| November 10, 2020
Purple Conversation My brother and I were talking last Sunday about the plight of small colleges, many of which stand to go out of business due to the impact of COVID on their enrollments and revenue. I reminded him that our dad once said to me, “Judy, it costs just as much to heat a third-rate college as it does to heat a first-rate college.” My brother acknowledged that dad would have known. He served for many years as the first (unpaid) development officer for the small college in our Indiana town. Dad meant no disrespect by this statement. For its size and type, Franklin College was perfectly fine. It just wasn’t Yale, and in a pandemic that makes a difference. I have been thinking a lot about my father these past few days. Born poor in a rich country, my father never forgot the better-off family across the road or the boy scout uniform he hid under the bushes and, when his father discovered it, was forced to return because it cost too much. You might think these experiences would have made him a democrat. In fact he was a staunch Republican and I entered American politics chanting “I like Ike,” and arguing with my friend Nancy who favored Adlai Stevenson. By the time of my first election, though, I was a democrat and proudly cast my first vote for John F. Kennedy. My father and I argued constantly. He once left the dinner table because, home from college and enrolled in a course on American political history, I was defending the accomplishments of Roosevelt’s presidency. “Roosevelt was the worst president in the history of the country,” he claimed, as he left, and added, “I can’t believe I am paying for you to learn this kind of stuff.” I wonder what dad would have said about Trump. My father was the kindest man I have ever known. No ball game was too far away for him to drive myself and my friends to. No bag of manure was too heavy for him to drag to my mother’s struggling garden. No call for help was too badly timed or difficult from him to naswer. One Christmas morning he responded to a call from our neighbor whose dog had suddenly become sick.. He went next door and managed to get a pill down the dog’s throat, only to learn later that it was rabid. A series of painful shots, injected in those days into the stomach, followed. Dad retired early in part to help his friend who ran the Ford dealership in town avoid bankruptcy. Working with Justin gave him access to good, cheap second-hand cars. When my high school friend, Loyce, was finally freed from the psychiatric institution to which her parents consigned her after a nervous breakdown her senior year in high school, she returned to Franklin and immediately contacted my father. She needed a car to get a job. She did not know my father had access to cars, she just knew he would help her. And he did. In the early 60’s I became involved in the northern civil rights movement. My father could neither understand nor support my activism and he had no patience for movements. Yet it was my father who answered the call one night from a local police officer. It was my father who went down to the jail and persuaded the officer to drop the charges against the young black man, a student at the college, whom they were holding for some minor infranction. It was my father who later got this same young man a job after graduation and helped him through law school.. My father was never comfortable with my homosexuality, and we did not talk about it, ever. He would say, “All homosexuals belong in jail,” forgetting that I was one. In the next breath, however, he would ask for the list of chores my partner and I wanted him to do while he was visiting. Joan liked to say that my father was the only true working butch she knew. The summer between my first and second year of graduate school I taught myself German so that I could pass the foreign language requirement for my Ph.D. Through his connections at the college, dad knew a young man from Germany. He hired Gerhard to tutor me in German, no doubt hoping that love might follow instruction. I fell in love, for sure, but with his car, not Gerhard. It was a genuine German Volkswagen, rare in the United States in the early 1960’s, with green leather seats trimmed in red ‘velvet,’ and a cane shelf beneath the glove compartment. When Gerhard went back to Germany that fall, he left his car behind. I desperately wanted to buy it, but I didn’t have the money. I would have to have help from my dad if I were to get it. He argued for a different choice. He could get me a second-hand American car for practically nothing. I did not want to drive the $100 Buick; I wanted to drive the $500 Volkswagen. I kept talking, and my dad finally capitulated. “Alright,” he said, “I will pay half the cost of the Volkswagen if you pay for the other half, but I strongly suggest you get out of English and go into law. It is impossible to win an argument with you.” Right now, I am not trying to win arguments. I am wanting to understand what is happening in our country. I am deeply troubled by how divided we are and how profound those divisions are. I want to think I can talk to people who think differently from me. I want to think I can have purple conversations. I’d like to believe that at least some of us can talk across our differences, agree on some things, work together to get them done, and make life just a little bit better for a few more people (and for the animals and insects and plants). It seems a modest wish, but in this climate it seems extreme. How strange and sad that is. I wish I had tried harder to talk to my dad. Maybe we could have had a purple conversation as well as a purple relationship. Thanks so much for reading my newsletter. If you are enjoying it, consider sharing it with one other person you think might enjoy reading it as well. I’d be grateful if you would help me reach more readers.If you aren’t already a subscriber, I’d be honored to have you as a reader. You can sign up here.http://perennialwisdom.net. |
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