9 Emoticons For The High WASP

A reader wrote and mentioned, in passing, her wonderment at the excessive use of emoticons in Internet parlance today. She asked whether I had an opinion. I do. ;)

Little emotion cartoons are an uncomfortable fit in the High WASP world. We still wish for the days when raised eyebrows sufficed. That said, one might imagine an entire lexicon of High WASP emoticons. If one had to. All of which would indicate, in essence, "I am not sure I should be saying this." We would never use an emoticon to emphasize, only to mitigate. High WASPs live life in the subjunctive, as Tad Friend pointed out in Cheerful Money.

Imagine the following in common use. If you will.

Translation #1: That dress is appalling but I mean no offense. Goodness those yellow smiley faces are undignified.

Translation #2: You have proposed a bad idea. And yes, winking is a little barmaid, but luckily you and I understand irony.

Translation #3: Your child sure does run around a lot. I can't resist big words. I'm not showing off.

Translation #4: I'm not showing off.


Translation #5: I'm really not showing off.

Translation #6: I fear I am not as cool as I am trying to be.


Translation #7: Hmm. Don't worry, I am not about to tell you I love you, or anything else embarrassing.

Translation #8: I have been drinking but feel my best self is now revealed.


Translation #9: I am showing off. Please pretend you don't notice. Please.


And now you understand why High WASPs are not in charge of the West's emotional dialogue. Thank you. You're welcome.

Emoticon key:
Mona Lisa color B&W. But you knew that.
Random Greek symbols
James Dean
Heart behind bars
Martini
Pretty much add all those things up and my entire culture will sit at the bottom line.

How To Deliver A Difficult Ethical Message

Figure 1. The dead elephant.

A reader, T., wrote in to explain that she had recently suffered through a situation which resulted in her leaving the practice of a health professional. As in, "Thank you very much, your services will no longer be required." She asked,

"To make a long story short, would you consider a post on the topic of 'how to deliver an unpleasant ethical message?'"

Unethical behavior, if not confronted, behaves like a dead elephant. Some of us line up in front smiling, others cross their arms, uncomfortable, in distress. How to speak up about the elephant? How do High WASPs do it? It's not our strong point, frankly. Crimes against humanity, the behemoths of bad ethics, we approach like any other culture. Sometimes courageous, sometimes fearful, sometimes guilty as charged. We try to do good. We sometimes fail. Smaller ethical mistakes, made unknowingly, we try to forgive. We sometimes fail. It's the middle ground where the High WASP culture lets us down. We are far more easily shamed than most. So overturned, in fact, by social gaffes that I cannot offer advice in this situation, cannot deconstruct as usual, without matrices. Diagrams, we hope, can fight off shame. Feel free to snort with laughter.

Figure 2. Impact of Emotional State On Conveying An Unpleasant Ethical Message, Mapped Against Severity of Ethical Misconduct.

If you've finished laughing, we can discuss. Not finished? I'll wait. Right then. 3 of the quadrants in the matrix pose no 'How To' dilemmas.

1. Heroic Resistance. When we need to be heroes, whether we are up to the task or not, we know what it would take.
2. Sociopath. Those who feel nothing at horrors of humanity must be sociopaths. I don't think sociopaths think about 'how to.'
3. Zen. When other people's small mistakes annoy us a just little bit, we have learned to breathe deeply and move on.

But when we have strong feelings about what we believe is unethical but non-criminal behavior, that's tougher. It's difficult to balance the discomfort of embarrassment against the righteous pleasure of calling out mid-level bad behavior. At least for us. If you are freer I salute you. So. You notice that you are angry and concerned about someone's unethical behavior. What now? The [Reformed] High WASP Guide To Difficult Conversations

1. Examine the offending behavior. Make sure you have the facts. No point using up righteousness points over inaccuracies.
2. Stand still. Take a breath. Examine your own feelings. Are you purely righteous? Or is your distress motivated more by your own emotional needs?
3. Realize that you're human. Nobody, except perhaps the Dalai Lama, Mother Theresa, or Thich Nhat Hanh, feels distress over pure right and wrong alone. Our internal landscape engages. Welcome to humanity.
4. Review your feelings. Even after you understand your own emotional engagement, do you still feel the person's behavior is unethical? That wrong has in fact been done? You are ready to speak. You will feel quite strong and calm.
5. Put your feelings aside. They will be there when you come back.
6. Do not send an email, text, or Twitter message. The usual rules of courtesy apply. Call the offender, or even better, make an appointment to see them in person.
7. Preview your message. "So-and-so, I need to speak with you about a difficult subject." Your politeness here prevents the kinds of thrashing common when people feel blindsided.
8. Deliver your message. Carefully, simply, articulately, and as briefly as possible.
9. Wait. Listen. Repeat. You are not here to argue.
10. If you hear new facts that indicate you were wrong, apologize sincerely. You haven't done anything that can't be repaired. You had bad information. It happens.
11. If you hear no new facts, listen, tell the offender you have heard what they say, and repeat your message. At a certain point you will know if they are going to admit their wrongdoing or not.
12. Before you are done, you will need to decide what reparations will satisfy you. Those who have done wrong must make it right, one way or another. Do you require only that they acknowledge? Apologize? Offer compensation? Submit to punishment? In this too, clarity is your friend. Your good friend.
13. Go home. The world is probably now a little bit better place.

