middle-class-life

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“A town is like a library and every house is a book." - Emily Freeland

Middle Class Life: Toward Sustainable Expectations...it's about time…and how we spend it.

For sustainable middle class life, our concept of success will shift from having more stuff to having more time to do what we love.

Ever wish this middle class life would slow down some?

Things seemed a lot less hectic then - much less chasing around. It was a kindergarten class picnic in May 1961, a sunny, breezy day of winding down the school year. I remember my mother in a beige khaki, well-ironed "house dress" that she wore when she wanted to look nice but still be ready for the usual spit-ups and spills that go along with taking care of a baby and a toddler, my two younger brothers, who were along for the picnic, too. Like the other kids and their moms and siblings, we spread out our picnic lunch on a big sheet or bed spread or table cloth on the grass and sat eating as a family, all the families set up like this scattered around the kindergarten playground and fine old red oak grove that remains there to this day. We ate sandwiches and macaroni salad and chips and drank miniature bottles of cold 7-Up. It felt warm except when a big cumulus cloud blocked the sun and the wind felt cool, but it was a good spring day and I remember feeling good and there wasn't any fuss or trouble with my little brothers, who seemed happy and excited to be with me at school and eating out on the lawn next to the big oak trees.

It was a neighborhood school in what is now an older middle class suburb of Detroit. Our old house, which I drive past maybe once a year, was twenty-four by twenty-four and two stories high. It had a basement and a one-car garage. The lot was sixty feet wide and about twice as long. A small and modest house by today's suburban standards, but brick, built to last, and well suited to a middle class life. There were eight of us living there: mom, dad, and six kids. My dad drove our car, 1955 Pontiac Chieftain two-tone green and light green, to work every day and my mom stayed home. We'd all pile into that car, certainly built for the middle class life, whenever we had to go some place as a family, like church or Hines Park, but not every day. We had another car, a pink and white Nash-Rambler that didn't run anymore but sat in our back yard and we kids played in it. We seemed to spend more time in that old Rambler than in the one that ran. I remember my mom cried when the wrecker came one day to take it to the junkyard.

The neighborhood was full of kids and there was always something going on. The neighbors became my parents' friends, for life, really, and they threw parties and drank highballs and cooked on charcoal grills. They took us to parks - well attended public parks, and the city pool called "Seashore" where someone would actually check between your toes for athlete's foot fungus before you left the locker room and went out to the pool. They volunteered a little at church or at school but weren't fanatics about either. In the summer, we kids seemed to be pretty much on our own. We were in a kid cluster that took care of its own or, most likely, we had more watchful parental eyes on us than we always realized. Middle class life meant moms mostly worked at home.

I remember walking to or from school, often alone, as a six-year old, a distance of about two blocks. One house along the way had a spider monkey named "Chico" tethered in big cottonwood tree. You never see that anymore. Chico always made a lot of racket and seemed nervous and wary whenever I walked past. I never ran into any problems on the street, although my older brother and a friend were held up once and terrorized by two other kids with a "zip-gun." Bad things happened then, too, but there didn't seem to be so much fear.

There did seem to be a lot of new things happening and we middle class kids felt like we could grow up to be anything. There was greater velocity and energy and new things to be built, sleek new cars, the space missions, polio vaccine. Schools were crowded but they seemed to work.

We finished our picnic and mom wrapped up all the leftovers and papers and folded the ground cloth and put my youngest brother back into the stroller for the walk home. I felt a little prideful as we parted, in the way that little kids feel when they think they're growing up. We said our good-byes and I turned away toward the school building because I had important work to do in there, through the tall, heavy doors to my classroom where there would be so many things to learn and things to do.