High-Brow White Trash

We laughed all the way through Talladega Nights recently-- at the stereotypes, the satire, the parodies--but the more I've reflected on my own life since watching the movie, the less I'm laughing and the more I'm thinking, "Wait, we do that too." Is it a Southern thing? A socio-economic thing? We were definitely low-income growing up, qualifying for "reduced lunch." I remember the empty margarine tub full of dimes and each morning we would grab a dime to pay for our lunch that day. When our family traveled to rural KY and WV where my dad studied that patch of Appalachian culture for his dissertation "Folklore of the Big Sandy Valley of Eastern Kentucky," people stared at us chugging through in a beat-up green Ford, three grimy kids in hand-me-down clothes. One time in my early childhood in Columbus, OH, my parents were waiting it out until payday and in the meantime had almost run out of food while maxing out the credit cards. All they had left was some credit on the Lazarus charge card and they went to the gourmet food section and charged up a bunch of chocolate-covered cashews and savory English biscuits for our family's sustenance for two or three days.

That was when my mom and dad were trying to make it on an assistant professor's salary while rearing three young children. Even though my dad retired five years ago, he still lives like a thrifty graduate student, driving twenty-year old cars and pinching pennies where he can. You know those annoying twisty ties that come with every child's toy packaging? I swear this is true, my dad always asks me not to throw away those ties, but to give them to him to use.

My life can't really be called low-income anymore, although it's sometimes hard to believe. I work in an architecturally award-winning modern building in a beautiful office with high-end artwork and colored leather couches and chairs. I can afford expensive power suits (and even own a couple) but I still shop at thrift stores and Target (and usually end up receiving more compliments on the dresses I buy there!)

Our small house needs many repairs: new doors, a new kitchen floor, new kitchen cabinets, and is in desperate need of a good exterior power wash. Yet, I finally get a loan for $3,000, but is any of it going toward home repairs? It's all going towards graduate school tuition. Even though I'm driving a 2006 Mazda 5 that we purchased brand new, I've been driving around for months with a cracked windshield . It's not that I can't afford to fix it--I guess it just doesn't bother me that much.

It also doesn't bother me that we consider take-out from Applebee's a treat or that there is kids' scribbling on the walls in every room of our house. Or that our kitchen table is David's desk and our kitchen corner is his office. And that rarely is our table ever fully cleared of non-meal items when we sit down to eat as a family. Or that SpongeBob Square Pants is almost always on at dinnertime. I take that back--that last one totally bothers me, and I don't allow it. If I'm home and we're all eating together, I refuse to have the tv on.

My dad has said in the past that people in academia are in a social class of their own. I catch his drift, but where are the lines drawn? Does the fact that he has a PhD explain (or excuse?) his practice of offering his children money for their biscuit or their piece of pie after his were already eaten?

As I look around our home and see the stacks of Philosophy books and piles of New Yorker magazines, I like to think that some of the things that we laughed about in Talladega Nights don't apply to my life. Then I notice the array of candles David has burning on top of our microwave. I can't believe my eyes so I take a closer look. One of the tea-light candle holders that David has recently fashioned is a small, empty olive can, left over from when he made spaghetti on Tuesday night.