2005-03-26 - 11:45 p.m.
Day two of spring break. Well, I guess I'm starting slowly. The day looked gray and chilly after all, so a bike ride by the beach didn't seem very appealing. Instead, I started the day by finishing a letter I had started. My friend had asked me about growing up in the south--he wanted to compare notes and mentioned his socially polite but not deeply honest family, where nothing of any true importance gets discussed (because it might be shocking or shameful, I suppose--better to keep up appearances), which is known as a typical southern trait in some circles.
My answer to him was more enlightening to me than to him, I am sure, but before I go any further with that, I need to segue into something that happened a month or two ago that led to me being able to fashion at least a piece of an answer to my friend’s question.
A month ago, I attended our school's trustee dinner, which is supposed to be a way for members of the board of trustees and the people who work at the school to get to know one another. It's a good idea that has fallen far short of the ideal in the past few years.
The first couple of years that I had attended this dinner, I would be seated at a table with a witty and intelligent trustee (the same trustee two years in a row) whose son I also knew, and admired, as one of the most brilliant kids in the school. The trustee and I had good conversations about law, the meaning of education, and what kind of teacher-student interactions benefit children and what kind doesn't.
But then the year of 9/11, the dinner was cancelled because of 9/11, because several trustees happened to be "stuck" in New York, 9/11 having just happened a couple of days before, and were therefore unable to make it back to Los Angeles. Well, while I understood that the air space had been closed for some period of time after 9/11 (and even once flights were allowed to resume, airports were mad houses and the prospect of flying was a nightmare), flying wasn't the only way of getting across country, quite well demonstrated by those others who traveled by Amtrak, rented a car, or even went by Greyhound. So, as I so very often do, I contemplated what my father would have done, and what would I have done, and the answer was a quite clear, "neither one of us would have been 'stuck'". My father might have hitched a ride with a cross-country trucker if that was the only way to get home to his family. And I know that, I, too, would have found whatever satisfactory method I needed. Neither one of us would have been stopped because there were no first class seats on a non-stop cross-country flight that left Queens at precisely twenty-two minutes after nine, which would have been exactly after we had sat and enjoyed a croissant and cup of cappuccino and then had a moment to stop in the men's room to straighten the dimple in the knot of our silk tie.
Not that I considered that dinner party all that important...that certainly wasn't the point...but it did lessen the desirability of getting to know such non-self-reliant people.
The year after that, the dinner was cancelled once again, but for reasons I don't know. Maybe those same trustees were still stuck.
The year after that, I was seated at a table with no trustee at all, the only table that did not have a trustee. When I commented about that afterwards, I was given the explanation that "several trustees wanted to sit with each other, so there weren't enough left to go around, and we thought that the group at your table would have more fun among yourselves." What, did they read my mind over the 9/11 thing? Anyway, that explanation belied the whole purpose of having that dinner in the first place.
So this year, when asked on the RSVP card whom we would like to sit with, I wrote "a trustee."
I should have left well enough alone.
The trustee who was placed at the table to which I was assigned was one I knew only to the extent that he had once requested a list of everyone's telephone extensions and since I had that information, I emailed the list to him.
We all sat down at the table and that trustee got up and pushed his body between me and the man sitting next to me, not an employee of the school, but the fiancé of one of the teachers. Before he shook the fiancé’s hand and introduced himself, the trustee turned to me and said, "Excuse me, I am going around the table to introduce myself, but I already know you." Apparently my having e-mailed him a telephone list was all that he needed or wanted to know of me, but he didn't do much better with the others at the table, because after meeting the teacher's fiancé, he simply sat back down again and ignored everybody else.
As their conversation ensued, I could tell that the only person that the trustee was the least bit interested in was that fiancé, and their conversation consisted of dropping in front of each other the names of the Hollywood celebrities each one of them represented as an attorney.
"I'm the one who put together The Brady Bunch Reunion," said the fiancé.
"Well, I introduced Jennifer Anniston to Brad Pitt," said the trustee.
"Who are getting a divorce," reminded the fiancé.
"But you don't know their prenuptial agreement," countered the trustee.
"They didn't have one," responded the fiancé.
And so it went, on and on and on.
This was, as I later characterized it, the sport of fencing with dicks.
Then the conversation turned to the trustee's conviction that "nobody is a native Californian." He polled the two people nearest him. Both were from somewhere else. Emboldened, he asked the next person, who was a teacher sitting next to me. Oops, she was born in California. So now he had to ask me where I was from, if only to cancel out the native Californian at the table. I told him "Asheville, North Carolina."
