T-715: Middle Aged, Middle Class, and Middle Brow

Part of what is sending us out on this trip is the feeling that we have become entirely too Middle Aged, Middle Class, and Middle Brow.  When I look back on the start of our marriage and our early years, when we vigorously cut an individualistic path through the world,  I wonder how much of our life has been settling down, and how much of it has been settling.



We have great neighbors and live in a great house.



When we first bought our house and started our company, we were no longer kids.  I was thirty five and Wes thirty eight.  Setting roots felt like the strongest, bravest thing we could do.  We saw our work in Detroit as part of the wave of transformation that surely was just around the corner.  It was exciting to live in a historic house, in a reviving neighborhood, making work that we believed in, even if we were supporting the work far more than it was supporting us.

But as the years have rolled by, we have become deadened by the sheer force of exertion.  We push through our long days, with barely a chance to look up.  Dinner so often is the quiet companionship of two people reading the paper together, happy that no one is making a demand, even for conversation, on them.

We pay our bills, we do our work.  There is little which takes us out of ourselves, little that forces us into new patterns of thought.  We are not particularly unhappy, but we are very, very tired.  The exhaustion makes us choose the familiar, the safe, the ritual.

How many more times can we go to Panera for Sunday breakfast and read the paper?  Does every Saturday have to be a lockstep of chores and shopping, with the occasional delightful fillip like last Saturday's performance by Heritage Works?

When we were travelling, every day presented a challenge.  I remember watching a pageant in Nova Scotia which celebrated the Loyalists journey from the United States to become citizens of Canada.  I remember thinking that I didn't even realize that there were a lot of people in the United States that were opposed to the American Revolution.  Of course, this is patently obvious...just not apparent because nothing broke through the incrustation of habit.



 

A sensible car for sensible people like us

This morning, as I was riding my bike to work, I was pre-occupied because I had to drop car keys

at a shop to repair our car which developed sudden and alarming electrical problems yesterday.  I was reminded of all those years when we lived without a car and how life was both much simpler and much more complicated.  We navigated big cities and small towns without a vehicle. 



Wes, god love him, would take a city bus in Houston, whose bus system was at least as bad as Detroit's is now, to go recycle.  I would organize our shopping trips to get the lowest price within walking distance.  When we lived in Salt Lake, we would wait until Wes got his "blood money" (cash for giving his plasma), go to the Dee's for a hamburger, then walk to stores to get the supplies for the week.  We must have been living on $600 a month.

Now, we don't clip coupons or worry much about whether something costs a nickel less.  We have insurance, and a washing machine, and think about the piles of chores which lurk about every householder's heels.  But do we ever just go lay in sun like we used to?  Do we ever let our selves go watch and wonder and discover the boundaries in our minds.  Not much, not much.  As the fenestrations of middle class life have grown around us, bit by bit by bit our souls have shrunk as our guts and butts have grown.   Enough.