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So much of life is like an awkward blind date. When we meet people for the first time, we know nothing of their story. Generally, we want to make a good impression, but we don’t know their tastes or the scars that conceal their tender places. All we have for a point of reference is our own past, and yet, like it or not, we share the history of a country, a culture, and a world that was set spinning long before we were born. Even our smallest encounters carry the weight of that history. During the COVID pandemic, I drove across town to pay my rent. It was an early morning in June. The city was showered with sunlight and gentle breezes. Lavender and geraniums were abloom in landscaped yards and sidewalk planters, but it was not long into my journey before I noticed the boarded-up store fronts and the city work crews cleaning up debris from Black Lives Matter protests. When I arrived at the real estate office I noticed a worn ladder propped up against the side of the building. It was blocking the path to the drop box. I stopped on the sidewalk and looked up. A slender, graying man looked down: a black man in a vulnerable position looking down on a white woman. Instinctively, we both felt the weight of America’s history of race. I looked back down to study the space around the ladder. Could I safely squeeze past? I looked up. “I just want to drop my rent payment into the box.” He looked back, “Okay, then,” even as he kept his eyes on me. For a moment we were both afraid. His fear was that I would kick down the ladder and leave him stranded on a hot roof. My fear was that I was causing him discomfort and that he would see me as someone dangerous—not a person I wanted to be. Each of us was just trying to do a normal activity: he was trying to earn a living; I was trying to pay my rent on time. I wanted to say, “You don’t need to fear me.” I wanted to offer to stay there and keep watch over the ladder so that he could work without the distraction of ensuring the ladder’s safety, but our words of reassurance can be shallow to people shaped by a different history, people who have lived their entire lives prepared for the worst in people. And would that offer have embarrassed him? Reminded him of the very things he most feared? It seemed like an awkward, no-win situation. The encounter affected me, and I worried about the man for the rest of the day. Driving home, I was reminded of another situation many years earlier. I was a graduate student in Pittsburgh working part-time in a treatment program for adolescents. The teens came to our program every weekday after school and spent the afternoons and evenings attending groups, sharing meals, and participating in therapeutic activities. Many of the youth were from inner-city neighborhoods. Part of my job was to drive each of them home at night. One night I headed out into the dark in an old station wagon filled with teenagers. With the last two remaining passengers, I proceeded to the housing project where the young man lived. As I started to slow down in front of his unit, a warning light began to glow on the car’s dashboard. I could see from the rearview mirror that the young man had seen the light too. He became alarmed and said to me, “DO NOT get out of the car! They don’t like white people here. I will get my dad.” I and my last passenger waited in the car as instructed. The young man’s father came and lifted the car’s hood. He peered inside with a flashlight. Slamming the lid, he said, “I think you will be all right.” Thankfully, all went well, and I dropped off the last teen and returned to the treatment center and parked the company car. All of these years later, I still wonder about that young man and the dissonance he had to live with daily growing up in an environment of hurt turned to hate. He was a young black man, and I was a young white woman. Clearly, he was filled with concern for my safety on that dark night even as he understood the anger and hatred that existed in his neighborhood. I wondered, how do people go about developing normal relationships when we grow up with such different and frightening messages about groups of other people? How do we keep hurt from becoming hate from becoming revenge? I hope that sweet young man found a way to navigate his circumstances without being destroyed by them. I have not suffered the insults or the fears that either of these black men in our culture has endured, but I am a woman in this culture. I have my own set of fears and my own flames of outrage. In that, we have much in common amidst much that is different. We each have known the pain of being vulnerable and the dangers of trying to defend ourselves. We know that standing up for ourselves often means more labels and being dismissed as an “angry ____.” You can fill in the blank with the stereotypes. Going into the workforce right out of high school in 1974, I experienced the blatant sexual discrimination and harassment that was common then. I went to work for a large, well-respected law firm. All