"Oh," he said, shaking his head with disgust, "Asheville. My brother lived there once. He got out of there as soon as he could. He had a neighbor who had a rock garden. Can you imagine, who would have a rock garden?"
Maybe the neighbors were from Arizona? But it was clear from his tone of voice that he considered Asheville, and by implication, the entire south, to be nothing but a haven for hicks, an opinion he seemed to presume was shared and accepted by everybody else. Why was this man, every time he opened his mouth, insulting me with impunity?
"It's only because in Asheville they wouldn't let him join the country club," my mother explained. Actually, in Asheville he probably could join the country club, which was why my sociable grandmother, who originally belonged to all of the country clubs in the area, let her membership in the Asheville Country Club lapse (what was the point of being a member if anybody could join?). It was the Biltmore Forest Country Club, that bastion of very old money southern aristocracy, that would never accept him as a member. And it was at the Biltmore Forest Country Club that I had learned how to swim, as where we lived was the Town of Biltmore Forest and membership of the club for residents of "The Forest" was practically de rigueur. Essentially the restrictions expanded to a greater circle, in that if one couldn’t join the country club, they basically couldn’t also buy a house in Biltmore Forest. This is to say that if this rude trustee assumed that all southerners were hicks, let's just say that there are hicks without money and then there are hicks with money, and none of them are buying houses in Biltmore Forest.
And speaking of money, dare I insert the fact that of the five largest banks in the United States, numbers two and four are North Carolina banks? (One and three are New York banks, and number five is a Chicago bank.)
I mentioned this conversation with my boss, who is from South Carolina, and he said that this perception that all southerners are hicks was enough to get him to lose his southern accent so that he could competitively achieve in a country-wide business-world. I hope what he had wasn't a Charleston accent, because there are hardly more elegant and aristocratic sounds coming from American mouths than those spoken in Charleston--that's something I think would be advantageous for a person to adopt!
So, ever since that miserable trustee dinner in which I was subjected to a society that was anything but high, I have been thinking of my background and how it might have shaped the person that I was to become.
I came across and bought a book in two very expensive, specialized volumes entitled Fashionable Asheville, written by a man named David Coleman Bailey, who lives in the afore-mentioned Biltmore Forest. I think his introduction is worth quoting:
The name Asheville evokes poignant images of a mountain mosaic in which sophisticated social fabric of an urban little enclave rested lightly upon bedrock of native conviction and personality. Character of the place comes into focus through an elusive elixir as pervasive as mists passing over Beaucatcher in the early morning hours.
Physical dimension has something to do with creation of a sense of place. Although they are opposites in many respects, Charleston and Manhattan share a similar peninsular foundation. New Orleans is dominated by water, San Francisco by the bay. Asheville's setting was in the clouds and as a municipality, it was both the smallest cosmopolitan city in the East and the highest in elevation.
Thus situated between heavily wooded hillsides and silhouettes of low hanging clouds or drifting fog banks, it worked a certain spell on the inhabitants. At times the mood was almost ethereal as the spirit of a higher plane began to permeate this Scottish atmosphere. And then suddenly one might be drawn by the immediate lure of deep azure skies on those surprisingly clear, cool days that inspired Wolfe to write of “October’s bright blue weather.”
Townspeople developed a cohesive sense of closeness, a sharing of common experience, like members of a colony brought together in a pre-designated place for some vague but instinctively perceived purpose. So it was that thoughts of Asheville brought smiles to the faces of persons in distant places. Few could define the synergism but many would refer to some elements of it, or perhaps describe an experience or event that seemed amusing or significant.
As in the old village days of Chapel Hill, the vibrant and congenial atmosphere of heterogeneous boarding houses provided a mystic glue which brought about a hearty social intercourse in a manner difficult to visualize in the world of combustion engines that would follow. Thus these institutions and their siblings became a sort of center stage to which others were related.
Around the peripheries flowed a diverse collection of mondes aparte…separate spheres of Groves & Vanderbilts, Wolfes & Fitzgeralds, Coxes & Cheseboroughs, Pattons & Weavers, Davidsons & Morrisons. A long parade of physicians & attorneys, artists & writers, architects & engineers, eminent in professional disciplines. Not to mention retired industrialists from the Eastern business world.
