20131025.0630

Through something of a minor miracle, while I was about my business yesterday, I managed to recall the topic I had originally meant to discuss yesterday.  It did little to ease the frustration I voiced, happening as it did well after I had made my blog post (and I do try to limit myself to one of these each day; oversaturation would set a dangerous precedent for me).  But it does make it easier for me to sit and write this morning, and I can certainly appreciate that.  (It also allows me something resembling a graceful transition into this piece from the last one, which helps, as well.)

As I have noted, my wonderful wife and I are expecting to be joined by a child.  Accordingly, I have already begun to think about that child's place in and among the families of which the child will be part--and that led me to thinking about how I will explain to the kid who and what my families are.  Given how much I talk about my family, it ought to be a fairly easy thing to do--but "ought" and "is" are all too often entirely different.  They certainly are as I try to wrap my head around the identities of my own families--I will leave my in-laws to my wife--as I try to pass them on to their next generation.  (Yes, I note the Star Trek reference.  Go figure that one out.)

I have noted before the working-class, salt-of-the-earth nature of my families.  Even now, as I write these words, my father is getting ready to go to work maintaining and repairing ventilation systems in a veterans' hospital.  One of my uncles is likely waking up so that he can go work on cars.  A cousin is doing the same, and another cousin is getting ready to dig ditches to install water pipes or to fix a toilet (his is a crappy job, I know).  Other members of my family are perhaps not in such labor, but are still down-to-earth folks; my mother is likely handling tax returns today, an aunt is staffing a school lunchroom, a cousin is stocking shelves in a drugstore or something similar, and my brother is or before long will be putting packages into a truck so they can go where they need to go.  They are a plain, hardworking people on all sides, solid and dependable and in many respects the exemplars of what the American working class is supposed to be.

The label does not sit so well on me as it once did.  As a scholar, as a privileged member of the contingent corps of academics, I am obliged to sit in offices and stand in classrooms and wander the stacks in libraries in search of knowledge with which to make more.  I am expected to absent myself from such things as my families still do, not just in their working lives, but in their personal lives.  I am not supposed to want to go out and have a beer and watch a game and crack dirt jokes, for example, but to sit quietly with a glass of wine and calmly discuss abstract concepts that have no bearing on the "real" work of living day to day.  I am supposed to sit in judgment over the words and deeds of others, reading them to uncover the systematic inequities that they indicate and to find ways to redress the social ills that my own family perpetrates.  The expectations impose a separation between me and the family that taught me to put family first, a separation I am still trying to untangle and a separation which I do not want to impose upon my child.

The difficulty, I think, is obvious.