WRA Reading 4: Please write three responses (with each no less than 100 words) to the following three essays. Submit your responses as one document (do not include the original essays) in D2L Dropbox “Reading Homework”.
1. Meet My Mother, a Salesman’s Worst Nightmare
By Jonathan Goldstein
10:15 a.m., Saturday
I open the front door, and my mother hands me four cases of yogurt. All strawberry. She doesn’t notice flavors. Coffee, vanilla, blueberry—they don’t mean a thing. I ask her how much I owe her, and she tells me that with the coupons and how she used them on double-down day, she actually made money off the purchase. I tell her I don’t see how such a thing is possible, and she explains that the yogurts were a buck apiece and her coupons were for 75 cents. Doubled, that’s $1.50.
“I make 50 cents off each one I buy,” she says.
She’s excited because she has a project for the two of us: a defective shirt that needs exchanging. She got it from a clothing store near my house that’s been around for decades. When I was a kid, my mother would take me there to buy shoes, making me take my pants off first for some reason, right in the aisle, before trying them on.
“What’s wrong with the shirt?”
I ask.
“It’s missing a sleeve,” she says. “How can I let your father leave the house like that? No way.”
It should be said that my father has left the house in worse: green corduroy vests,
T-shirts advertising aquarium supplies, ties intended for novelty use only. If it were handed
to him as he was getting out of a shower, I’m
sure my father would figure out a way to
wear a bridge chair.
I asked how a
missing sleeve might have escaped her notice during the
purchase. She doesn’t remember. She bought it a long time ago.
“How long ago?” I ask.
She doesn’t really get the question. Life for my mother isn’t exactly a chronological unraveling. She was visiting me. I’m around the corner from the store. It’s just a clever thing to return it now—killing two birds with one stone. She looks at the bag and thinks for a moment.
“Five years,” she says.
This kind of operation is what
my mother lives for. It will be a
challenge, a battle of wills—a game of chess, but with yelling. I remember as a kid watching her open three bottles of tahini, one after the other. She wasn’t satisfied with the hermetic popping sound the caps made—it was too muted. She liked a pop that was more emphatic, a pop that cried, “I have not been sprinkled with hemlock.” She returned all
of them to a grocery store she’d
chosen, not because she’d bought the tahini there but because of its proximity to our house. The store didn’t sell
tahini. I’m not sure they even knew what it was.
To be honest, it isn’t that my mother exerts Clarence Darrow–like powers of persuasion;
it’s that she has no shame. None at all. As an adult,
I seem to have taken on the extra shame she has no use for. I don’t like to draw attention to myself. If a waitress gets my order wrong, I keep my mouth shut. If a bus driver goes past my stop, I just get off at the next one. Scenes aren’t my thing. But even now, no matter where I go with my mother, there are always the inevitable spectacles. Just the thought of her getting all froth-mouthed about the one-armed shirt—it was enough to make me queasy.
10:40 a.m.
At the store, my mother heads to
the cash register and pulls the article of clothing out of the crumpled bag.
“It’s missing a sleeve,” she says to the saleswoman.
“It doesn’t have sleeves,” the saleswoman says. “It’s a poncho.”
“A pon-cho?” my mother repeats, as though it’s a foreign word—which, in her defense, I guess it sort of is.
You’d think that would be the end of it, that my mother would accept the fact that we live in a universe where such a thing as a poncho
exists, and we would leave. But this
is not to happen. “I don’t care what
it is,” she says evenly. “It’s factory-
defective. My husband can’t wear it.”
I thought of my father, a man very big on tucking in clothes, packing the bottom of the poncho into his pants, belting up, and heading out for an evening on the town looking like Fatty Arbuckle.
The saleswoman refuses to give a refund, so my mother asks her to get the manager, and the woman disappears behind a row of suit jackets.
10:50 a.m.
As we wait, I remain by my mother’s side, standing there in this way I
developed as a kid. It’s a posture that’s meant to convey filial loyalty peppered with a touch of what Vietnam vets call the thousand-yard stare.
I imagine the saleswoman conferring in the back room with the
manager, a bedraggled, shiny-jowled man, as he stares at my mother through a security cam, watching with a look of recognition that quickly turns to panic.
10:55 a.m.
The saleswoman returns, immediately offering store credit.
That’s a mistake. Weakness.
“So you can unload socks on us?” my mother asks. “We need more socks like we need rickets.”
Desperate to defuse the situation,
I grab a baseball cap off a nearby shelf and hand it to my mother.
Reluctantly, she gets it for me with her credit.
“Lucky for you my boy needs a hat,” she says. “Walk around in it. Make sure it isn’t too tight around the temples.”
As we leave the store together,
my new cap on my head, I feel about ten years old.
“I’ll hold on to the receipt,” my mother says. “Just in case.”
2. Red Dad, Blue Son
Things were going great. On the last night of our family reunion two years ago, my 62-year-old father and I walked along a beach in South Carolina, glasses of wine in our hands, and soaked in the warm air, the full moon, and the gravity of the years. I’m my dad’s first child and only son, now married with three kids, a career, and a mortgage. From the surf, we could both see his grandchildren silhouetted in the glowing windows of the rented beach house. The moment for a toast had arrived.
