Give me room for scanning the paper, and then running-room for reaction
One of my favorite things to do (splitting kindling, hiking into camp, playing pitch, pushing snow around with a tractor) is laying out The New York Times on the kitchen counter before dawn, when the rest of the house is asleep. This is after I've taken care of fires and let out the dogs who, at this time of year, immediately want to come straight back in.
The headline that caught my eye in the issue of February 17 said "What's Hot on This BBC Podcast? The Siege of Munster (1534-35)." First, I'd forgotten all about the siege of Munster, which I'd encountered in high school history. If you look it up, it makes pretty good reading. There is more about Munster (bad misspelled joke coming here) than cheese.
But what really caught my eye in the Times piece was a paragraph on a BBC radio program called "Thinking Allowed," which focuses on things contemporary and whimsical. A recent episode dealt with "The sociology of car behavior."
And here was the rub, or the nub. "One inquiry suggested that when two middle-class couples ride in a car, the owners of the car are likely to sit in the front, with the second couple in the back. When two working-class couple go for a drive, the men are likely to sit in the front and the women in the back."
Now, to say that I was taken aback at this doesn't do justice to the thought of being taken aback. My back was up against the kitchen wall.
Why? For the same reason I'm always (a) confused, and (b) indignant whenever TV talking heads refer, blithely, to "working class" or "middle class" or "blue collar" or "white-collar" neighborhoods. Where do these definitions come from? What do they mean?
When my siblings and I were kids, there was always good conversation around the supper table. Note "supper." The noon meal was dinner, and something you might take to work in a pail was lunch.
My grandfather Carl carried a lunch pail to work as he strode off down the hill in Lisbon to his lifelong career with the Boston and Maine. What was he? Working class?" To me he was just my grandfather, a great guy working hard, day in and day out, pounding spikes and setting ties and bending rails and inhaling coal dust, in a world where everyone, one way or another, worked.
One of the worst insults I ever endured came on a day when I stopped at a local convenience store, and encountered an old neighbor from Park Street growing-up years. "Beautiful snow," I said by way of greeting, and it was, floating down in big fluffs. "You wouldn't say that if you were a working man," he replied. This to a guy who bailed boats and emptied chemical toilets and worked on farms and dropped out of college and worked at the Beecher Falls factory and a lumber yard in Milford before bamboozling a job at a newspaper in Nashua. Silver spoon? Right.
My father Fred was well known for dragging strangers home for supper. It could be a guy hitchhiking home from the Groveton mill or a kid hitching home from the service or just some college student on the lam. It made no difference.
Many times I was the first one to get to the telephone, which was a wall affair during my early years, with a crank. Mabel, the operator, would get the call from wherever Dad was, and, as she'd always say, "patch him through." "Essie?" I'd hear, my father mistaking my high-pitched, prepubescent squeak for my mother's. And then, "Tell your mother I'm bringing home one more for supper," he'd say.
Everything was on the table at the table. We could talk about just about anything that wasn't prurient. Politics and press were prized subjects. Only two things stick out in my memory as being verboten. One was gossip, which my parents absolutely abhorred, and the other was anything smacking of class.
To this day I too abhor gossip, having spent my fair share of time, deservedly, at the whipping-end of it, but if there is anything in the stream of mind and conversation and behavior that I cannot understand and refuse to listen to anything about, it's the presumption of class.
Before I wrote this, I thought about all the places I've lived in--Colebrook, Clarksville, Amherst, Nashua, Manchester, Lancaster, Jefferson, and on and on. Not in one single case could I begin to differentiate as to what might be "working class" or "blue collar" neighborhoods, let alone the actual people.
Stick your hand out, and I'll shake it. Pull me out of a ditch, and I ll pull you. You know you're welcome on our land, we know we re welcome on yours. What's "class" got to do with it?
To this day I cannot and will not abide anything to do with "class," mostly, no doubt, because our parents had such a visceral reaction to such pretensions. We were brought up believing that we're all in this thing together, striving for the greater good. Call it optimism. Okay, maybe even gullibility.
We were also, and are, a military family, with roots current and long past extending into the Army, Navy and Air Force (two kids now on active duty). Which is why this line from a Boston Globe review of Amtrak service from South Station to Chicago so particularly stuck in my craw:
"Empty brick warehouses and mill buildings line the tracks in a corridor, remnants of industry long gone. Locals can still sign up for the military, but the train doesn't stop here any more."
Talk about class, or the lack of it.
(This column runs in a dozen weekly papers covering the northern two-thirds of New Hampshire and parts of Maine and Vermont. John Harrigan's address: Box 39, Colebrook, NH 03576, or hooligan@ncia.net)
(Issue of March 3, 2010)
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