Place(Setting) Identity

We looked at some dishes yesterday, and I came face to face with some more family history. 

As I've written about before, my mother's family is Congregationalist New England, and my father's family is Baptist Dust Bowl.  And that played out through their entire marriage.  My mother told me a story about my three brothers (all much older than I) being in elementary school, and the principal calling her.  "Mrs. Childress, what nationality are the boys?"  He had a smile in his voice. 

"Why, they're American, of course.  What sort of a question is that?" 

"Well, they were filling out information forms today, and all three of them wrote down 'hillbilly.'"

So apparently my parents' arguments predated me. 

I remember my mother being so proud of the "French Provincial" furniture from the Cole's Department Store downtown.  I remember it mostly because the paisley was satin-stitch embroidered, and I used to rub my fingers back and forth over it... so smooth.  I remember my father's shop in the garage, with all the tools hung on the pegboard over his workbench... so ordered.  She was so proud of being a "supervisor" at the phone company, clearly a status marker she'd worked hard for.  He was a union machinist who was unemployed for ten months one year after being laid off at Christmas.  She had the AMC Matador with the Oleg Cassini interior design package; he had the Chevy C-10 pickup with the truckbed camper.

North/South.  Management/Labor.  Widely-read/Never-read.  I grew up in Red America and Blue America simultaneously, forty years before those labels were ever known.

With that history, even something as small as the choice of dishes can stir really complicated feelings.  It's not that Nora likes one pattern and I like the other—that would be easy.  It's that stuff like dishes and furniture and clothing act as culture markers, and sometimes those cultures don't easily communicate.

We drove away from the dishes and talked for another hour about it, and about why it was difficult to even find words for my discomfort.  (They were nice dishes.)  I love that we can talk about things that are hard just as well as we talk about things that are immediately pleasurable; that's a big change for me.  We haven't resolved the dishes, or the issues beneath them.  But I know that we will, and that's enough.