I'm among the elites

Great-grandparents C. C. and Neeltje Schaap

Both pairs of grandparents went through the Depression without a pot to pee in. My grandfather the preacher relied on his farmer parishoners for food. When he was a boy, my dad said it was always a joy to open the door--front or back but normally back--and find a bag or box full of carrots and a dozen eggs or whatever. My dad insisted his dad got almost no salary through those lean years.

My mother's father was a blacksmith across the street from the church, right downtown. She told me he'd come home some nights and cry because he wasn't making any money. It was spring, as she remembered, and his farmer customers would need their shares sharpened or horses shooed, but they had no money, or so little that they'd look up at him with vacant eyes. If he didn't serve them and they couldn't get the crop in, things would only get worse. For a time, he too worked for almost nothing. They were not starving, but they were poor.

My dad, like so many others, gave up a goodly chunk of his life to serve his country. When he returned from the Pacific, mom had two girls, his girls, one of them three, the other just a year old, a child he'd never seen. He was handy, so handy that he (and an entire generation) did a ton of his own work on the little house my parents built on Superior Avenue. Took a while before they could afford a living room he sheet-rocked himself.

The best Christmas I'll ever remember is the almost holy night I got a 26" J. C. Higgens Mom and Dad had carefully hidden behind the living room couch. "And now it's your turn, Jim." They peeled away all those coats and blankets they'd used to hide the handlebars, and right there in the living room a dream came true. 

There was no doubt in my mind that I was blessed the day I got my very first real baseball glove. I loved baseball. That glove was the most beautiful thing on earth. I think it cost $25. 

I went to college willfully. I wanted to go, but I also knew my parents would have been woefully disappointed if I stayed home and got a job in some local factory. Dad had been working at a job he never really liked much, and wanted more for me. Most of his siblings had gone to college, girls included, as did Grandpa the preacher, as well as Grandma, whose father was a seminary professor. My biggest fear when I went was flunking out.

My parents would have preferred the ministry or some missionary calling, but education was great too, and I remember the place on the sidewalk outside of class where I determined that teaching English was something I just might like for a profession. 

Then came writing. Then came grad school, two of them. If I tally them, I spent forty years in the classroom and never made any more than $65,000 or so--I'd have to check with my wife. I'm almost sure my first teaching job--rural, southwest Wisconsin--offered me a contract worth $7500. 

My wife and I had two beautiful children along the way. With them in the back seat, I remember driving through Las Vegas once, but we never vacationed in Hawaii or Mazatlan. When they got to be college age, our kids traveled abroad more often than we did.

But for reasons I don't understand, I'm somehow among "the elites," I guess, even though I'm a white male, and an old one, from a rural county in the Midwest.

I'm not sure what people mean by that word--elites. Am I such because I have an education, because I play classical music when I'm at my desk, or have a thousand too many books in my house? Does it mean that I don't listen to Fox or that I'm going to caucus in a week or so for Amy Klobuchar, whose mom taught second grade and whose dad, a sportswriter, drank way too much? Okay, she did go to Yale.

Why am I "scum," "a disease," a "totalitarian" who does "illegal acts"? This time around it's the elites who are deplorable, I guess.

We do have a new house--I admit it. It's just five years old. A lot of windows, and an acre of rich Iowa soil out back. Maybe that's it. 

I've never thought of myself as among the "elites," but if he insists, then who am I to argue?

I guess I am. It's the American dream, the hope of every immigrant heart. Would be nice for my grandparents to know their grandson made it. I'm with "the elites."