There are loves, and there are great loves, and I do believe Lora and I share a great love. We are an improbable couple in many ways, but perhaps the core improbability lies in the disparity in our education, and in various and sundry ways, this disparity preys on her mind. I mention this because Lora and I have had our first real argument since starting our little adventure on the road. I won't attempt to replicate the argument. It would just sound silly, and in the way of most arguments, once they develop heat, they also develop leaps and non-sequiturs familiar to those arguing but incomprehensible to those observing. Besides, it's not particularly surprising that we'd eventually come to an argument. We have been living in close quarters now for some time, and that in itself is bound to create some friction. Still though, Lora and I always live in close quarters, intimately bound up in each other, so the cause runs deeper. At the risk of over-analyzing, the proximate cause of our argument was my arrogance, and I can be quite imperious, but behind my arrogance lie more ultimate issues of education and social class that have nagged at our marriage from the beginning, and threaten to pull us apart.
I mention social class for a couple of reasons. First, of course, the whose notion of social class is suspect. In the broader sense, in America, we like to think of ourselves as "individual equals" in almost every respect, except perhaps money, and money is the great class differentiator. We are individuals first and foremost, and each individual has equal "freedoms," equal "opportunities," equality "before the law," and the list could go on, but one gets the idea. It's that "all men are created equal," with the corresponding idea that, if differences arise, they do so as a result of what "we have made for ourselves" in the pursuit of our individual happiness. For most that means the pursuit of money, and the stuff money can buy, to include such things as good health insurance, and a sense of security. Of course, neither Lora nor I have ever really had money, and for reasons that seem at once obvious (bad luck and a few unfortunate choices) and mysterious (why so much back luck and why did we feel compelled to make those choices?) we have always found ourselves living a stone's throw away from poverty. Though money is one of the typical causes of stress in a marriage, I can't recall ever arguing with Lora about money. If we argued about money, it wasn't the money itself, more the way in which I made our money.
Of course, one could go about unpacking each of the scare quotes above, and quickly arrive at the conclusion that almost any notion of equality is mostly hokum, which leads me to the second reason I mentioned social class. In a narrower sense, in America, education ostensibly opens the path to greater social mobility. Both Lora and I have a working class background, and in that respect aren't much different from one another, with perhaps one exception -- education. I don't recall ever having a doubt that I would graduate from secondary school and go on to college. Looking back, however, there may have been huge doubts in my parent's minds. I didn't qualify for the normal run of scholarships graduating from high school, mostly because I dropped out and didn't even attempt my senior year. From thence, I didn't have the sophistication to seek out other scholarships, nor did my parents, so I paid for my schooling with a combination of student loans and work study. When the loans and opportunities ran out, I found myself with an MA from the University of Michigan, and few prospects. Perhaps because education was always about seeing the world more broadly, more deeply, I never really thought of it as a path to a better, more remunerative job. I stumbled about, trying to find work in a bad economy, and finally joined the Air Force, at my father's urging, as a way of getting started in life. It wasn't as horrible as I thought it would be, and they did send me to Europe, and from thence to the Air Force Academy as an instructor of English. Through a very narrow set of circumstances involving the recommendation of a visiting professor, the Air Force sent me off to Brown for my PhD, and the rest, so to speak, is history. Nothing comes without payback, and the payback for my PhD was a six year service commitment and a remote tour in Korea, which is where I met Lora.
In many ways, the story of Lora's education is the precise opposite of mine. On her telling, there was never a thought that she'd go on to college, and neither her mother nor her step-father seemed much concerned that she would even finish secondary school. There was, perhaps, an expectation that she'd get married and get pregnant, not necessarily in that order, and live out a life not unlike her parents, and initially at least she fell in line with the expectations. She fell in love with her high school sweetheart, left high school, and got married and got pregnant in that order. Her young husband had joined the Air Force, received an assignment to Germany, and after a brief separation, she followed him there. As it turned out, her high school sweetheart had a drug and alcohol problem, which in turn fueled violent abuse. From there, on her telling, it was all about "survival," and one step she took to survive was to join the Air Force herself. There is more history, and I will let her tell it, but I doubt, from the time she dropped out of high school, to the time she met me, that education in the conventional sense often entered her mind. Someday I will attempt to tell the fully story of our courtship, but suffice it to say that I felt a connection to her that was at once passionate and profound. Neither the differences in our education, nor the resulting differences in social class (precisely delineated in the Air Force by rank -- she was enlisted and I was an officer) much entered my mind, and when they did, they were quickly overwhelmed. I was utterly, recklessly, helplessly in love, and love has a way of obliterating differences.
Well, not quite. If there has been a point of friction in our marriage, it's been that difference in education. It's not the friction of "anti-intellectualism," the assumption that "good old common sense" and "education" exist in inverse proportion to one another. Except in the rare cases of the beautiful mind or the Sheldon Cooper of pop culture, the one has no bearing on the other. I've known some educated idiots, but I've known even more uneducated idiots and I'm reasonably certain we cannot overcome human stupidity by closing down the schools. "Good old common sense" is a fiction to maintain a sense of balance, of equality, between the uneducated and the educated, though I will say education has at least one adverse effect -- one quickly discerned and resented by those who lack education -- arrogance. The educated "know more" than the uneducated, but that is not to say they "know enough," or that they "know correctly," or that we necessarily "know better," and we shouldn't let our education go to our head. In the end, the educated physician of 1750 who bled his patients was less right than the peasant shaman who rubbed them down with horse manure. At least the horse manure did the patients no harm. Just by way of saying that Socrates was right, education is a good thing, leading to a more capacious life, but it must always be tempered with the wisdom of humility.
