Ten-Finger Exercises

Class-ism

Our local community college, voted the best in the U.S.A. incidentally, has a program called Quest. It is specifically for adults over age 50 and has a great variety of classes and opportunities each quarter. I've taken a writing class several times now, and it's half filled with us old regulars who love an audience for our writing. The old instructor finally retired, (she's in her late 80's) and a friend of mine has taken on the job. His experience is as a librarian and teacher, and he's fairly good at that although not a very proficient writer himself in my estimation. Nevertheless he tries hard and does apply what he learns and teaches. I guess I shouldn't be so critical. He's in my poetry group too, and he is getting better, just doesn't have an ear for it it seems to me. Pedantic. Maybe that's the right word.

Today he brought a speaker, Mary Husted, a woman well known in Eastern Oregon for sponsoring a writers' group in Pendleton and a writing workshop at the reservation. She is a retired teacher and a memoirist, and was under the impression that our class was all involved in memoir writing as well. She read the introduction to one of her books, (I'll look up the name and fill it in later.)

What she read was an essay, starting with a particular scene when her own writing group went out to dinner at a nice restaurant on the Oregon coast following a weekend workshop. She said she wrote it to show the reader who she is and how she approaches the various -isms she falls victim to, in this case class-ism. She made several comments about people who were brought up in the working class, as she was, and how she could always tell which of her listeners shared that experience. The restaurant had made a mistake and did not have a record of their party's reservation. She said people who grew up in the working class would be horrified, and others would say, so what?

I guess I always thought we were part of the working class. My parents both had jobs, not professions. My dad had dallied with being a watchmaker but was mainly a shopkeeper, and my mother kept the books. By this woman's reckoning, we were not poor enough to be in the same class with her. She meant manual laborers. Apart from feeling a little affronted by this, I guess she does have a point I hadn't thought of. Perhaps I did look down on classmates whose fathers were laborers. I'm not at all sure I knew what they did, but I think I did have an awareness of being a little above them. Language played a large part of it, vocabulary and grammar.

Anyway, something to think about.