And that’s when my dad started talking about the Tea Party.
Somewhere along the way, my dad had come to believe that trying to sell me on his conservative politics was the equivalent of bonding. His opining, however, has always had the same effect on me: My jaw clenches, my back stiffens, and the charge of political discord transforms the most beautiful moon on the East Coast into a naked lightbulb hanging in an interrogation room. Suddenly, I’m trapped with a right-wing pundit who happens to be my dad.
Ever since George W. Bush beat Al Gore in 2000, the chronic red-blue conflict in America hasn’t just been a spectacle on cable news; it’s invaded our family’s phone calls, vacations, e-mails, text messages, Facebook posts. It nearly destroyed my relationship with my own father.
Our father-son differences date back to high school, when my dad, an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard, personally wrote the essay for my application to a military academy, which I passionately opposed with a declaration that I was a “nonconformist” meant for unconventional pursuits (i.e., tramping around like Jack Kerouac). But the arguments we’d had about politics in recent years had been of a different intensity altogether.
During phone calls and visits home, the day’s news headlines were like a background hum growing louder and louder, overwhelming us. It would start innocently enough: My dad would coyly ask what I thought of, say, the latest skirmish over gay marriage. “It’s certainly a complicated issue,” I’d say, as if trying to tiptoe past a sleeping dragon.
Inside, however, I was roiling, considering some close friends who were gay and in committed relationships. Unable to resist, I’d throw out a line to bait him: Hey, isn’t tolerance an option?
“I’m not a live-and-let-live guy,” my dad would assert gruffly, now freed to unleash his own opinions. “I’m live-and-let-live within a certain set of moral values!”
Global warming, immigration, Iraq, Nancy Pelosi—it didn’t matter the subject: Before long, we were both on our soapboxes, red-faced and yelling. Hang ups were frequent. During weekend get-togethers, the simple act of rustling a newspaper to the op-ed page or clicking my tongue at Fox News was enough to send my dad skulking out of the room like a wounded animal. I’d sit on the couch, depressed and confused. My beleaguered mom was left to mediate, trying to cool everybody down so we could at least have dinner together.
2004, I had the bright idea of writing a book about the divisions between my father and me, how they related to the larger national political dialogue. I typed up a sample chapter for publishers, full of scenes from our lives. I made some oblique references about the book to my father, but he somehow came to believe that I was writing an homage to him in the spirit of the late Tim Russert’sBig Russ and Me. Far from it: I was painting him as a modern-day Archie Bunker, spewing harsh opinions from his recliner.
Not long after, while babysitting my nephew, Dad found a copy of my proposal on my sister’s computer while checking his e-mail. My sister called me the next day, apologizing profusely for having left it open on her desktop but also warning me that things were about to blow up.
I didn’t hear from Dad for several days, and every hour that passed became freighted with more dread. For a couple of days, I thought we’d never speak again. When we finally did, it was a tense, emotional conversation. His voice was shaking. How could you think these things about me? You think I’m some kind of bigot? An ignorant redneck? I apologized profusely, nearly in tears.
Given the emotional opera of the election that year, the consequences of our differences felt more significant than ever. It pained me to hear him say that he thought the war in Iraq was justified, for instance, or that women didn’t have the right to choose. In my insular New York world, friends whose parents shared their liberal political views talked about my father the Republican like he had an unfortunate medical condition.
Something had to change in our relationship. I decided it was me.
I forced myself to pay closer attention to my father’s life. While he was occasionally bellicose in his rhetoric, in everyday life, he was a different person. Actually, he was probably the most open and tolerant person I knew, my supposedly tolerant friends included. He had a warm, southern hello for total strangers in my Brooklyn neighborhood, socialized with liberal retirees in his own North Carolina neighborhood, had a gay photographer friend in town with whom he traded camera tips, and spent every Wednesday delivering food to the housebound. It reminded me of the old adage: Liberals love humanity but dislike people; conservatives dislike humanity but love people.
Over time, my dad’s tolerance went from a confounding outlier (he’s a Republican, and he likes people!) to a more complex reality—and a personal challenge to my own biases. My dad forgave me for the things I wrote in the book proposal (the book was never published). It was a quiet and, to my mind, major act of love. If I couldn’t look past my own politics and extend a hand to my father now, who was less tolerant, he or I? And how important to the future of the United States of America was my winning an argument over taxes and deficits with my dad anyway? It was the man I wanted to have a relationship with, not his political agenda.
Bridging the divide required time and patience from both of us. We slowly began to migrate our conversations to new subjects, carefully finding topics that didn’t naturally lead us down the warpath: his interest in photography, the successes and trials of my sisters, home repair, raising children. It was awkward at first, but after a while, I began to look forward to talking about real estate values or the price of heating fuel. And when politics did crop up, as time went by, I noticed we both came to agree on something: that polarization, so corrosive to our own relationship, was corroding every¬thing else as well. “I can’t stand to watch the constant partisan bickering anymore,” he told me recently.