men. It was common for them to make inappropriate sexual remarks or jokes that made the women who worked there uncomfortable, or to try to touch or kiss…When the first female law clerks were hired, they were told openly, “If you plan to have children, don’t even think about working here.” It was a point of pride that no woman had ever sat in the boardroom. To complain likely would have meant the end of employment for women during that time. We endured, and we had each other. And, eventually, things did change. The women law clerks hung in there. Years later, some became partners and had children too. I worked at the law firm to finance my way through college. After graduation, I went onto graduate school where I saw that white men benefitted from diversity and inclusion efforts too. Social work is and has been a predominantly “female” occupation. To attract more men to the program and to the profession, my graduate program offered many generous full scholarships to men while I and the women I knew did not receive the same substantial financial assistance. We befriended our male colleagues and lived with it. We understood that white males were not generally attracted to the jobs held by women and other minorities because the reality is those jobs just didn’t pay as well as the jobs more typically dominated by white men—at least back then. And back then, men may not have had the same freedom to pursue careers in fields dominated by women because of the social scorn they might have received. After graduate school, I went to work in a community mental health center. While I was working there a professional position opened at a prestigious university’s Child Study Center. I was very interested in the job, the university, and that part of the country, and so I applied. I received a phone call from a woman at the university inviting me for an interview. She ended the invitation by saying, “We are looking to hire a minority candidate; so if you are not a minority candidate, I wouldn’t invest the money in travel.” I did not schedule an interview. Though a woman, I was no longer a minority candidate in the professional community…much had changed since I left high school. Even now, all of these years later, with so much anger about race and diversity, I cannot be angry about the lost interview opportunity. I felt it was someone else’s turn to have a chance. I accepted that this was the road that led to change. I always assumed the person hired would be both a minority candidate and a competent individual. It would be lovely to think that after all of these years, it would be unnecessary to have quotas or to make such direct efforts to hire a more diverse work force, and yet…And maybe so much of the current anger about DEI efforts has to do with the opportunities technology has taken away from humans not what DEI has done. We are fighting over the scraps of the remaining good jobs, and we blame each other… In this time of rancor about DEI programs and efforts to further social equality, people quickly jump to conclusions, and so we can fear speaking at all because we might be accused of being some “ist” or “ism.” The only way to win this war of confusion is to go out on a limb and assume that most people are well-meaning even if naïve—good at heart but with different experiences. Every person has a point of view and their own scrapes with culture and history. No one wants to be belittled. All sides want to be heard and understood. We can choose interpretations that fuel anger and hostility widening the divides in our country, or we can choose interpretations that educate and lead to insight and understanding. We need to keep talking with compassion until we find the eloquence to express what is true. Like blind dates, we can expect that the first encounters will be awkward, but good and lasting relationships can be built between hopeful strangers with good intentions.
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 A wealthy white male politician with three children, a wife and available in-laws has put childless cat ladies in the news. He did not do this to uplift childless cat ladies or to garner their votes. No, he did it to demean them and keep the attention on himself. He stated outright that the United States is “being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He asks: “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” Wow, J.D. Vance! You might want to hike up your pants. I think your soul is showing. In response, I want to honor the childless cat ladies in my life, women who gave their lives to others, investing in the future and in me. First, shout-outs to family women: Aunt Phoebe, Aunt Lillie, Aunt Gen, and Ellie, remarkable women who, while they never bore children, were never childless. They invested in me and my large pack of cousins, their communities, and their country. They made the world a better place. Lillie, Phoebe, Gen, and Ellie, you never birthed or adopted children, and it never occurred to me to question your marital or parenting status. You always belonged to me