This is all more easily said than done, you might reply. You would be right. One has to be willing to step back and look at oneself. This is not easy. Hence the entire cadre of therapists. But it's not impossible, especially as one ages. Sometimes you notice unethical behavior in a person who has power over you, an employer, an official, a parent. The problem of power imbalance is more tenacious. Backing down from fear is much different than backing down from embarrassment. Far easier to forgive. 

 The photo above is from T.'s family archives. She grew up in British Colonial Africa. The picture was taken in Kenya. Colonialism is the epitome of ethical issues, complete with a terrible power imbalance. I can only imagine how I would have felt as a child in that environment, although I would not want to assume anything about T. The elephant as metaphor. I'm talking to myself here. Diagramming for myself what I haven't always done well. Using abstract constructs to repair felt flaws. While mild shame has probably improved my taste in clothing, its more bitter cousin has left other, longer, traces. High WASPs have historically believed that what remains unsaid means more than what gets said. This should have changed, in 2010. I don't know if all the talking that goes on night and day now, across the electronic universe, is helping with shame, and the resultant ignoring of bad guys. I hope so.

How Does It Feel To Share A Family Portraitist With The Kennedys?

Back in the 60's, my mother had a portrait painted of her children. The three eldest, that is. I was 6, my sister 3, my brother 2. The painter tried several times to cover up my brother's diaper, but couldn't. The diaper stayed, my arm got tired, and my sister and now I fall about laughing about how, well, piggie she looked. She no longer looks one bit porcine, but she's captured forever as, um, piggie.

The eldest three children in the Privilege family of origin. c. 1962.

Family portraits play an storied role in High WASP families. Especially since we didn't have cameras back when. Local talent included Gilbert Stuart, 1755-1828, who painted many notable early Americans, while the Age of Innocence relied on John Singer Sargent, 1856-1925. My father believes the Privilege family portrait was modeled on this.

The Daughters of Edward Darly Boit, 1882. Who subsequently lived fairly difficult lives.

Singer, unfortunately, was not available to paint for us. However a man named Aaron Shikler was. As is often true in lives of privilege, we, wholly without intent, bumped into someone who then bumped into someone else extraordinary. Five years later, Shikler was to paint this.

Jacqueline Kennedy and her two children, 1967.

And in 1970, at Jackie's request, he painted this from a photo. Post-mortem.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1970.

Which now hangs in the White House as JFK's official portrait.

What do I think about having our family share a portrait painter with the Kennedys? The same thing I think about other things we share with them. My father went to Harvard, some years before Jack. My mom played softball at the Kennedy Cape Cod compound. It feels cool, as though some of their import rubbed off on us. Even though it didn't. Privilege sometimes lands you in the vicinity of special. You get a better view, not necessarily a place on the playing field. Oh, and apparently Teddy cheated.

Why paint a family portrait, even without Presidential connection? Beyond status or privilege or simple representation? In the era of digital photography, which has led to a proliferation of images unseen since the Russians stopped iconifying saints? Recently Materfamilias wrote very movingly about the portrait she found from her youth. The degree to which the drawing of her young face reminded her she had been more beautiful than she knew. The Privilege family painting, on the other hand, provokes not one whit of profound feeling in its subjects. We fall about laughing. I think there's a place for both reactions.

I imagine, as I write, that our parents feel something more. Portraits show intent. You "sit" for them, over several weeks at least. No wonder I complained my arm hurt. However, the intention itself is open to interpretation. All one can say for sure is, "Yes, we did that on purpose."

Oddly, my siblings and I find most meaning in Shikler's painterly habit of getting things wrong. I do not have now, and did not have then, hair like a wild animal. In this painting I always will. Portraits create distortions of reality that become part of the told history. Which is, I suppose, as good a definition of art as any.

Decades later, Mom checked to see if Shikler would paint my youngest sister too. But his services now run dear. Presidential commissions will do that to a fellow. So Mom had a lovely charcoal sketch done. Which looks just like my sister. Beautiful. It hangs in Mom's bedroom, as do piggies, diapers, and fierce hair.

Shikler himself continues to get better, as a painter. Capturing exhaustion and pre-teens pretty darn well.

Mother and Daughter, 2005

If your family fortune is intact or (thank goodness) on the increase, there could be worse ways to invest your time and money. And maybe one of your children will, in fact, become President.



Images:
Family collection
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit via PBS
Jackie and children via Artnet
JFK via The White House Historical Association
Mother and Daughter via Davis & Langdale

How, And Why, To Plant A Cottage Garden Anywhere On Earth

I have a proposition for you, one which I do not expect to be controversial. Here goes. Gardens are wonderful.

