Strong Language

I’m in the Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids (Jerry Ford’s hometown), waiting another three hours for my flight to Newark.  There’s not much in Terminal B — six gates, one bagel shop, and a corridor snack/magazine kiosk.  C’est tout.  Long stretches of blank wall, everything in the same tone of gray-green.

Funny place, West Michigan.  When I arrived on Friday, the person I was supposed to meet had been delayed, so I asked the woman at the Travel Information desk how I could get to Calvin College.  She immediately called the college's conference center, and got me added to the shuttle bus list.  I thanked her, we talked, and I said that I’d grown up in Muskegon but had never been to Calvin College.  “Oh, gravy!” she replied.

That’s really the tone of the place now.  Kind, eager to help... but always just a little uncomfortable with how the 20th Century has turned out.  Never is heard a discouraging word.  A place where “Oh, gravy!” is a strong oath.

Back when I was growing up, West Michigan was an industrial place, full of hard-living third-generation Irish and Poles and Italians, people who brawled and drank and smoked and laughed.  But the industry is largely gone in favor of management and finance, and the blue collars are also gone.  Their habitat is now claimed by shiny young JayCees, evangelists both secular and Calvinist, men on the make.  Smiling, shaking hands and making friends, always moving forward, always ready to claim another convert/customer.  It’s the home of multi-level marketing, dreams of greatness, relentless self-improvement.  Willy Loman would recognize Grand Rapids. 

I went out to meet the shuttle bus, and waited far past its appointed arrival time.  I carried my bags back in to the info desk, where the same sweet, grandmotherly woman was still on duty.  She didn’t recognize me at first —as with all salespeople, she’s fully attentive with each client but carries little of that into long-term memory — but I explained what had happened and she remembered and was shocked that the shuttle was so late.  “Oh, my heart!” she said.  Not as in clutching your chest and exclaiming, “Oh!!! My Heart!” but in the way you’d say “Oh my goodness.”

OMH!!

There’s something brittle about that kind of living.  I once read, “A person without humor experiences life like a wagon without springs, unpleasantly jolted by every bump in the road.”  Business self-help books and motivational speakers are part of that life, constantly reminding yourself that you can be great, that greatness is your due, that hard work will unfailingly be repaid tenfold.  From Good to Great.  The Purpose-Driven Life.  The CEO of YOU.  They don’t advise on how to deal with the bumpy road; they promise instead that the road will soon be pearly smooth.

And it won’t.  And they’ll always be a little surprised, a little shocked that imperfection is still allowed.  Oh, gravy.

One of the unstated goals of liberal education is that it creates another population distinct from the blue and white collars. A community of people able to absorb change, and to help frame it.  A community with enough historical perspective to have some humor about the current world while simultaneously being serious about making it better while simultaneously knowing that other people have competing (and yet reasonable) definitions of what "making it better" would entail.  It doesn't matter whether you're studying English lit or architecture or agricultural engineering — good education has larger and more crucial outcomes.

But that IS a third community, with its members drawn from but no longer fully at home with their working or the professional class roots.  This Grand Rapids, and my own Muskegon, are both foreign places now.