subscribers, to Crone Life, my weekly post of reflection and commentary on the fine art of growing older.
It’s been a stressful week, for a variety of reasons, mostly a fibromyalgia flareup. I wasn’t feeling inspired, so I poked around the folders in my Google drive to find what could be found and came across this little number.
It’s based on something I wrote for grad school, as a discussion post (the actual post was heavily edited and nowhere near as personal).
I was asked to write about my experience with race and difference and how that might affect interaction with library patrons.
My mother did not permit prejudicial or disparaging discussion of any ethnic, religious or racial group. I remember this because once I was in the car with my father and grandfather and overheard my dad saying he thought one of his co-workers might have got preference over him because of his ethnic background. I repeated it to my mother and -- what happened? I don’t know. Nothing obvious. But I didn’t overhear anything like that again. I have the feeling that she said something. I don’t know if my father stopped talking like that or if he was just more cautious of my big ears. I am very grateful to have grown up in a family that didn’t overtly teach me to be racist, to look down on others, or to be prejudiced against difference.
Because there’s PLENTY of that in the general culture! It didn’t take me long to realize that although I was not of the preferred gender or hair color, I was fortunate in many other ways---both parents were well-educated and from “good” families or at least not “bad” ones.1 We were white and the best kind of white--European Protestants! With a lengthy American heritage and ties to England and Germany. Practically perfect.2
I got this information, indirectly, from my parents, in a “be proud of who you are” kind of way. I also learned from kids at elementary school that I was different and not in a good way. The local Catholic kids were not shy in telling me I was going to Hell since I wasn’t a Catholic. That sort of thing can be hard to get over. I probably was what those kids considered a “snob.” I was a good reader, gently brought up and a total goody-goody (still kind of am). We often didn’t have a TV and my mother was into classical music and jazz, so I wasn’t familiar with pop culture. In my perception, these were kids whose parents said bigoted things out loud, whose fathers were sexist, whose mothers had NOT gone to grad school, etc. etc. That was just the way of the world.
In retrospect, I’d like to point out that the above difference as described is not as much of a religious difference as a class difference. In elementary school, most of the middle-class Catholic kids went to the local parochial school so I didn’t meet them till high school. I fear most of the girls I met in 9th grade still think I’m a snob. They too wanted to achieve academically, they liked to read, they didn’t think they would ever be popular, but I had absorbed lessons of my own difference perhaps a little too thoroughly, especially after years of middle-school hazing. I might have seemed to be a snob but underneath I thought I was too different to be likable. I continued under that misapprehension for a few decades.
My breakthrough moment occurred later in life. My son went to an elementary magnet school designed to be racially/ethnically “equal” at least numerically--equal numbers of black, latino, white and Asian kids. This gave the feeling that everyone had an equal say in the school and it wasn’t just for one group. It was also a progressive school with a good reputation. Admission was by lottery and for once he was lucky.3 In any case, it was the first time I got to know families that were different from ours. I wasn’t working full time, so I did a lot of volunteering, was a room parent, a chaperone on trips, that sort of thing. I tried to be involved because I didn’t grow up in Brooklyn and didn’t have deep roots in the community. I was a bit of an anomaly with my New England background and Ivy League education.
One day I was walking on Fulton Mall in downtown Brooklyn and heard someone call my name.
Looking around I didn’t see anyone I knew. Then I realized, to my deep embarrassment, the person who had called out was the mother/grandmother of a child in my son’s class, who was black. It wasn’t that I didn’t recognize her--it was that I thought I didn’t know anyone who was black and therefore wasn’t looking at the black faces in the crowd with the expectation of recognizing one of them. I was embarrassed and ashamed that I had been automatically excluding a whole category of people from my conscious perception as “someone I might know.” How many times had this happened before? That I had, in fact, been ignoring most of the crowd? Ignoring other people is something of a necessity when you live in Brooklyn, especially when you’re walking on Fulton. But I was ignoring a whole category of people, because I thought they weren’t relevant to me. It wasn’t conscious--but in that moment, I realized I had been excluding people from my attention, based on race and difference, for much of my life. A “we wouldn’t have anything in common” barrier--no need to let them in. I was embarrassed and ashamed and horrified and in that moment I realized I had to do more to be part of the community. Or I came to a resolution at least from then on that I would scan the crowd on the street with the expectation that I would recognize someone that I needed to say hello to. No matter who was in the crowd.
And this is how I became part of the urban fabric, part of the NYC public-school parent community. I was so lucky! I think my son was lucky too. I wanted him to be a person who didn’t make disparaging comments about difference and felt comfortable in a heterogenous crowd. I think I’ve achieved that. Becoming a mom made me a real person, in the sense that I had to care for someone outside of myself in real time. I wanted to do a good job.
I want to point out the importance of community, and of all being in it together. Not thinking that I have this special out, that I don’t have to care about other people because … fill in the reasons. I felt committed to making sure everyone got equal treatment from me, and through me, from the school. I felt it was my duty. I felt, moreover, that it wasn’t something exalted and praiseworthy on my part--it was just common sense. I decided to overcome my exceptionalism and become part of the crowd.
Moving from multicultural Brooklyn to Dutchess County, which is heavily white, makes it both harder and easier to live by this credo. There’s a lot of unspoken prejudice against other races, especially in the towns, since the cities of Poughkeepsie and Newburgh are where most of those others live. My workplace does its best, but it’s an almost 200-year-old institution with its own history of exclusion and hierarchy. I’m trying to find a way to be a part of the fabric here too.
Cat Talk
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F12fbd128-8008-40d8-8a14-e3ec6f2ce61c_4032x3024.jpeg)
Veronica continues to be delightful, although hard to photograph. She still prefers to stay in our bedroom, although she did venture to set foot in the attached bathroom at least once. Maybe she has a phobia of doors? She recognizes the closet as a safe place for cats, but those doors are perpetually open.
In any case, she has progressed to sleeping with us at night, purring softly and enjoying chin strokes and head skritches. I bought her some toys. Her favorite so far is the feather wand toy I bought on sale at Target. We played and played last night, then I put it in a drawer of my night table. After a few minutes of reclining on the floor, she hopped up again to stand on her hind legs and poke her paws in the drawer. I took this to mean she was ready for another session. After that, I put the toy on the top of my dresser when I thought her attention was elsewhere. Then she pulled it off the dresser and started playing with it by herself. The toy is now on the shelf at the top of my closet. She’s a clever one. I chose well. Or she did.
Thanks everyone for reading! What’s your experience of being different? What’s the interplay between feeling different and feeling unlikable? Can your difference ever be your strength?
I will leave the definition of “good” and “bad” to others
This is written in a spirit of embarrassed sarcasm. I’m ashamed to state it. I don't actually believe any of it, but it’s hard to shake decades of social conditioning
Why do I say this? I was probably luckier.