My High WASP cohort is with me on this one. We do love a garden. And our genre of choice is the English cottage. At home we are not prone to formal plantings of colored annuals, spelling out our monograms. Nor to singular shrubs, lonely, disciplined, labeled. Nor to wallpaper plants, i.e., 60 sad impatiens in a row, advancing before 23 well-behaved azaleas, flanking 7 uniform hydrangeas. While our vacation houses might get a little fanciful - topiaries, follies, the crunch of French gravel paths - at home we like to balance our personal formality with the comfort of a mixed border. Or two. Or six.

High WASPs plant cottage gardens even when the cottage is, well, a little grand.

If one still lives in the family manse, cottage-ification is by necessity limited to regions near and dear. Overseeing an entire acre, or two or forty, covered in artfully massed and scattered and staked perennials? Please, no. Unless you are the queen of something. For ordinary manses, rolling swaths of sustainable vistas are a good thing. But the walkway to the front and back doors, the borders around the paved stone patio, or the brick-decorated swimming pool will most likely cottage-up. And if family fortunes have declined, and one lives in a regular house, swaths and vistas are a thing of the past. One learns to appreciate the small.


You might well wonder, "What is a cottage garden?" You might well consider, "Do I want one?" I ask you in return, do you like:

• Mixed and crowded plantings whose final architecture you can't quite predict
• The Fibonacci curves of nature
  
• Dedicating space to growing plants to cut, either flowers, or food, or both
  
• Walking amongst your plants, and the paths to walk upon
• Honoring the geography where you live?

As you can see in the photos above, cottage gardens should be planted every which way, as though they might have chosen to grow in situ of their own accord. The effect you are looking for, which might in fact be the High WASP credo, is, "Oh this old thing?" Even though you or your landscape architect might in fact have spent at the very least a lot of time, if not money, planning and designing. And then spent a lot of time planting, watching plants fail, and replanting. Dignified chaos is a lot of work.

You should also remember that cottages sustain themselves. You will need to plant things to bring inside, flowers, or herbs, or vegetables, even when you don't have an acre for a cornfield. I remember the cornfield, next to the barn, opposite the cottage, where we stayed on my father's family place. And the deer that would walk out at night, as we held our breaths and waited. But I digress.

Do not worry. Strawberries in a pot count. Orange trees in pots count. Basil leaves on a windowsill count. You only need the chance to crush, or sniff, or bite something you have grown.

Your cottage garden should have paths, to wind through the greenery, to conceal and reveal. Even if the only path you have is the one leading from the sidewalk to your front door, or up the stairs to your apartment, let it meander just for a minute, if you can.

Most importantly, the cottage garden must adapt to the environment in which it finds itself. Plant a polite space, following the culture of your adoptive home. High WASPs wish for nothing more than the nirvana of appropriate. Above, the garden on the right is in fact in England. The garden on the left? Chicago. Planted affectionately, in a corner protected from winds.

Noe Valley, San Francisco. Where a cottage garden includes the plant known as Kangaroo Paws. Under a crayon-blue sky, cottages might have a kangaroo or two nearby. In the desert, a cottage garden might consist of succulents, cacti planted as though they'd just happened to arrange themselves in patterns along your walk, in amongst the swept dust and broken pottery embedded into adobe walls.

You didn't think palm trees were part of a cottage garden? They are in Santa Barbara. While in the hills above Silicon Valley, Mediterranean natives do a heck of a job mirroring the foxgloves, hostas, and peonies of other climates. No need to imitate the cottages of other lands.

So get out the tools hiding in your garage. If you want to get fancy, put them in a basket. Tie a bow on the handle. Do not bewail the lack of a gardener. Gardeners work on the vast nether reaches. What is close to home we do ourselves.

Enjoy the digging, the weeding, the pruning. Nothing is so good for the soul as a good pruning session. Protect your cottage. Curiously, weeds ignore demographics, weedkiller is poison for everyone, and you don't really have to get your hands dirty. One could say the earth is our cottage, if one wanted to speak out.

Archetypal Cottage
Grand Cottage
Corn
Path
Chicago
Noe Valley
Mom's House, LPC
Dad's House, LPC
Garden Necessities, LPC

Guest Post: Reggie of "Reggie Darling" On His Yale 25th Reunion

Today we have the honor, and privilege, of a guest post from Reggie Darling. Reggie writes one of my favorite blogs on design and hospitality, providing tips on how to be a gracious host, a well-behaved guest, as well an absolutely fabulous array of inspirational home design photos. He and Boy Fenwick, his husband, scour the East Coast for antiques. Boy photographs their finds, and their weekend house in upstate New York, gracefully and compellingly. In short, every time I read his blog I wish either to visit him or own all his stuff.

Today, Reggie's writing about his 25th Reunion at Yale. Since he and I agreed to exchange posts, you'll find me over there today, writing in turn about my 25th Princeton Reunion.