So when that night on a South Carolina beach was threatened with a sudden squall of Rush Limbaugh, I took a deep breath and decided only to listen, not to fight. It’s not that I agreed with him. But I knew what was in his heart, and it wasn’t the Tea Party. Mid-sentence, my dad caught himself too. He took a deep breath, sighed. We both just listened to the surf, falling into a temporary spell. When we came to, we were standing in this glorious place, that moon overhead, the whole country at our backs. A father, a son, a real family—a better union.
3. Snapshots of Middle Class Families
Portraits of four families who represent the challenges faced by the American middle class.
The Realists: Making Ends Meet
It’s been a bumpy decade for Jessica Burrell and her husband, Chad. In 2001, with a baby and dreams of building a nest egg, they were optimistic, despite $11,000 in student loans and credit card debt. In 2005, their income hit a low point when Chad left the Army after two tours in Iraq, and they moved in briefly with his brother. A year later, Chad, now 36, found work as a salesman for a beverage company, and Jessica got a job as a child-care provider. In 2008, with the help of a low-interest loan program for vets, they closed on a $159,000 home in Ridgeland, Mississippi. “We’re happy to have some equity,” says Jessica, 32. “But we worry about the economy and the future of our jobs. ”
Their house has lost value due to foundation damage, but they can’t afford to fix it. “Our biggest financial challenge is simply making ends meet,” says Jessica. Their savings consist of less than $500 in Chad’s retirement account, slightly better than the quarter of all U.S. families with no savings. “Ideally, we’d have a retirement nest egg, money to help the children get on their feet after college, and a little extra to travel,” says Jessica. “But, realistically, we just plan on repairing our house and paying off our debts.”
–Beth Dreher
The Self- Starter: A Taste for Reinvention
Regina Mason opened the Virago Baking Company, an organic pastry shop in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, in 2007 after being laid off from a food-services industry job that paid $50,000 a year, her third layoff in a 30-year career in the field. “A financial planner told me I could invest in stocks, or I could invest in me,” says Mason, 55. Opening Virago took about $60,000, which Mason cobbled together with a bank loan and personal savings. Her expenses, $8,700 a month, include loan repayment, baking supplies, rent on the shop, a home mortgage, health insurance, and credit card bills. Though the recession brought a serious decline in small business start-ups, Mason’s bet on herself is paying off. Her bakery is set to do about $150,000 in sales this year.
As a divorced mother of four, Mason knows how to make a dollar stretch. “We always felt middle class because we always had enough,” says Mason. “I think middle class is more about how you feel about where you are rather than your bank account.” She has about $10,000 in savings and a 401(k), but retirement is not on the menu. “I feel most alive when I can create something,” she says. “Retirement seems like stopping.”
–Joan Raymond
The Retirees: Just Trying to Hold On
In 2003, Gina Caliri retired earlier than planned from the United States Postal Service, at age 64. Her mother, who lived in France, needed care and soon had a stroke. At the time, Gina and her husband, Sebastian, had about $95,000 in savings and an additional $50,000 in stocks. In four years, Gina made 12 trips between Sacramento, California, and France. The Caliris’ savings and 401(k) were weakened by the costly airfare, home repairs, and several stock investments that turned out badly. Then, in 2005, Sebastian, now 78, suffered a stroke of his own. With hefty medical bills and no income besides their pensions and Social Security, they eventually lost their home to foreclosure in 2007. Their plight was no less painful for being common; more than 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies are caused by medical bills.
They rented a house in Plumas Lake, California, and in 2008, their son, Ron, now 49, who was diagnosed with a rare blood disease, lost his job and moved home. Gina and Sebastian both need dental care but cannot afford it. “I was always middle class,” says Gina, now 73. “To be honest, that’s a term I never even thought about until I was slipping out of it.”
–Natalie van der Meer
The Optimists: Faith in a Better Future
Frank Hallum lost his job in 2008 and not one but two houses in 2009. His wife, Pamela, 45, lost her insurance adjuster job this past July. But the married father of three young children and stepfather of two grown sons remains optimistic. “It’s the hope in the middle class,” says Hallum, 45. “You can taste it. You can feel it. You can grasp it. You haven’t got a good hold on it, but you’re right there.”
From 2004 until his layoff in 2008, Hallum worked as a technician on the rail system at Dallas–Fort Worth airport. During the housing bubble, he bought an investment property. When the recession hit and he lost his job, he could no longer handle the two mortgages. He sold his family home and lost the rental property to foreclosure, a fate that befalls 1 out of every 200 homes in the U.S. In December 2010, through contacts in the entertainment industry, he landed a job with radio host Steve Harvey. The Hallums rent their current home. Frank, who makes around $90,000 a year, sees himself as solidly middle class — and wants to move higher. “You don’t look at the middle and want to go backward,” he says. “You look at the middle and want to get better.”
–Karen Springen