Tidy Tidbits: Friends & Family

Being socially engaged with others is a key to good health and perhaps a longer life.  We entertained very good friends recently and I spent several days inhabiting J. D. Vance’s head in his disturbing and engrossing memoir of growing up in Appalachia.

FRIENDS

As is certainly evident in Vance’s memoir (noted below), we don’t get to to choose our parents or our grandparents.  Some of us are luckier than others.  But, we are able to select our friends.  One of the greatest pleasures of retirement is the gift of time and with that the opportunity to spend more time with good friends Last week our good friends, Mary and Joe, came for an overnight visit.  We’ve known them probably twenty years and, although we hadn’t seen them since the end of last summer, we picked up where we left off and had an easy, delightful time.  We’ve met and are acquainted with each other’s children and grandchildren and we share a common interest in good food, good books, and being by the water.  Conversation flowed effortlessly, and we parted knowing more time together awaits us come summer.

FAMILY

Hillbilly Elegy:  A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance

This is a remarkable book.  Remarkable for its unflinching candor and remarkable for the story it tells.  How J.D. Vance was able to escape from his family’s cycle of poverty, violence, and instability is amazing and riveting.  He describes hillbilly culture:  its mores, values, and attitudes, and both defends it and then holds it accountable for the ongoing problems experienced by this segment of society in Appalachia.  What enabled him to succeed at all was the relative stability provided by his grandparents.  They were strict and, to some of us, would come across as mean, but they loved him and, his grandmother in particular, instilled in him the value of education.  Also key to his survival (and he was surviving rather than thriving) was the protection his older sister Lindsay offered.  For a long time, they were a team, and Lindsay more the adult than his drug-addicted mother with her series of live-in boyfriends and, eventually, five husbands.  

Studies have demonstrated and Vance is evidence that constant disruption in childhood and daily exposure to loud arguments and violence leave scars that carry over into adulthood.  Vance was not only socially and culturally out of step when he went to college, but he lacked the necessary skills for developing a loving, long-term relationship.  He occasionally cites from the literature on poverty, but it offers few solutions.  Ultimately, he believes the answer lies not with the government, but with hillbillies themselves re-evaluating their conduct and facing the fact that it is harmful to their children.  His is a success story fueled by resentment and anger, but success none the less.  He had advantages many children from Jackson, Kentucky and Middletown, Ohio do not.

Published in June 2016, Vance’s memoir has been singled out as describing individuals most likely to be Trump supporters; read with that in mind, it offers an up-close look at lives most of us have little familiarity with.  The book jacket states that after law school, Vance became a principal at an investment firm in Silicon Valley and lived in San Francisco.  I thought this was one of the unlikeliest milieus for him and was puzzled.  My wonderment was partially answered by his op-ed piece in the March 16 New York Times in which he writes about deciding to move back to Ohio, but Columbus, not Middletown.

DIVIDED LOYALTIES

On the small screen, I just finished watching the five-part Netflix series, Rebellion.  Set in Dublin, it focuses on the Easter Rising of 1916 and three women who are caught up in the Irish rebels’ fight against the British government.  While these young women, a government employee, a doctor in training, and an activist, are all involved, two brothers are fighting on opposite sides while an upper class husband and wife have sharply different views on how they should participate or not.  I found it totally engrossing and well done and hope that there will be a second season.

Notes:  Header photo and coloring ©JW Farrington; downtown Middletown, Ohio from Pinterest.

New Books by Desmond & Collins

RECENT READING

I have two nonfiction books to recommend and, with you know who now in office, the first one about poverty seems especially appropriate.

Evicted:  Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond.  This is an important book and one that takes a different look at the lives of poor people in Milwaukee in 2008 and 2009.  Desmond views poverty as a relationship between landlords and tenants and shows how entangled and enmeshed renters’ lives are with landlords who hold the threat of eviction over them.  Desmond lived in a trailer park inhabited by white residents for four months and then spent 10 months living in an apartment owned by a black woman.  Like many people, I thought that most poor people lived in public housing, but in this city, and probably more generally, public housing was very often not available, the wait time was years or decades, or the individuals who needed it most didn’t qualify for one reason or another.  Most of those evicted or those who moved out voluntarily (rather than being given an eviction notice and taken to court) were women and especially women with children.  Having children tripled the odds of being evicted.