Hello. My name is Reggie Darling, and I am guest-posting here on “Privilege” today. I recently had the pleasure of meeting Lisa for the first time over dinner in San Francisco when I was there on a business trip. While I had communicated with Lisa over the preceding months, both by commenting on her blog and by enjoying comments she left on mine, and later by email, I had never met her before our dinner. I was pleased that she agreed to dine with me, a stranger, as I had found her blog “Privilege” to be interesting, thought-provoking, humorous, and charming. I was delighted to find, when I met Lisa, that she is all of these in person.

Over dinner we hatched a plan to write guest posts on each other’s blogs about our 25th college reunions, hers at Princeton, mine at Yale. But since then I have decided to slightly alter my subject, and write about the three 25th reunions I have attended over a forty-year span, the first two at Yale and the third at Vassar. For I believe that you, as a follower of her blog, may be interested to read from another High WASP (as she defines it) how much the world of the High WASPs that Lisa examines has changed and evolved, and in a relatively short time. And I believe the contrasts of these reunions illustrate much of this change . . . for the better. So, here goes.

Yale Class of 1944 25th Reunion

I attended my first Yale 25th reunion in June of 1969, when I was twelve years old. I was there because my father was celebrating his 25th reunion that summer, having graduated in 1944. My father’s Yale class was a pivotal one, because it was the last one that enrolled there before the U.S. entered WWII and was almost entirely populated with the types of men that had attended the university since it was founded in 1701. In other words, White Anglo Saxon Protestants, the offspring of this nation’s ruling classes, largely drawn from the East Coast, and the product of its elite boarding schools. When my father applied to college he did so only to Yale, since it was a foregone conclusion that he would be admitted. As he told me when I asked him years later, it didn’t even occur to him to apply anywhere else.

My father brought our entire family with him to his 25th reunion, including my mother, my three older siblings, and me. I was pretty much odd boy out at the reunion, because I was too old to engage in the activities organized for children, not old enough to hang out with the teenagers, and too young to join the adults, whose primary occupation appeared to be drinking alcohol and talking about the old days while wearing silly hats and blue-and-white striped jackets. My older siblings didn’t want to have anything to do with me, since I was a “dumb twelve year old,” and my parents were otherwise engaged. So I spent a lot of time hanging around the reunion tent observing what was going on. One of the attractions of doing so was it provided me--in stark contrast to back home--with unlimited access to Cokes, bottomless bowls of peanuts, and endless cheese and crackers, since the tent was set up with a fully stocked bar continuously manned with a fleet of accommodating bartenders morning, noon, and night. Pay dirt!

Over the course of the reunion I got to know the bartenders by name, and I enjoyed speaking with them when the pace slowed down and they had nothing else to do. One evening, while lurking around the tent after my parents had staggered off to bed, I noticed that one of the bartenders was having an argument with his manager, and I sidled over to see if I could overhear what they were fighting about. It turned out that the bar was understaffed that evening, and the bartender was complaining that he didn’t have time to both wash out the used glasses and also man the bar (this was back in the days before plastic glasses were used at such events). So, having nothing better to do, I piped up that I would be happy to wash glasses for them, and, much to my surprise, the exasperated manager agreed to let me do it. I then spent the next several hours happily washing glasses and delivering them to the bartenders, who were pleased for me to take this burden off their hands. I had such a good time doing it, in fact, that I spent the better part of the rest of the reunion washing glasses behind the bar in the reunion tent, where I became something of a mascot for the bartenders. My parents were more than happy to let me do it, too, because it got me out of their hair, they knew where I was, and, besides, they thought it was a hoot. And at the end of the reunion, much to my delight, the manager presented me with a twenty dollar bill for my efforts. Not only did I get to wash the glasses for my bartender pals, but I got paid for it, too!

Yale Class of 1979 25th Reunion

Although my father’s Yale classmates were almost entirely made up of WASPs, after WWII the face of Yale’s undergraduates started to change. Slowly at first, and aided by the G.I. Bill, Yale’s student body began to become more diverse. By the time I entered Yale in September 1975 it was a very different place from the university my father had enrolled in. For one thing, Yale had gone co-ed in the fall of 1969, and by the time I matriculated forty percent of my classmates were female. In addition, a substantial percentage of my class were people of differing ethnic and religious backgrounds from my WASP origins, and the majority of undergraduates there had attended public schools. While being a legacy offspring was certainly not a liability to getting admitted to Yale, it was no longer the easy ticket for admission that it had once been. In other words, Yale had become a meritocracy. But Yale remained, and remains to this day, a very macho, competitive, and elite university. Today, however, these defining characteristics of the university have nothing to do with the ethnicity or religion or gender of its students, unlike when my father went there, when its doors were tightly closed to anyone who didn’t fit a very narrowly defined vision of who should be admitted. I loved my experience at Yale, and I look back on it fondly and with respect. I feel fortunate to have been able to go there.