and to all of us. It was just the way it was. Lucky us! Perhaps you had your reasons or even your heart breaks. I will never know. If you were sad or unhappy with your life, it never showed. And one thing was always clear to me, your lives were never focused on yourselves; your lives were always about others, about us, about the future, and not just our futures, but that of your community. You offered us examples of different choices and circumstances, of acceptance for what life gives and takes. Without your own children to care for, you were free to care for all of us. And you did. To Aunt Lillie, I want to say thank you for sharing your name with me. I am proud to carry it. I want to thank you for your service to our country during World War II caring for soldiers injured in Europe. You showed me that a woman can serve in uniform and in war. By your example, you showed me that a woman can live a life of adventure and still be nurturing, generous, and a master of the home arts. You taught me to keep house and to cook, to adapt to the needs of others and the demands of life, and to sacrifice for family when crises occur. You showed me how to stay on my feet when illness strikes. You introduced me to Gidget movies, Tammy movies and Johnny Carson. For all the sleepovers, summer respites, and wise counsel, I thank you. To Aunt Phoebe, you showed me that a woman can be an entrepreneur and savvy investor without selling her soul. You ran a local store where I met my neighbors and learned about commerce, kindness and generosity. You took the time to learn the many languages in your immigrant community. You offered credit to folks when times were hard. You sent us to leave surprise bushels of groceries on front porches. You worked standing all day, sometimes until your legs looked like they might burst. You showed me when to hold your tongue and how to get along with everyone. I watched you at night studying the stock market reports in the daily newspaper. You showed me that one does not have to go to school to learn. You were self-taught in everything and a master of it all. You left a small fortune to your family and to your community. I thank you for the security that came from always knowing that no matter what happened, there would always be food on our table. To Aunt Gen—you married but never had children. I don’t know why. You showed me what a happy marriage looks like. Thank you for bringing Uncle Harry into our lives with his humor and his ability to fix anything, and for showing us all how to nail down a bargain! You shared your finds with all of us so generously and so often. You will be happy to know even my children are bargain hunters! And to Ellie…you were not born into our family, but you might as well have been. You came to us as a mother’s helper when you were just a child yourself. You came and you never left us. You moved from one growing family to the next. You showed me that faithfulness is not born of blood but comes through the love that grows from time, commitment, and sharing lives together. You know more about my family roots than I do. You saw it all. And wisely, you accepted it and kept your mouth shut! As Mary Pipher would say, each of you, all of you “did the hard work of loving me into existence…Through (your) eyes, I began to see myself.” When politicians carelessly label and categorize, I feel a personal sense of outrage and the need to stand up for you and for all women. All of you taught me that. You were never miserable. You always gave me somewhere to turn, and I would turn the country over to any one of you. While I have spoken of family, I cannot disregard the many, many childless cat ladies in my life who have been my teachers, medical professionals, and lifelong friends. They taught me to read, cared for me when I was sick, filled my life with adventure, and rushed to my aid in emergencies. They had a flexibility that I did not have as a single parent, and they used their skills, money, and time to care for me and for others. My life would have been so empty and so hard without them. Please, J.D., don’t mock the childless cat ladies. They are part of the backbone of America. They make it all work.  Well, I have a small update. Just this morning my petite neighbor called to tell me that while she was monitoring the self-checkout stations at her current job this week, she was offered three different new jobs by three different customers. I have no doubt in my mind that, in addition to being beautiful and petite, my neighbor is also friendly, hardworking. And petite. The only offer I received this week was from a burly, unshaven man coming out of a restroom in my local convenience store. I happened to notice him because he was wearing tactical gear and mumbling into his shirt collar. He asked me if I’d like to be a human shield. Apparently, I am the right size to conceal a military target. And I look disposable. I did feel flattered to be noticed since most people don’t see me at all, and this attention despite the fact the guy was wearing an eye patch! The job did