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who feels failed by the American Dream
Wednesday, August 26 2015
location: Rural Hurley township, Ulster County, New York
This afternoon Gretchen made some pasta salad, vegan ricotta "cheese," and a large tray of brownies. With all of this stuff and our dogs, we drove over to Susan & David's place (east of Woodstock) to pick them up and then continued to Julianna & Lee's place (south of Woodstock), where they were hosting a barbecue for the six of us and any dogs that could attend. (The dogs Olive and Darla had to stay home because they don't play well with others.) This was the first time Susan & David had been to Julianna & Lee's place. It's an amazing house on an amazing site, with glorious views of the Catskills across the lush floodplain field along the Saw Kill, and right away Susan & David were struck with house envy. They have a gorgeous place of their own, but the basement has been gutted and unliveable for six months, and it's all a bit overwhelming. At Julianna & Lee's place, though, everything is finished and perfect. So throughout the evening, there was a constant din of gushing about how beautiful everything was.
We'd started out drinking sort of girlie cocktails that Julianna had made. When I'd finished mine, Julianna offered to get me "a beer." I suppose I should have asked what kind, since, strangely, she didn't say. I suggested she just let me root around in the fridge and find one (since that way I could avoid the many beers that I don't prefer) but no, she insisted on fetching me "a beer." I shouldn't have been surprised when she returned with an Amstel Light. It was so not me that I kept its label concealed in my hand as I drank it. (You never know what picture of you is going to show up on the Facebooks!) It had been a very long time since I'd last drunk that particular brand. I've become quite a beer snob since then, but the world around me has stayed mostly the same.
At some point in and around the beer incident, David jokingly asked what my last name means in German, and I responded, "He who goose-steps the highest." We were out on the bluestone stoop at the time, admiring the distant mountains. According to Lee, there are no more fireflies at this time of year, but it was too early for them to be out in any case.
Inevitably the topic of conversation returned to its home position in this household (at least the one it likes to go to when we're around): the craziness and tackiness of the ultra-orthodox in-laws. I wonder if this was the topic just because nearly everyone present (4.5 out the 6) was Jewish, or if this is the everyday guest conversation.
We also discussed the double murder that happened this morning live on-air in Virginia, as a disgruntled newsman opened fire on colleagues doing an on-site video broadcast. I noted that, since the shooter was a black man (an unusual characteristic of rampage shooters) perhaps now they'll be movement towards trace amounts of gun control. People in this country, after all, are all about rights until black people start exercising them.
David mentioned something he'd read about how Americans as a people are unique in the world for the rage they experience at the disappointments in their lives, and that it has something to do with feeling lied to by the American Dream. This led Gretchen to tell about her experience as a union organizer in and around Milwaukee. African Americans were easy to organize, because they knew that the American Dream wasn't for them and there was no way they'd ever be the boss. But white people proved impossible to organize; as uneducated and unskilled as they were, they looked at the boss and could imagine themselves in that role, and that kept the dream alive. They didn't want to do anything to rock the boat or trouble their future lives as a part of management. Hearing these two things, I immediately understood why it's so rare for black people to shoot up their schools or former places of employment: they never had any hopes for society to crushingly dash.
At some point after we'd eaten the burgers, [REDACTED] barbecued corn, pasta, and salad, there was brief kerfuffle in the couch area of the screened-in porch. Reflexively, I jumped to my feet, grabbed Ramona, and held her by her back legs, allowing Lisa Marie, the house Siamese cat, to scurry away. She's an intelligent-but-bitchy cat with perhaps a little too much curiosity, and when we'd been looking at the upstairs rooms, evidently we'd left the door to her room open and she'd wandered down. Evidently she'd popped up as a surprise there among Ramona and Eleanor, and they'd reacted as their instinct dictated, which was to charge. And Lisa Marie had done precisely the worst-possible thing: she'd fled. Ramona had managed to get her mouth on the cat, but happily Lisa Marie was not injured.
The other household cat is, like one of Susan & David's dogs, named Olive, and she's a special needs cat who must be kept on a tether to keep her from pissing all over Julianna & Lee's bedroom. Gretchen absolutely adores her, even to the extent of semi-seriously suggesting that we have our cat Oscar lobotomized so that he'll be more like her. Since Olive has too many mental challenges to process the threat of our dogs, she basically ignored them as they looked at and snuffled on her (though she was always in someone's arms when this happened). This is the best possible way for a cat to deal with a strange dog; it worked great for our last elderly cat, the late Marie (the first cat that we referred to as "the Baby").
Before we headed home, Lee gave us a tour of his studio, which, like my laboratory, is in the prism-shaped space over a garage. It was dominated by a place for doing paintings and a place for making music. He even played us a version of the classic song "Unforgettable" that he'd built out of 60-some different tracks on his multitrack music-editing software. He's clearly something of a polymath, because this is all in addition to his professional talents as an architectural and furniture designer.
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