One of the things that has changed since I was an undergraduate at Yale is that the stigma of being gay in this country has largely dissipated in the intervening years, at least among educated people, and had long become a non-issue by the time of my 25th reunion, held in June 2004. When I was an undergraduate at Yale in the late 1970s, being gay was still considered to be a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association, and it was stigmatized to a degree that is unfathomable today, at least here in the U.S. While I had (discretely) come out to a number of my friends during my senior year at Yale I had not brought any of my partners with me to reunions until my 20th, when I brought Boy Fenwick, my partner in life (and more recently my legally recognized husband, at least in Massachusetts, where we got married last year) with me. While some of my classmates were slightly taken aback when I first introduced Boy to them as my life partner at my 20th reunion, they rallied immediately. And when he joined me at my 25th reunion, no one batted an eye. I had a marvelous time at my Yale 25th, and having Boy there with me was an important part of what made the experience memorable for me. Needless to say, that would not have been the case for any of my father’s classmates if they had the audacity to do such a thing at their 25th reunion in 1969, where they would likely have been met with disapproving astonishment at such an introduction, and where the offending classmate and his partner would probably have been ostracized, if not asked to leave. Thank goodness people are more enlightened these days here in America.

Vassar Class of 1985 25th Reunion

In addition to coming from a family where Yale figures prominently among the men, Vassar figures prominently among the women. My father’s mother, known as Granny Darling, went to Vassar, class of 1913, and initiated the first Yale-Vassar marriage in my family when she married my grandfather, Yale class of 1911. She dearly hoped that one of her offspring would continue the tradition. My Aunt Mary (her daughter), Vassar class of 1941, was the first to frustrate Granny when she married outside the fold (headstrong girl!), and my father disappointed, too, when he married my mother, Sarah Lawrence class of 1943. After both of my Vassar-educated cousins, classes of 1967 and 1972, failed to marry Yale men, Granny then looked, with mounting desperation, to her two grandsons with Yale potential (my older brother, Frecky, and me) to remedy this unfortunate situation. She was further frustrated when Frecky, Yale class of 1974, married a Brown graduate shortly after finishing Yale. I was, then, her remaining hope for such a felicitous union. More than once when I was an undergraduate at Yale my Granny Darling gently admonished me to be sure to “look up a nice Vassar Girl” in the hopes of achieving her goal. Unfortunately, Granny Darling died before I graduated from Yale and long before I met, and then married, Boy Fenwick, Vassar class of 1985. I can just imagine hearing my dear Granny’s reaction upon learning that one of her Yale-educated grandsons had indeed married a Vassar graduate (“At last! What joy!”), followed by her surprise when she learned that I had, in fact, married a Vassar Guy and not a Vassar Girl (“He married what?”). I am fairly confident that Granny would have eventually come around after her initial shock wore off, since at least it is a Yale-Vassar union after all . . . although it’s not exactly the union she had envisioned.

So when I joined Boy at his Vassar 25th reunion earlier this month, I did so more than solely as his partner in life, but with an added appreciation of his college’s history, traditions, and its meaning to my family. I enjoyed myself at his reunion, and I had a lot of fun there meeting his college friends and seeing the places on campus where he had once lived, studied, and frolicked. I also thought of Granny Darling and the other Vassar women in my family when I walked around the campus, and I felt a pleasant connection to the school that extended beyond the happiness that I experienced in joining Boy there as he and his classmates celebrated.

Even though Boy graduated from college only six years after I did, his experience at Vassar was quite different from mine at Yale. For one thing, the majority of his classmates were female (55% to Yale’s 40%, when I was there), which is not surprising, given Vassar's history. Also, his classmates were a slightly more diverse group of people than mine had been at Yale, at least they appeared to me at his reunion. Finally, attitudes towards being gay had relaxed considerably by the time he enrolled at Vassar, and he was out as a gay man from the moment he arrived there as a freshman.

As I sat at a table under the large white tent during the big class dinner at Boy’s 25th reunion, I felt glad to be there with him and his friends, who welcomed me with civility and humor. I also felt a connection with my dear Granny and was amused that her wish for a Yale-Vassar marriage had finally come true, albeit not quite how she had envisioned. And I felt very fortunate, indeed, that the world had evolved in my lifetime to such a point that I could find myself there with my beloved spouse, under those happy circumstances.

Images:
Yale postcards - Reggie's private collection
Vassar postcards - Cardcow.com

Note: I have noticed that Reggie's blog hasn't been updated yet. He's traveling. Technology is not as simple as they would have us believe. Stay tuned.
Note: All is remedied! I am at this direct link, with photos of tiger-infested garments.

How Do High WASPs Differ From WASPs?

A shot glass from my mother's family. It says, "A Thimble Full." We have to drink a lot of scotch, but with decorum.

How do High WASPs differ from WASPs? Well, WASP is simply an acronym for White. Anglo-Saxon. Protestant. No more, no less.

However, in America, the broad term WASP is often used to mean a smaller, more specifically defined socio-economic group. When the broader term is used to indicate the smaller group, it's often done metonymically. Yes. Big word for the day. Which I'm actually using incorrectly but let's pretend. Meaning, using a part to imply the whole. In other words, the word WASP is backed by a list of daily life characteristics, rather than a discussion of the root cause/socio-economic background. By gin and tonics, red pants, and an Ivy League degree, rather than history, anthropology, psychology.