sound noble. And short term. But I wasn’t in the mood. I am still getting the hang of retirement, and I am too easily frustrated to obtain the right documents to travel internationally. Being invisible may be a superpower in some circles, but I don’t know if it is the best resume for a human shield. Perhaps he thought that eventually I might have potential in the spy trade though that is unlikely. If he really did see me, it would have been apparent that I am no Mata Hari. Though tall, she was extremely beautiful and disguised herself as an exotic Asian dancer. Not a good cover for someone with so much to cover. And I am not much into stealing—secrets or otherwise. I don’t think I could ever live a double life. I have enough trouble managing one, and sometimes I can’t remember the name on my official state ID. Even if I could overcome these spy deficits and unleash my superpowers, my kryptonite is that I can’t seem to hide my incredulity at the things people say and do. In the spy business, perpetual astonishment would be a dead give-away, and I would be the one dead. Speed and elusiveness are vital traits in the world of espionage, but as you can tell, I also tend to perseverate which makes it hard to move on. I am baffled as well as fascinated by the irony that being smaller can make a woman larger in the eyes of others. Or maybe I am downright incredulous. In any case, I am as stuck as those last 3 inches and 25 pounds.  Then there is this other life, layered on top and woven through, the life of passion and pursuit, of my dreams and aspirations, a life of love sought and realized, of beauty and community, of adventure and openness. It is a life I always want and don’t always have…a life animated in thought and action by the hope that I shall flourish along with my friends and family—that we shall hold each up through our excellence, creativity, and goodwill, a life where we flourish together. Where humanity flourishes. The thought of this life fills my heart with love and hope, fills my lungs with breath. --Nick Riggle in This Life, This Body, This Day, This Time, These People, This Beauty: A Philosophy of Being Alive I have a neighbor who is about five years older than me. Like pre-menopausal women whose menstrual cycles align through association, my neighbor and I seem to run into each other on the way to the dumpster. I don’t know if it is some biological synchronization or just the timely flow of fertile debris before it grows into something alive inside our apartments, but it happens regularly. When we meet at the dumpster, we stand down wind of the odor of decaying food and poopy diapers. The conversation becomes a purge of trash, problems at work, and the decline of the neighborhood. The conversation winds down when one of us makes a half-hearted commitment to do lunch “sometime,” the signal that one of us is cold, hot, or has to go. While I enjoy this wonderful neighbor whenever and wherever I meet her, I am beginning to feel some pressure to dress for these trash-can occasions. My petite, fashionable neighbor always comes to the dumpster like it is cocktail hour in an upscale Greenwich Village bar. She sparkles like champagne with her hair styled, nails polished, eye makeup just right. I am both in awe and suspicious. I do notice that she seems to have considerably more trash to dispose of than I do. Perhaps, as I suspected, being beautiful requires a lot of time-consuming work and a lot of products. I rationalize my own appearance with claims of sparing the environment from all that packaging. What else I notice about my neighbor, in addition to her lovely appearance and volume of trash, is the way men respond to her, to all petite women, really. A petite woman can carry a baggy to the dumpster, and a manly neighbor will fall all over himself offering to carry her trash. Petite women are sexy, sleek little sailboats. I, on the other hand, am an overloaded cargo ship that has been stuck in the Suez Canal for so long that the bottom has rusted out. When a man approaches me, it is not to offer aid or flirtation. It is usually to ask if I will hold up the front end of his car while he changes a tire. For women of my generation and the ones before, it seems like it was always a choice between being capable or beautiful. Smart girls were admonished to keep their hands down and NEVER appear smarter than the boys. To do otherwise would guarantee spinsterhood. Of course, all young children were advised to “be seen and not heard,” but there was a time-limit on that for boys. For young women the advice later became “be seen but not heard.” Be desirable but not too smart. The images of women who appeared in ads or on television were housewives dressed in fitted-waist dresses, wearing nylon stockings, pumps, and a string of pearls. A starched white apron was the only evidence of their shared occupation. These women, if mothers, deferred all parenting decisions until the father got home. Here I am now old enough to have one foot in the grave (and I can still hold up the front end of a car, thank you