Category Archives: Friendship

Neither Past nor Future

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“It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out.”—Sarah Orne Jewett

Corn fritters, crowder peas, tomatoes, and cucumber salad.

Well, this wasn’t going well. The employee had been babbling on for some minutes about how stupid Southerners were, bashing neighbors, co-workers, and everyone who lived within a few miles of her rural farm. Finally, she drew breath long enough for me to make a point. “You do know I’m from the South, don’t you?” I waited a few seconds, knowing exactly what was coming next. “Sure,” she said, “but you’re not really Southern. You are smart.”

It would take a long time to unpack the ignorance that lies behind that colossally impolite statement. That I have heard variations on the same theme from dozens, maybe even hundreds, of others about the South in general and the rural South in specific is enlightening. As many thousands during this pandemic rethink their commitment to living in the suburbs or the city, I’ve been mulling over what a move to the country might mean for them.

When someone moves to rural America, the South in particular, the fault lines of prejudice are often laid bare. And here I speak of the newcomer’s prejudice, much of which is centered in the post-war suburban ideal that you can filter out contact with those who are different from you. Like the Democrats who jettison blue-collar politics because they are uncomfortable associating with workers as a class and wish to trade them in for something different, outlanders who move to the country often ring clear their biases from the first day and dissatisfaction with what they consider their provincial neighbors on the second — as if the people whose family has lived on the land across the road for four generations could be taken back to Trader Joe’s for a new and more comfortable model.

If you are one of those considering a big move “back to the land,” then tuck this piece of advice in alongside your cultural baggage and worldly goods: Prepare to be lonely. At least until you have demonstrated an old-fashioned liberal willingness to accept people as they are rather than as you wish them to be. It is an age-old fault of humanity, holding up the exotic or at the very least the quaint and the picturesque as more desirable, more noble than the mundane. The reality seldom meets the dream.

Your new neighbor is unlikely to be an Amish farmer who plows with horses, conveniently providing a pastoral backdrop for your Instagram shares. Nope, he is going to be a part-time Primitive Baptist preacher, prone to washing feet on Sunday and voting for Trump on Tuesday. He is going to gut deer in his front yard. His very existence is going to affront your Peace Corps beliefs, and it sure won’t provide your cultural mining more than a meager payout for your social media posts.

Yet that same man can weld your broken bushhog (but will take offense when you offer payment); he’ll show up and help you mend a fence when your friends in the city only wish to text or Zoom their assistance. His kids will look after your animals if you’re called away, and his whole family will look after you when one of your family members is called home. Just don’t — and this is important — open your mouth to tell him how you did things back in Orlando or Ann Arbor.

Still thinking about that move? Let us do a final check, making sure that you are not that sad, clueless, insulting individual who moved to the country but wanted a different rural population from the one you are going to get. Start by asking yourself a question. Would you really move to rural Thailand and expect to find the cultural options, the governmental services, and the same people you get in a hip Upper West Side New York neighborhood? If that is the case, then you’d better prepare for a life of loneliness. Or, better yet, stay put.

Or, and let me just toss this out as an option, learn to embrace an actual, nonacademic notion of “diversity.” The choice is yours. And who knows what you might discover.

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Reading this weekend: Kilvert’s Diary (Francis Kilvert) and The Country of Pointed Firs (Sarah Orne Jewett). The former is a new discovery (of mine) that has quickly become a favorite to read before “lights out.” The latter, at Cindy’s suggestion, I read this past week. It partly influenced this post.

Life Lessons From an Old Austrian Socialist

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My last visit with Ken.

Beginning in the late 1980s and throughout the early ‘90s, I would get together regularly with an old Austrian friend of mine. Ken and his wife resided at an independent living facility in a small neighboring town, my friend having retired from Chicago after a career as an accountant. Ken was a small, wiry man with a mischievous sense of humor. He and I would meet periodically for breakfast or lunch and talk over the problems of the world. We’d also get together once a month at his home, where he would attempt to elevate my intellect with prepared readings of European philosophers. (For better or worse, Ken, little of it took.) We continued these discussions until the week before his death, at age 80, in 1994. Ken and I were friends for just over eight years, and even today his friendship remains one of my most valued.

In his will, Ken bestowed on me his library of a couple of thousand books. A conversation with his nephew at the time of Ken’s death gave me a fuller picture of who Ken really was. I discovered, for example, that this unassuming little man had been one of the youth officers in Austria’s Social Democratic Party. The party led an armed fight in the February Uprising of 1934 against the Austrian Fascists. As that fight became increasingly desperate, and with a price on his head, Ken was smuggled out of the country (and eventually changed his name).

In my library hangs a picture of the two of us. The photograph was taken when Cindy and I, returning from a hiking trip in the mountains, had stopped in to say hello. Ken died the next week. Often, I’ll stare at the photograph and remember him with great fondness. He taught me some simple yet key lessons.

  1. Not every question needs to be answered. One day, out of the blue, Ken asked me, “Do you still like your boss?” Nothing unusual, except that the question was presented in the quiet reading room of the genealogy library where I worked, in the very loud voice of the hard-of-hearing, with my boss standing nearby and a roomful of patrons sitting at the oak research tables. I paused, feeling the pressure of the rock against a hard place, then replied simply, “Ken, it is good to see you.”
  2. Curb your optimism. In 1989, when I was preparing to open my own bookstore, Ken advised me on making a business plan. Each time I would present my plan, he would push back and say it was too optimistic. “Plan for no sales and pay your bills with that,” he told me. That is some pretty darned good farming advice right there: when your crop fails or no one buys what you have on offer, you’d better be prepared with a contingency plan.
  3. Find your place and stick. Eventually, as part of a resettlement program, Ken made it to the U.S. in the late 1930s. He was set up with a job in Houston as an auto mechanic. That did not last. To know Ken was to know that there could not have been a job or location for which this bookish Viennese Marxist would have been less suited. A few months later he was resettled again, this time in Chicago, where he trained as an accountant and where he remained until retirement.
  4. Spend time in quiet contemplation. Ken had a poster of a Gustav Klimt painting displayed in a special alcove of his home. He said he liked to just sit and stare at it. He told me over lunch one day that every time he did, he saw something new. I don’t get Klimt, but I do get the concept. Routinely, I’ll sit in my garden and just stare. Eventually, I’ll see it differently, come to a better understanding of what should be done.
  5. Find and praise competence in the small places. Ken always insisted on talking with the manager or owner of a business when a clerk had excelled at his job. To a bemused auto parts manager, he would outline, his heavy Austrian accent at elevated volume, what specifically the employee at the counter had done well. “Call attention to good work habits,” he told me, “and the world becomes a better place.” When the young man helping me build a fence has persevered in hot weather with good cheer, I’ll thank him for a job well done — and also tell his mother for good measure.

The two of us during that last visit.

It’s been more than 25 years since Ken’s passing, and I’m still grateful for my unlikely friendship with such a unique and interesting man. Cheers, Ken, and thanks for that.

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Reading this weekend: Local Culture: journal of the Front Porch Republic, Drawn and Quartered (Chas Adams)