Which drives me nuts. Since my family falls into the smaller category, and I find that the daily life characteristics being bandied about hit the mark just enough for discomfort, and not enough for the relief of being fully found out.

Hence the term High WASP, used here for precision. Defining a smallish group of Americans. After the term came to me, when I was beginning to blog, I looked it up on the Internet. This is the only prior reference I have found. Below is the definition I use. Which I invented, out of whole cloth, and to which we need to attribute no authority whatsoever.

What are the traits of the broader category, the WASPs? I do not know. Perhaps they are too diverse to discuss in generalities. I try to talk only about what I know, or believe. And I try not to believe things about groups of people unless I have terabytes of personal or scientific data.

Let me just say straight out that I understand I tread a difficult line here. Matters of class are deservedly touchy. I think Twnkltwrp** said it best in reponse to Toffegyrl's post on the Fatshionista LiveJournal forum. When asked if Privilege was a joke, she said she thinks that if it is, it's one Amid Privilege gets. I hope I get it. I try to. I try very hard to get the joke.

So, leaving aside the question of whether we ought to be talking about all this in the first place, we might ask ourselves, should anyone care about High WASPs? In terms of world affairs and commerce, it's probably no longer necessary. The day when my ancestors oversaw the political and economic workings of the United States of America have come and gone. As it should be, in the American way. But in the arena of style and taste, possibly, we have left our mark.

The High WASPs, in their heyday, developed a certain aesthetic related to social context. Hence, Privilege. The aesthetic is useful if) you want to hint at the American upper class - even though we rule no longer our style lingers b) your deepest desire is to dress "appropriately" b) you want to emanate power in many work cultures, such as law, finance, and traditional corporations.

The High WASP aesthetic is not homogenous. We allow for individual expression. Hence our style archetypes, the Grande Dame, the Sturdy Gal, the Artsy Cousin. Faux Fuchsia, she of the fabulous frocks and unchipped nail polish, she who in fact Directed Me (as she would say) to define the difference between WASP and High WASP, is apparently the best instantiation of the Australian version of a Grande Dame one could ever wish to see. The aesthetic is neither proprietary nor immutable. Anyone can do it if they like. I say so.

Which leads to the question, which I will lob back to Faux Fuchsia, and to you around the world, do other cultures have their High WASP equivalents? The thing about America is that in a culture where social class is firmly tied to money and achievement, where we replaced titles and aristocracy with welcomed waves of immigrants, our ruling class can, in fact, um, die. Leaving these rules of style and taste with no one left at the head of the cabal. Maybe that's why I tell the inner secrets now. I mean, who's left to get me in trouble?

I don't know how it works, in other countries, and I'd love to find out.

*And now, if I may, I'm going to put my tongue firmly back into my cheek, square my jaw, and carry on.
**Toffegyrl, Twinkltrp, if you are reading, thank you so much for your comments. I would have responded on the forum but was thwarted by LiveJournal and all the signing up requirements.
***For a more wistful version of such folderol, read Tad Friend's book, Cheerful Money
****The Anonymous Speller did me the enormous favor of pointing out that I misspelled Fuchsia. Apparently it the color was named after the flower named for Herr Doktor Fuchs.

What Shoes Can I Wear With Navy Blue?

Like most bloggers, I track my search terms. Guess what's most common? The meaning of life? Just kidding. Shoes. "What color shoes should I wear with navy blue?"

Let us consider why it's harder to decide what shoes to wear with navy than, say, with gray, or forest green, or burnt umber. Here's what I think. Women have heard that there's a rule against black.

I am here to conclude, definitively, you can wear black shoes with navy clothing.

You CAN Wear Black Shoes With Navy by High WASP featuring Christian Louboutin shoes

How did the no black shoe myth get started? I looked around. No trace of origin to be found. I considered. Is it like white shoes after Labor Day, a remnant of our upper class habits? In the absence of proof, I theorize. What? That's the prerogative of social anthropologists, especially us amateurs.

My theory is that this rule, if it ever existed, was to prevent the wearing of black shoes with very, very dark navy. Because with a very dark navy pair of pants, or skirt, and let's say, a pair of matte black leather shoes, it might be possible to think that the wearer had been CONFUSED. That the wearer had MADE A MISTAKE and worn black shoes THINKING SHE HAD ON BLACK CLOTHES. Oh, the horror.

In case you still query the present-day acceptability of black with navy, here's corroboration. From Highly Diverse Sources.

"Black shoes can most definitely be worn with a blue suit. But it depends which blue. Sky blue and hues all the way to teal and French blue (none of them a good idea anyway) call for something different, like a light-brown shoe. Navy, however--the default setting for suits--is perfect for black or brown shoes, right up to a pale tan if you're brave. Or from Naples (Italy or Florida). The motto is choose your suit first, then buy the shoes." (Esquire)

"For another example of a celebrity breaking this rule, see the photo of Rachel Bilson (left), mixing navy, black, AND brown. Her outfit looks adorable and fashion-forward, proving that this rule is really just a dumb myth." (College Fashion)

"Traditional wisdom long held that navy suits must be paired with navy or brown shoes. But, in the past decade, black shoes have become acceptable and fashionable to wear with navy. This is primarily due to navy and black pairings on the runway from designer Donna Karan." (eHow.com)

"The problem is that the navy blue does not have the glamourous connotations, instead we think of it as the professional or the nautical color, and thus when we pair it with the black shoes it has the potential to become too drab, or too uniform. (Black clothing and black shoes do not suffer from this drabness because black has the glamourous associations.)" (Manolo's Shoe Blog) Confirms our point, given that for work, we don't WANT glamorous connotations...