That said, I suppose, however, that education did provide me with a pathway from the working class into the middle class, if not exactly the bourgeoisie in the classical Marxist sense, then in positions where I had to hob-nob with the bourgeoisie. I was an officer in the Air Force, and a senior administrator in the community college systems of three states. I never quite lost sight of the simple fact that I was an at will employee -- a hired gun as one particularly crass board member put it. Although I was never subversive, I wasn't submissive either, so I was often reminded that I served at the will of the President, and the President's will was directly shaped by the Board of Trustees. The board varied by state, but the members were often drawn from the business elite, often those with budding political aspirations. I was successful enough, but ultimately I couldn't quite reach the top of the hill. In the Air Force, it was clear enough that I wouldn't make colonel, and in the community college world, like a salmon swimming upstream, I bumped up against a final barrier that I couldn't quite leap. I would never be a college president. I was successful enough, but then again I was never quite successful enough to fulfill a final ambition. Partly, of course, it might have been that I didn't quite want the presidency badly enough to do what was necessary to achieve it, but then too I have often wondered how much the rushing pressure of social class exhausted me and kept me from leaping that final barrier into the promised spawning ground? I didn't have, as another particularly crass college president put it, the right pedigree.
Lora hated my career, and disliked most of my associates at work. I have never known anyone who is a quicker or better judge of people than Lora, but we share an unfortunate trait. We both give people too much the benefit of the doubt. For Lora that benefit often translates into a generosity that "takers" are quick to sense and exploit. For me that benefit often translates into a naivete, or more precisely, a willingness to take people at face value that the more "politic" are quick to sense and exploit. In either case, suffice it to say, we are often disappointed in people, and once disappointed, we are not particularly forgiving. My associates at work had little need of Lora's generosity, nor could they admire what I find most admirable in her, a generosity of spirit that led her to serve the severely disabled at Marklund's Children Home, or the hospice patients assigned to nursing homes. It paid next to nothing, and most of her co-workers were bumping the bottom of the working class. They were puzzled by Lora's willingness to do that sort of work when she "didn't need to," and my associates too were puzzled on the rare occasions when it came up. Although no one quite said it, I suspect most felt that, if she wanted to volunteer her time, there were more "class-appropriate" ways to do so. Instead of bathing patients and "wiping butts" at Marklund's, she could, for example, do good by raising money for Marklund. All told, because of my career, she could never really quite fit with her co-workers, most of whom sensed and tried to exploit her generosity, and she could never quite fit with my associates or their wives. She felt the arrogance of the "educated" pressing against her as an invidious judgement, and it infuriated her. I tried to convince myself that she was wrong, that they were not judging her, partly because I had to work with them. In the end, though, I know she was right.
Lora observed the other day that it's natural at our age to take stock of one's life, but I wonder what happens when one does take stock -- really takes stock -- and finds that most of one's life has been the meaningless pursuit of unattainable ends. Then too, even if one attains one's ends, the result is the same, debility and death, and then nothing. It's a frightening thought, perhaps the most frightening thought of all, to think that we are merely bubbles rising through emptiness destined only to burst . Though it is, perhaps, too much a truism that religion is an anodyne against meaninglessness, but the more I take stock, the more I see it as such. I would like to believe -- really, I would like to believe -- that our lives are inherently meaningful, that we all play a role in God's plan, and that our rewards will be after in heaven. It's a comforting thought, and at times my desire to take comfort in it almost overwhelms me -- almost. There is that nagging, restless, critical part of my mind that just won't allow me to sink back into a comforting faith as if it were an overstuffed recliner. If God does have a plan, then, in the fulfillment of it, he seems to be as careless with the suffering of his people as Stalin or Mao were with theirs. One need only read the news.
So, what are we pursing now? We quit our jobs, sold everything, bought a camper, and set out across the country to find what? The thought does occur to me that we're not so much "pursing" anything as "escaping," but from what? I do think the world is too much with us, and we find ourselves living like refugees in a camper partly because we're escaping one world for a different sort of world, where we can, in Lora's words, "just live our lives" without the entanglements associated with education and social class that inevitably emerge for us when we allow others, outside our bubble, to prick at us. I would like to say we've quit reading or watching the news, but we haven't, and the current clown show of our government seems increasingly pernicious, increasingly indifferent to the suffering of real people. I'd like to say it doesn't affect us, but it does. We need our Social Security, and at our age the threat of debility is just a good case of the flu away, and so we also need our health insurance, not that it does much for us anyway. We are still saddened and depressed by a culture that insists more, and more efficient, gun violence by the right people is the solution to gun violence by the wrong people. Still, though, we have simplified our life together considerably, pared it down closer to the essentials, and made ourselves as mobile as possible. We've met some good people -- and I would like to say all people are good people -- but our mobility has allowed us to escape the entanglements and disappointments that inevitably develop when we spend too much time in one place. The one essential thing in my life is Lora. Perhaps that's why our arguments, when we have them, seem so apocalyptic, and make us restless. We all have our reasons for moving, as one poet put it, and we move to keep our world whole, and our argument suggests its time to move on from Hidden Shores and Yuma.
