Diplomats and Doublewides

[NOTE: This essay was written 8 years ago. I now live in a large townhouse in SE Michigan - still with the same man (and they said it wouldn't last). While in Ohio, I got a job with the Art Institutes, and landing that position changed my life. I now work as a Marketing Specialist for infoUSA and have health insurance. The sky is still big, and my life is good.]

I am 38 years old. I am not a wife. I am not a mother. I am not a homeowner. My credit union holds the title on my car. I do not have health insurance. I have a B.S. degree in English but have not pursued getting a masters degree. My life has taken a sharp turn from the path on which I’d been meandering for 36 years.

Mine is a family of intellectuals, diplomats, artists, writers, museum and theater goers, world travelers, and liberal minded, forward-thinking citizens. I spent several years of my childhood living in East and West Africa. My parents have dined at the White House. My father deals with dignitaries and meets with presidents and heads of state. My mother is an artist who marches against unjust wars, unjust laws, and for civil rights, and she tutors elementary age children in reading, many of whom speak English as a second language. I think that’s pretty cool stuff. My family is successful, happy, well liked by others, interesting, and interested.

I am almost 39 years old. I knowingly took a nosedive off my career ladder in order relocate to another state to live with a man. A man I met on the Internet. A man with a record, a couple of failed marriages (and the children from each), and a political/social perspective that veers to the right of mine. He also has a love of things that go fast, a warped but wonderful sense of humor, and a brilliant mind when it comes to all things mechanical and technical.

This was the man I dreamed of before I really knew such men. This is the grown up version of the boy I daydreamed about after seeing Jackie Earl Haley ride his Harley Davidson in the movie “Bad News Bears.” This man represented the attitude I had, even on my eleventh birthday when my mother drove to a rough and tumble Harley shop in Dumphries, Virginia to buy for her pre-teen daughter a model motorcycle, Harley calendar, t-shirt, and decals. She also bought me a book on slick vans. The purple carpeted, oak paneled and chrome-trimmed interiors reminded me of the people who lived in my classmate Beau Beau Baker’s neighborhood. Back then, that neighborhood was made up mostly of hard working, blue-collar people. White painted tires doubling as planters were a popular garden adornment, and many homes had the ever-present lawn menagerie of plastic squirrels, flamingoes, kittens, and year round Christmas displays. Getting in a car in the dead of night, gathering up as many plastic animals as the car would hold and planting them on our High School lawn was a rite-of-passage for the kids from my neighborhood. Not nice, but easier than taking the Big Boy statue and placing it on the roof of our school. By the way, a recent online search showed me those same homes in the DC suburbs now sell for over 250 grand.

Perhaps the exotic book of vans and the Harley paraphernalia represented windows I wanted to peek into, but wasn’t sure I wanted to see out of. Now, I am 38 and more than a half, and I’m looking out the windows of a trailer in northwest Ohio. It’s a comfortable trailer, and I’ve learned not to be a snob about such accommodations…much. I now know that there are parts of the country where people make fairly decent money and still choose to live in trailers. I also now know that there are parts of the country where mathematics and vocational school are emphasized over language, history, the arts, reading, writing, and the expectation of college. . .and I understand why. It’s taken me over three years of living here and cringing when I hear the English language butchered by so many - my very bright boyfriend, teachers and fast food workers alike. It’s taken going through the demoralizing process of many, many interviews that have led, ultimately, to a mediocre job with a market research company, performing work I could have done at 19, at a wage I last earned when I was 20. So why is it that my skills and strengths are lost here? It’s because math and science will get you a job in northwest Ohio. Speaking well, writing well, and being able to identify, by book titles alone, an author on a PBS interview show --- these things get you nothing more than rolling eyes and a degree of contempt. I now understand that to people living in an area dominated by industry (primarily automotive), a college education could be wasted, unless one studies engineering, medical transcription, or business administration. Two years in a regular high school followed by intensive, no-nonsense training in a vocational school holds more promise than a liberal arts college education.

While still living in the Washington DC metropolitan area, I read somewhere that employers value clear, concise writing over many other skills. People who can put a sentence together are valuable. Here, it’s nice to know that somebody can communicate effectively, but somebody with experience in a plant or manufacturing environment is more likely to land the management positions I sought the first year and a half of my job search. “You don’t want ME?!” I’d think after not getting a job. “Do you have any idea who you’re turning down? Don’t you know that I’m a diplomat’s daughter and know a little about more things than anybody you are likely to interview?”

