9.18,15 I ventured out without him later on, the day still dark along the fields nearby

, damp from the night despite the recent searing days, and I found myself along a dirt road, curved toward some destination, down through the fields, and filled with purple and blue and yellow and pink wild flowers, having their very last fling before drying, falling to sleep, providing seeds for birds the whole winter long.

 

9.18.15 The lone crow, sweeping by through the early morning soup

9.18.15 Growing up in waspland, USA

Growing up in upper middle class waspland, the reality was pretty clear . Some people were more valuable than others, and they needed to be tall, wasps , wealthy , attractive, ruthless at amassing money, and powerful. They would be entitled , excluding. They got no speeding tickets, were treated with great regard by the legal system , the local town looked the other way . They quietly threatened those who would not play along with spoken threats , or implied threats to job or connections or lies about facts or reputations. They had long memories and a vengeance for payback . 

The essence of WASP is to act one way and be another. Bite backs. Embrace hypocrisy . Trust no one, and be untrustworthy . Have no idea who you are. 

Money and power got you into any job , got you any reference you wished, any school, any degree regardless of whether you did the work or not. Any club was yours for the taking, the connections rampant and incisive . 

Appearance was everything , and got you married with more connections , won you contracts , increased your inherited wealth , got you out of trouble you didn't want and into the trouble you did . 

No one with entitlement and privilege has any idea how much of their life has been afforded them simply on the grounds that those around them must comply with the dominant power. Or else .

9.18.15 To have, or not have, class

I grew up on the South Shore of Boston, where a big bunch of inherited-wealth-with-high- paying-jobs-in-the-family- business lived in the woodsey burbs. Everyone raced into Boston each day to work , avoided speeding tickets because they were well connected, and had lots of kids, a house in New Hampshire for skiing, and really knew how to seriously party down. 

My maternal side came from Lowell, with that Lowell version of the Boston accent, which was studiously eradicated for class upward mobility reasons.

As far as all those wasps were concerned, the only people that should be speaking with a Boston accent were our own royalty, the Kennedys. Who were only ok, despite being Catholic, because they were so damn wealthy (#1) and outrageously wild (#2). 

When I began flunking out of sixth grade, my grandparents sent me to an excellent day school in Hingham, where a certain percentage of the wealthiest spoke with ... wait for it.....an English accent. Turns out they worked hard to retain that accent ( or affect it) due to, yes , class reasons. Btw, those same people managed to stay tan all year round , long before tanning salons , because they were always jetting off to some warm sunny place or another, and making it sound oh so tiresome .

At the dinner table , we were coached on the proper use of 'r' to forestall any danger of lowered class ranking.

When I was sent to a boarding school, I was awash in accents , and when I first fell in love, Yiddish was a saving grace , so fluidly inserted into everyday speech , to really nail expressing yourself . 

In that Westchester family that became my own for a long time , my speech morphed into a WASPY version of a New York accent , and for years after, whenever I was tired or in need of comfort , back it would come.
But to be honest, I must say that few things are more hands down appealing anytime anyplace ... than a Boston accent, what with it's brusque accompanying bravado. 

"The Boston accent possesses both linking R and intrusive R: That is to say, a /r/ will not be lost at the end of a word if the next word begins with a vowel, and indeed a /r/ will be inserted after a word ending with a central or low vowel if the next word begins with a vowel: the tuner is and the tuna is are both [ðə tʰuːnəɹɪz]

There are also a number of Boston accent speakers with rhoticity, but they occasionally delete /r/ only in unaccented syllables, e.g., mother or words before a consonant, e.g., car hop."

9.18.15' Early in the morning ' bout the break of day' Sonny Boy Williamson

9.18.15 It's so odd how sometimes

It's so odd how, sometimes when I'm feeling really stressed, really crispy, I'll find myself telling myself that I'm going to go do this or eat that or have the other things , 'and then I'll feel better." That it's a good thing to make things feel better when 'they're really hard ." It won't be true , of course, just a classic 'if....then ' set up . But somehow , I watch as my subconscious ends up feeling better, because I told it I would . Go figure; the complexity of the human mind.

9.18.15 The important difference

There is an important difference between feeling bitter and being bitter. Feeling betrayed and being betrayed . Feeling unloved and living as unloved. One is fluid and present and clear and resilient , while the other is fixed and stuck in place , as if a verdict from on high. We would do well to remember that it is always a choice , which we find ourselves living.