But this elegant, artistic, unique community was only to be an incubator for me. My father had fought in the Pacific in World War II and a brave new world fit for the dreams of returning young victors was opening in his visions. Whereas we were of the clouds, he now yearned for expansiveness in both directions toward the atoms and toward the stars. After a few years of post-graduate education that culminated in a masters degree in nuclear engineering from M.I.T., my father garnered thirty-two job offers all the way across the United States, and he accepted one of them from Lockheed in their Missile Systems and Space Division that would take him into the emerging aerospace industry in California. Thus, when I was eight years old, the family did the adventurous thing and left all that they knew in old money Asheville and started naked and fresh in the pioneering state of California.
After several months working in the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles, where we lived in a non-descript rented bungalow, my father was transferred to the San Francisco Bay Area, and in a housing development in Palo Alto near Stanford University, my parents saw a new kind of house that they recognized as soon as they saw it as an expression of their California visions manifest: a modernist design of glass walls and open beam-ceilings, closed-off family privacy in the front, and a wide-open commingling with nature in the back, an Eichler Home, their first California house.
Since this was representative of a special kind of home buyer, I have been curious about what this means, and have found some explanations, such as this one from the website, Eichler Network:
Stylishly modern in appearance and built in the burgeoning postwar suburbs of the Bay Area, the Eichlers have seemed to many to embody the spirit of the emerging postwar California culture.
However…Eichler’s homes were so different from other suburban houses that his market niche was actually quite small. Who, then, were the Eichlers appealing to?
The elegant, stripped-down look and indoor-outdoor connections of this open planning suited an idiosyncratic, but growing segment of the Bay Area population. In the South Bay, [and here the writer is describing my father exactly] that included engineers and researchers who worked in the developing aerospace industry. The pure forms of Eichler’s homes would appeal to this engineering crowd, who thrilled to the clarity of Eichler’s solution to the modern California house. The author David Beers recalls his Lockheed-engineer father enthusing about the Eichlers. “The Eichler design stunned us,” he said. “The low lines, all that glass. It had this California look to it.”
The Eichler buyers were a very heterogeneous group—different races and ages—but all of them shared certain “core tendencies”. They tended to be somewhat adventurous and often creative. Many were doctors, architects, and advertising people, none of which was looking for a traditional house. Those qualities that unite Eichler buyers made them good neighbors regardless of their backgrounds, and the mix—unusual for suburban developments—made for especially vital communities.
Thinking about this, and knowing that this had been the fertile seed ground that several decades later became Silicon Valley and the start of a whole new technological economy, I can see that the qualifies of my parents not only rode the wave of this major transformative trend, but contributed to its momentum. Understanding this, from incubating in a proud tradition to growing up in the extremely new, I felt elongated, my head open to the infinite vistas and my feet planted in solid and fertile soil. People like that do not succumb to shame or participate in a polite dishonesty, for we know we can change what we need to and recreate ourselves into something we see as better.
I posted my letter and then started to read the words of a hero who changed what he needed to change and recreated not only himself, but a whole country, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and Other Writings.
I haven’t gotten very far into it, but so far I’ve learned that Franklin was the youngest child of ten and he was apprenticed to an older brother, who was a printer and had a newspaper. Young Benjamin didn’t get along very well his brother, who administered to him too many severe beatings, and so Franklin left that apprenticeship to start his own newspaper.
Too many severe beatings? I know we are now living in a different time with different perceptions, but still it’s hard to imagine it. I can’t ever see myself beating my own younger brother, even if my position had allowed or demanded it. And then to think that this little boy who was so treated was Benjamin Franklin, who, in my estimation, is only just below Jesus Christ or the Buddha in historical importance and worthiness of admiration (along with Thomas Jefferson and George Washington). Those of us who have continued to be educated have undergone a lot of historical revision and most of our American heroes are now no longer as respected as they used to be, if at all, but so far, nothing I have learned has knocked Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington off of their pinnacles (even if they DID have some sexual peccadilloes such as Jefferson’s impregnated slave, Sally Hemmings, and Washington’s prostitutes that he claimed on his Revolutionary War expense accounts as “laundry”, but even my mother excuses that, saying that “most women in those days didn’t know ANYTHING about sex and those poor men had to do SOMETHING about their needs!”).
So I’m glad that Franklin got himself away from the beatings and onto the paths that led to the founding of our country. I love it that after Franklin’s death there was a bust of him installed over the door at the back of Congress Hall in Philadelphia, where those who were in Congress in the days of our nation's infancy could easily see it and be reminded of what we were about. Now hundreds of years later, we can read his words and understand his struggles, and attempt to emulate him if only in our own small, individual way.
See, this spring break I may not have gone on the Washington trip, but its spirit still lives within me anyway.
Will it be sunny tomorrow so that I can let my body run free like I let my mind do?
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