I.
I've been thinking a lot lately about money and what it brings you. - About what it means to be rich, to be poor, to be middle class, to identify as middle class. (Which, of course, is not the same thing; the middle class feels like the monarch butterfly of American economic life: once plentiful, now beleaguered.) Above all, I've been thinking about what it means to be privileged: to enjoy some benefit that you haven't yourself earned.
When I went to college, I realized for the first time my own privilege: how hard my parents had worked to send me there; how heavy was my reliance upon the community in which I'd grown up, however much I disdained it; how much each class that I overslept cost in dollars. At the same time, amidst the hard-edged self-assurance of my fellow students who'd grown up in Greenwich McMansions or Spanish palaces, "studying" at Le Rosey or scuba-diving during Egyptian summers, I felt keenly that I was a nice, middle-class girl from New Jersey who'd gone to a not-especially-good public school. Someone farther down the economic scale might have called me entitled, of course; but since we usually compare up, not down, I could only marvel at 19-year-old classmates who felt qualified to run entire nations based on right of birth. Which is to say, the experience of going to college impressed on me how middle class I really was - upper-middle, sure, but middle. My close friends were diverse geographically and ethnically and religiously, but we all sprang (I realize, looking back) from somewhere in the middle class. At no time did I realize that girls exactly like me - maybe not so nice - were angling to leave the middle class for the glittering world of wealth: through membership in the right sorority, with an "M.R.S.," or with invitations to ski vacations and summer homes from carefully-cultivated friendships.
Since college, my income, identity and lifestyle have not always lined up, like a Vegas slot machine that reads
For a while, I toggled between the drudgery of a graduate student living in one of the most expensive cities in the world on a $19,000 stipend, and a heady life as the girlfriend of a man who could afford to fly me to London for a weekend. My circumstances, if not my identity, have been ever more turbulent over the last few years: I've had neighbors who sat smoking in their underpants in our public stairwell and who shamelessly stole my mail, and, now, an employer who provides me not only with a salary and generous standard benefits, but with perks like an elaborate catalogue from which to choose a free plant for my desk. I appreciate these luxuries in a way that I never could have when I was eighteen or twenty-five. This afternoon, while I sat deciding between Ficus elastica and Sansevieria trifasciata (the evocatively-named "mother-in-law's tongue"), I considered, not for the first time, the great change in my own circumstances, and the exponential way that privilege accrues, so that the more you get, the more you get. I could have wept, in my old job, for just one sick day, let alone a free desk plant. In my own meager way, I've experienced drought and abundance.
When I went to college, I realized for the first time my own privilege: how hard my parents had worked to send me there; how heavy was my reliance upon the community in which I'd grown up, however much I disdained it; how much each class that I overslept cost in dollars. At the same time, amidst the hard-edged self-assurance of my fellow students who'd grown up in Greenwich McMansions or Spanish palaces, "studying" at Le Rosey or scuba-diving during Egyptian summers, I felt keenly that I was a nice, middle-class girl from New Jersey who'd gone to a not-especially-good public school. Someone farther down the economic scale might have called me entitled, of course; but since we usually compare up, not down, I could only marvel at 19-year-old classmates who felt qualified to run entire nations based on right of birth. Which is to say, the experience of going to college impressed on me how middle class I really was - upper-middle, sure, but middle. My close friends were diverse geographically and ethnically and religiously, but we all sprang (I realize, looking back) from somewhere in the middle class. At no time did I realize that girls exactly like me - maybe not so nice - were angling to leave the middle class for the glittering world of wealth: through membership in the right sorority, with an "M.R.S.," or with invitations to ski vacations and summer homes from carefully-cultivated friendships.
Since college, my income, identity and lifestyle have not always lined up, like a Vegas slot machine that reads
II.
The house in which I grew up, built in the mid-sixties, still had a formal living room. We used it the first or second year we lived there, for a Christmas party, but never again. It was a carefully-staged dumping ground for all the formalities of early-(last)-century middle-class life: the piano, the dictionaries, the leather-bound collected works of Charles Dickens. At some point during my teenage years, my mother bought fabric flowers to liven up a room in which none of us spent any time. I was horrified - not that it takes much to horrify a teenager - and told her that flowers must always be real, never fake. "Marry a rich man," she advised me.
III.
The house in which I grew up, built in the mid-sixties, still had a formal living room. We used it the first or second year we lived there, for a Christmas party, but never again. It was a carefully-staged dumping ground for all the formalities of early-(last)-century middle-class life: the piano, the dictionaries, the leather-bound collected works of Charles Dickens. At some point during my teenage years, my mother bought fabric flowers to liven up a room in which none of us spent any time. I was horrified - not that it takes much to horrify a teenager - and told her that flowers must always be real, never fake. "Marry a rich man," she advised me.
 Lilac 'Leon Gambetta,' BBG. |
III.
I have explored my new neighborhood, however temporary is my stay. I've eaten my way across several mediocre neighborhood Italian joints which I rather romantically had hoped would become my "local." I have counted one Bikram yoga studio, two hair salons, and three martial arts establishments. There is a high-end wine store and store for winos, a Footlocker and a place which advertises itself as the largest family-owned shoe store in Brooklyn. Next to my building is a community garden, a glorious mess of plots, with a contorta tree and a lilac bush planted optimistically close to the street. My block holds old carriage houses recently re-sided in vinyl.
Last night, walking home past the Dollar Store, I noticed the sign over a bin of red plastic flowers: "Flowers 99¢." But they're not flowers, I frowned, they're plastic flowers. I think of the best plants as having as many as possible of the following four qualities (though, like the Seven Sacraments, it's nearly impossible to have them all): they are beautiful, fragrant, ephemeral, and structural. A lilac bush, for example, meets the first three criteria. And plastic flowers are none of these things. Though, surely, only the most privileged of people - in finances, health and hope - could find beauty in ephemera.
Last night, walking home past the Dollar Store, I noticed the sign over a bin of red plastic flowers: "Flowers 99¢." But they're not flowers, I frowned, they're plastic flowers. I think of the best plants as having as many as possible of the following four qualities (though, like the Seven Sacraments, it's nearly impossible to have them all): they are beautiful, fragrant, ephemeral, and structural. A lilac bush, for example, meets the first three criteria. And plastic flowers are none of these things. Though, surely, only the most privileged of people - in finances, health and hope - could find beauty in ephemera.
IV.
It was drizzling when I left my apartment this morning. I'd noticed the florist last night, garishly lit by neon signs that read "WEDDINGS AND FUNERALS." It occurred to me that there are multiple consumer classes for flowers, as there must be for any luxury good. There are people for whom flowers are so expensive that they must be reserved for specific, life-altering moments like matrimony and death (and at all other times, one must turn to plastic); and those people for whom an occasional $7 bouquet of tulips is what marketers call "an affordable luxury"; and people who get weekly deliveries of fresh flowers and who sign the bill without looking at it. (And then, in his own category, there's Elton John.) In my previous purgatory, I would sometimes make lists of the things I would buy, and the things I would do, "if I had any money." (The imprecision, I can hear ex-boyfriends objecting, is both ominous and charmingly characteristic.) Top of my list was always to buy fresh flowers. It's been a tumultuous few weeks. I bought a $5 bouquet of lilacs, so delightfully ephemeral, and placed them on my desk at work in a paper cup taken from the kitchen. It seemed a good compromise.
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