If you are STILL worried, try black shoes with a high gloss sheen, further differentiating them from your clothes. If your clothes are shiny, matte shoes.

Of course, as previously discussed, you aren't limited to black either. The thing about navy clothing is that almost any color shoe can be said to "go." In one way or another. For example, in the "preppy" style (I use preppy in the current sense of the word, not as in went-to-Exeter), one could wear lime green, or bright red, or pink shoes. Color-wise, all those choices work. They just have a certain feel to them you have to take into consideration.

Conversely, if you follow the Stacy and Clinton "pop of color" practice, you can go with orange, or lavender. An edgier Artsy Cousin can pull off wearing shoe colors right next to navy (but with enough yellow or red tinge to avoid confusion), forest green or aubergine. A Grande Dame senior partner can sport fabulous chocolate brown crocodile pumps.

The sheer flexibility and range of navy is what makes it tricky. So I will put forth my particular High WASP prejudices for you to avoid, with the caveat that they are only that, prejudices, and navy is a case-by-case phenomenon.

• Light brown with navy is declasse unless we're talking sandals. I don't know why. This can make nudes, or pink, difficult to pull off too.
  
• White with navy better be pretty clearly nautical or don't try it. White bucks for men perhaps, but there I defer to Reggie Darling.
  
• Gold with navy should be worn a la Grecque, somehow. Or on a red carpet with very avant garde jewelry.
• Bronze is the best metallic, inasmuch as it's the most surprising.
• Turquoise-studded sandals would look fab.
• Purple and aqua are tough, as they tend to verge into navy territory dangerously near to the SHE COULDN'T SEE THE DIFFERENCE gaffe.
  

In sum, it's about the style tribe signals you want to send, your color sense, and your tendency towards the sombre or the cheerful. The strict or the playful. Not about rules. Here are some examples, from previous posts.

What Color Shoes To Wear With Navy? by High WASP featuring Fendi dresses

All this extends to jeans. They are navy, you know. And east side bride says Bensimons are the way to go. I'm a fan of Tretorns too.

Bensimons To Wear With Navy by High WASP featuring Tretorn shoes

So there you have it. Speak now or forever hold your navy peace. Speak now anyway. You guys are fun.

Monograms, Even When You're Not Sure What They Mean. And Unexpected Presents.

My mother gave my daughter the necklace above. Not for Christmas, mind you. Here's Christmas.

Theory "Sasha" Cupid Tribal Black Dress. Who thinks up these names? (I'm telling you. Wear this stuff when you are young and pay no mind to any flaws you think you've got. They are defeated by your sheer youth and, well, youth.)

Which looked so fabulous on, the morning of December 26th my mother emerged from her wing of the house holding something sparkly, and said, "Here darling. I never wear this. Would you like it?" Jaws dropped, just a little. "This would be so much more unusual than a long necklace."

Good moment for Mom's credo, "A simple thank you will suffice."


It's apparently from the family. My mother says those medallions spell out Martha. Hmm. Perhaps in code. We could make neither hide nor tail of the monogram. But we really didn't care.

My daughter works. In New Jersey. No socialite she. We're very, very thankful for health insurance. But this is my family and these are the artifacts.

Generosity in all its forms is at the top of my list of the Universal Good. Mom, thank you. Simply, thank you very much. Now if I can just get my daughter to take a lot of pictures of the wearing said necklace...

The High WASP Christmas Tree And Its Friends.

High WASPs are, as my mother would say, big pills about Christmas trees. About all Christmas decorations, actually. No matter how evolved we fancy ourselves, come Christmas, we revert.

We don't believe Christmas decorations are decor. They are symbols. They are family. As such, to be revered, experienced for meaning, and rarely changed. Everything has to be highly traditional, as in, the way your grandmother did it, or completely kitsch*. As in the lit-up Santa I bought on West 14th Street in Manhattan that flashed red and played a digital version of Jingle Bells.

Christmas tree lights? Um, white. They can be shaped like pine cones if you like. Or little candles on branches. Colors? Um, red, green, gold, even silver, if you feel daring. Theme? Um, Christmas?

We put angels up even when we're not religious. Especially those from our grandmother's Austro-Hungarian 2nd husband. He didn't give us his family's court sword. Would have been tough to hang on a tree, no?


Ornaments? Anything you like. Just don't let them match. Stuff made by kids, by you, bought at the Stanford Shopping Center, bought the year you moved into your new house, bought the year you moved out. Fish. Fish are good. They are however, as my son once said to the great amusement of my best friend, dumb. From Gumps, home of the greatest traditional glass ornaments ever.