Hmmmm. The problem could be just that. My past, upbringing, education, and verbal skills don’t impress folks around here. Why should they? What good does it do them or their clients? I may know a little about a lot of things, but have I been thoroughly trained in any one area? Do I have a trade? No. I do not. I am not marketable in northwest Ohio. I now understand this.

I am almost 39 years old. At 36 I went to my first drag race. At 37, I went to my first auto show. At 38, I went to my first dirt track Sprint car race, and also witnessed my first appliance race – of which there are two kinds. One is a race in which participants modify appliances and race them via remote control (toasters, buzz saws, blenders). The other is one in which racers must strap three large appliances (washers, driers, refrigerators) to the hood, roof and rear of their vehicle and race around a track.

During this period of time, I attended my best friend’s wedding in upstate New York. The families came from Maine and small town New York. They were wonderful people. I’m rarely at a loss for words. If I don’t seem to have much in common with someone, and if I don’t have much to say, I often ask questions, which brings me into the conversation. This time, however, I did have things to say. NASCAR and hunting are now topics on which I can contribute information. I didn’t have to ask annoying questions of the men who stood with me smoking outside the wedding hall. The Coors car? Sterling Marlin. My favorite driver! I was able to impress by saying that my boyfriend is an engineer – automotive design primarily. His team sometimes gets to work on NASCAR designs. When one baseball cap-wearing wedding attendee mentioned moose hunting, I talked about the incredible venison my boyfriend’s brother had brought us the previous year, and how I hoped he’d help us stock our freezer again this year; how I’d be interested in tasting moose meat, but there hadn’t been any moose sightings in Ohio since…ever. Somehow this brought us to the topic of the sniper terrorizing the Washington metro area at the time. That took us to gun control. These are things I can get on my soapbox about. Yet, I found myself not feeling the same indignation I would have felt three years earlier. Hunting? Eating Bambi? Hearing myself say, “Yeah. I wouldn’t mind trying target practice.” Am I the same person who raised money for handgun control? Who’d get on my high horse about hunting? Hell, if you eat the meat, what does it matter? If you learn to respect the weapon you use, what’s wrong with that? I really believe these things now. They seem very reasonable. My knee-jerk reaction to all things “gun” and “hunting” is gone. I don’t see my change in attitude as a bad thing. I still think assault rifles are unnecessary to hunters and no ordinary citizen needs automatic weapons. I hold firm to my belief that taking pot shots at squirrels and birds and killing just to mount a head on your wall are cruel. But you want to give me some meat to eat, I’ll thank you and wish you luck for the following season. You have a healthy respect for your firearm, teach your children gun safety, and practice it, I won’t fight to take away your right to do so. I am 38 years old, and I sometimes have to look very carefully at my face in the mirror to recognize myself.

I am 38 years old. I’m not as professionally successful as I’d planned on being. I don’t have intellectual neighbors or friends. I live in a trailer and talk to my parents on the phone about their season tickets to the Kennedy Center and Arena Stage. I don’t go to the theater. I go to the races. I live with a man who has jailhouse tattoos (one youthful indiscretion), but who once said as he was falling asleep, “I like James Earl Jones’ voice. Whatever would we do without him?” I live with a man who makes me smile. The man I live with can build his own computer, repair our heater, change the brake light in my Saturn, make his sons laugh until their faces hurt—he is why I am here, and I can accept that as I exit my trailer and go to work for pennies and no insurance.

Truth be told, it’s not only my boyfriend that keeps me here. The Ohio sky has often filled me with such joy that my eyes brim with tears. The sky in northwest Ohio is huge. Sunsets are lovely. The sky back home in northern Virginia has been shrunken and cut into, like the Asian art of paper cutting – like Kirigami. In northern Virginia, you have to travel far outside the Beltway to see sky from left to right. Apartment complexes, high-rise office buildings, monuments, all kinds of things impair one’s ability to turn left – see horizon, pan to the right, see horizon and nothing but sky in between. Of course, my part of Ohio is pretty flat, which helps. Still, Ohio can claim big, beautiful skies. I like that. As long as I never hear myself say, “I seen a beautiful sunset the other day. Them clouds was streaked like sherbert across the sky”, I think I’ll be okay here. I think I’m okay with that.