very much!) and I continue to confront these messages from my past, the trash talk that shaped my life and opportunities. I look around now at young women professionals and think “Hey, that’s what I wanted!” I just didn’t know it was available to me or even that it was out there to want. Such models or examples were not present in my every-day environment. The real professionals that I knew were nuns. They taught in schools and colleges and operated hospitals. For me, that was the spinsterhood I feared. Of course, messages about beauty and appearance still taunt women today, but the messages about brains and opportunity are not as limiting. There are plenty of women who now can claim brains and beauty. They can be mothers and successful professionals. But there are groups of individuals who continue to receive limiting messages about who they are and what they can be. To all children everywhere, I say this: No matter what package you are wrapped in, it is good to raise your hands. Take a chance no matter what you are wearing or what nouns or pronouns describe you. Be at home in your body and in your life. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Behold your own beauty. And if anyone tells you otherwise, well, that’s just trash talk.  Ever have one of THOSE days? You know what I’m talking about. You wake up in the morning and you are already tired—the worst possible way to start the day. One of THOSE days is a day when everything you touch experiences system failure. You try to pay a bill that is due today. You go on line and the computer freezes and the site goes down. How you discover that the refrigerator quit working during the night is by pouring sour milk on top of the last bit of cereal and taking a rancid bite. You go to your car in the pouring rain to find the tire pressure light is on. Road construction is blocking your driveway, and you pull out into speeding traffic like a blind woman in a pedal car with wobbly wheels. Each tiny cut of discouragement leaves you bleeding on the curb of life and you have to pretend you booked this location just to take in the view from below. I am not talking about a full blown state of clinical depression. I am just talking about one of THOSE days. On one of THOSE days, you lose all knowledge of how the world works, except this: you know from experience that it is not a good day to weigh yourself. You have been around long enough to know that there are things you should never do when under the influence, but adding insult to injury is what you do under the influence of one of THOSE days. You try to talk yourself out of it. You are long familiar with this particular brand of self-harm, this proof that you are a loser but not of pounds. You know you should just get into your car and start driving to a Betty Ford Clinic to address this relapse in your addiction to self-hatred, but you don’t. You step on the scale instead, and just as you knew would be the case, the needle moves up. And then you chastise yourself for having been a fool when you should have known better, and you curse the gods that gave you a slow metabolism, a hefty bone structure, big feet, and a serious water retention problem. You know the number on the scale can’t possibly reflect the portion-controlled few morsels you ate yesterday. It is all more evidence of the cosmic injustice that is your life. You can never admit any of this inner drama to anyone, and so you try to act like a normal human being. The demands of life propel you forward into the day. You dress and face the weather and the traffic. You blast some old Motown hits from your playlist and sing along as you drive. You get to work and get busy. You engage with people you like. You solve problems. You make plans. You take a walk. Slowly, you forget that you hate yourself and the world. By lunch you convince yourself that your morning fast and the calories burned in the fire of angst make it safe to eat lunch. And you do. And you feel better still. And the work day ends, and you realize that slowly, while you weren’t looking, one of THOSE days became a GOOD day. You offer thanks to the Great Day Trader who gave you a better day than the one with which you began. And you do not weigh yourself when you get home.  A neighbor stops in: “Oh, your house is so clean!” At my stage of life, which is just inches from the grave, I can’t risk the threat of eternal damnation by being a fraud: “Well, there’s order, but I wouldn’t say it’s clean. That’s not sheers on the windows.” I survey the rest of the room eyeing dust on the shelves so thick that it looks like starched doilies. I grew up in an era when an entire multi-generational family was judged by the quality of one woman’s housekeeping. In those years, my neighbor would not have gotten past the front door. My mother would rather have been seen in the shopping mall with curlers in her hair than to let an outsider see our dingy windows and dusty shelves. Hence, housework became my default occupation. I never applied for the job. I was drafted against my will by virtue of being