Once evicted, these folks often had to look at 80 or 90 apartments before finding a place to live; if unsuccessful, they ended up in a shelter for weeks or even months.  And the rents they paid for their apartments (frequently in poor condition with non-working appliances or holes in walls or roofs) were market rate—the same amount as paid for nice, clean apartments in the more desirable neighborhoods.  Over the course of his field work, Desmond followed eight individuals and their families and observed their struggles with addiction, job loss, new schools for their kids, and the possibility of jail time.  Only one person, a single male, succeeds in breaking the cycle, overcoming his addiction and becoming a productive citizen again.

Matthew Desmond, a Harvard professor who won a MacArthur Fellowship (“Genius” Award) in 2015, offers his thoughts on possible solutions in a very comprehensive “About This Project” at the end of the book.

When in French:  Love in a Second Language by Lauren Collins.  This is yet another memoir in my ongoing fascination with reading about how other people perceive their lives.  A New Yorker staff writer, Collins’s book is ostensibly about falling in love with Olivier, moving to Geneva, marrying him, and dealing with communicating with him and others in French.  But it’s much more than that.  Collins is a small town Southern girl from Wilmington, North Carolina, who moves to London where she meets Olivier and then follows him to Geneva when his job takes him there.  She is biting in describing her response to the city of Geneva and candid about her linguistic faux pas and her cultural misconceptions.  Along the way she provides nuggets of information on the history of languages and her canvas becomes much larger than just her stumbling journey to fluency.  At some points, I felt she was trying to cover too much material, but I stuck with her.  Here’s one example of some linguistic history:

In 1880 there were 641 German newspapers in the United. States. …One of them, Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote, had been in 1776 the first publication to announce that the Declaration of Independence has been adopted.  English speakers had to wait until the next day when the document’s full text appeared in the Philadelphia Evening Post.

And one of her observations on her extreme desire to get married:

I had exactly two anxieties about cross-cultural marriage:  (1) I feared being marooned, at the end of my life, in some French nursing home where no one had ever heard of baseball; and (2) it made me sad to think that my kids would miss out on one of the great joys of an American childhood, learning to spell Mississippi.  But, generally, I didn’t see what the big deal was.  Tied up as I was in rules, timetables, and proverbs about buying cows, I couldn’t take Olivier at his word.  [That he loved her and wanted to be together and have a family with her.]

If nothing else, you will think a bit more about the language you speak and how you acquired it, and if you’ve ever tried immersion in another country and language, you’ll empathize with her experience.

Header photo:  Taken at Selby Botanical Garden (JWF)

Loafing in London

We arrived yesterday morning in London and powered through the day with lots of walking, one nap, and a respectable early bedtime.  Today we increased our step count exploring Knightsbridge (think Harrod’s Food Hall) and spending time in both Hyde Park and Green Park.  The rose garden was mostly over except for one or two last blooms.img_1194 img_1206img_1219

 

img_1216RECENT READING

The Latter Days by Judith Freeman
Continuing my reading of memoirs by writers and reporters, I read this one by novelist Judith Freeman. She was brought up in the Mormon faith, but strained against its strictures and rules from an early age. Certainly by her teen years, she was rebelling internally, being given talks by one of the church elders, and subjected to little chats with her mother who admonished her to behave more like her older sister, Marcia.

Somewhat surprisingly, Freeman married a local boy at seventeen, got pregnant very soon thereafter and surrendered any thought of college for herself. Later she and her husband moved from Utah to Minnesota and grew even farther away from the church.

Freeman’s memoir is straightforward and plain as she recounts a childhood starved of warmth and thin on material goods. I found some of the early chapters slow, but appreciated more her later discussion of the turquoise notebook she found from her high school years and how she was eventually able to quench her thirst for learning and channel her desire to become a writer. She has written several novels based on her Mormonism.

All photos copyright JWFarrington