a kid, a girl-kid, and living in a house. There was no lingering suspense to the draft process. There was no multi-million dollar contract, not even an allowance! I was not offered a name-and-likeness-deal. I did not even get a t-shirt with my favorite number. Once a baby girl could stand on two feet and hold a soft rag, she was signed up. I didn’t get to choose my team, otherwise, I would have picked Agnes’s house down the street where the rooms were arranged like art exhibits. All of the furniture was covered in plastic and no one was allowed to enter those museum-like spaces. Saturdays were game days all over America. While most of us lived in smaller homes back then, about 1100 square feet, every inch was crammed with people—six in our house, along with a dog and a couple of neighbor kids who appeared to be orphaned. Despite the crowd, there was only one bathroom which was also typical of that era. Every space was over-crowded and over-used. To do a good cleaning meant every piece of furniture and every stationary person had to be moved down the field, cleaned, and returned to the starting line. One of the younger kids was constantly being displaced on cleaning day, chased from one room to another. They were out of bounds wherever they landed. Of course, the work-out didn’t end when I got my own place. By then, I was well conditioned, hooked on Spic ‘n Span, and a psychological prisoner of the vacuum cleaner. A weekend could not go by without a darkened dust cloth and the smell of lemon Pledge. As a mother, the duties expanded exponentially. Now with the children grown and out of the house and full time employment behind me, I am getting out of the inside game. I will give housework 15 minutes at a time. That’s my limit. Even young, hefty, well-conditioned football players get a pause every fifteen minutes, and so I head to the bench for a water break, to nurse my injuries, talk with my team mates, connect with the audience, and see how things look on TV. Between games I’m happy to study the play books. I‘ve got a stack of House Beautiful magazines. I consider them a kind of pornography for the housekeeping derelict. It all looks slick, salacious, and out of my league. I am convinced that it must be illegal. It’s a new season. Here on the fourth down of the final quarter, I punt. Let a new team carry the dirtball.  Running behind schedule one Sunday morning, Aunt Addie grabbed her full length fur coat and put it on over her bra and panties. She slipped on some high heeled shoes and headed for church. Addie made no secret of her attire as the family left the house. No one was surprised. We all knew that Aunt Addie had reached a compromise with nature long before we were born. Nature would not defy her. Neither would we. We also knew that if Aunt Addie got it into her mind to remove the coat during mass, she would not blink an eye or bother to look right or left. She would simply slide the luxurious fur off her shoulders and drape it over the back of the pew. When mass was over, she might put the coat back on or hang it over her arm and walk home. Aunt Addie’s philosophy was: go bold or go home, and if going home, go home boldly. Once on a crowded department store escalator, Aunt Addie broke wind, thunder really, that trailed her for the entire ride down. She never flinched or even lowered an eyelash. She simply enjoyed the ride and stepped off at the bottom like royalty. Had Addie lived to see Donald Trump descend the escalator to launch his presidential campaign, she would have dismissed the performance: “A fart on an escalator? That’s already been done.” And then she would have inhaled deeply on her long cigarette and blown a smoke ring for emphasis. Addie envisioned herself a kind of Auntie Mame, that Manhattan-dwelling, flamboyant, free-spirited aunt with an objectionable lifestyle, and a friend who ran a nudist school. Auntie Mame is famous for saying: “Life’s a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.” Aunt Addie never missed a meal, and, generally, she was doing the cooking. We rode the waves of her moods into countless adventures. Erasmus, Mark Twain, or somebody in between is credited with saying that the clothes make the man. I’m not so sure. It is my observation that women like my Aunt Addie who came from simple immigrant roots were fully formed before they purchased the fur coats and the designer fashions. Addie was smart enough to know that clothes gave her access, got her invited to the banquet, and so she acquired them. But those wardrobe items were simply props that embellished her already big personality and fed her appetite for living. Some of us fret about having nothing to wear to the banquet, or that what we have isn’t good enough. We’re ashamed of the state of our underwear. And so, we don’t attend. Aunt Addie would have had none of that. She would have said, “Grab your coat, Doll, we’re going! Meet me in the Cadillac. It’s not the clothes, Doll; it’s the courage.” |
AuthorLilli-ann Buffin Archives
April 2025
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