Other decorations? As long as you adhere to the principles above, anything goes. A creche? Sure. Hand-carved and from another culture, even better. Garlands of greenery? Sure, especially ones that smell good and are tied with plaid bows. Red and green plaid bows, goes without saying. Tiffany bowls full of ornaments on your table? Yes*. Again, have to be red, green, gold or, well, you get the picture. We apologize but we cannot countenance aqua at Christmas. Or lavender. Blue is OK and Hannukah is great and if you have a cultural holiday with a color association that falls around Christmas just let us know. We will support you and celebrate you. But Christmas is red and green and gold, and, well, you get the picture.


Want something new? 2010 appears to beg for resurgence and reemergence all around? Mix high and low. Handmade and mass market. Tell a story that reminds you of Christmas. Which to us means home. In this case, home, not house. Sometimes house decorations do make home. Clear? No? Like I said, we're kind of pills about Christmas. But good with making sure you have enough to drink. And enough light to read by. Me, I'm building a little imaginary Scandinavian village. Where elves live under the shade of pink glass tree-ish things. Happy Holidays to all. Don't mind us. Another glass of Scotch and we'll be quiet.

Chubby elf house handmade by even*cleveland, 2009. Glass tree, Target, 2007.

*Town and Country Mom does this too..
**For a peak experience in this approach, go to kidchamp.net

The 21st Century Grand Tour, In Which Freud And Jung Come Along.

King's College Rare Book Collection

High WASPs like to travel. My mother, one afternoon, put down the New York Times' travel section, sighed, shook her head, and said, "I don't need to read this. I'll never see Finland again." My father is prone to private safari-type expeditions, to Africa, to Vietnam, and the British Virgin Islands. Well, maybe not safaris in the Caribbean, but cruises involving boats, crews, and few other people.

In our generation, given the state of the once-great family fortune, travel is a little less glamorous. No less compelling. Between us the siblings have worked in London, France, and Shanghai. Studied in St. Petersburg. We've been to most continents, on holiday, on pilgrimage of one sort or another. I'd list the countries but your imagination can probably do a better job.

Why? I don't think it's just the fact that we can afford to. After all, many people with financial resources are happy to stay put. I believe the construct of the Grand Tour is still with us. That, and the desire to poke holes in the comfort of wealth.

The Grand Tour was a custom, originating in the 17th century, primarily English, in which young men graduating from Oxbridge would travel through Europe for several years. Upon their return, expanded cultural knowledge allowed them, we assume, to take their place in society. Needless to say, these Tours involved the usual activities of youth, trysts, gambling, intoxication. The reality diverges from voiced lofty goals. But the Grand Tour became a cultural keystone, embodying the idea that to lead one must know more than one's backyard. Which, despite the colonial overtones, isn't such a bad thought. Even though we, the High WASPs, are no longer the leaders of the Western world.

The 21st century, of course, has added the personal to the social imperative. The thing about growing up with money is that you don't quite know what to trust. You are never sure what life would taste like if you really bit down hard. Blood on your teeth.

So we travel.

I admit, the travel isn't without accoutrements. It's not pure voyaging into a dark night. We think about the right wallet, the right suitcase, what to wear on an airplane. I have come to believe in Purell. My mother has a special travel bathrobe. I like black Pumas with Velcro fasteners.

It would be possible to imagine that portable comforts of home defeat the powers of new places. Having grown up in privilege, it's very easy, as I said, not to know what to trust. To mock oneself for not having really had to fight. To decide that only the most difficult is worthwhile. But that's not a way to make much progress. There are times when you have to relent. To say to yourself, "Fine. If I like belting leather on my rollaway suitcase, fine." As I remember, a durable duffle doesn't get in the way of India. You still have to brush the dust out of your hair at night alone in a hotel room.

Brought up in privilege, and full of nerve-endings, you are apt to feel guilt. You will feel the desire to know what you do not know. You will wish for courage. You will have some. Probably never quite enough. So you get on the train.

This is more difficult than I make it sound. But not unique. I believe everyone in privilege must face the same problem, how to test, and still forgive oneself.

House Is Where The Heart Is

Little known fact. High WASPs don't say "Home," as in, "Oh, what a lovely home." Has to be "House." "Home" can only be used as in, "I'm going home." (I cringe at my own snobbery. I am in snob therapy every day.)

I believe, or at least I will invent, that this is because the concept of home is the closest we come to true love. To closeted passion. Clothes are for others, home is for us. Clothes enforce the social divide, at home the divide disappears. Because we are shy about strong feelings, this might not be immediately apparent, but we invite anyone who comes to our houses to join the family. At least for that night. Not, perhaps, a loud, warm, hugging kind of family. Not, certainly, a transparent and straightforward family. A family with a code of conduct and and a web of unspoken requirements. So, I suppose, a family like many others. More blue-eyed, perhaps, than usual.

I can't find High WASP house style archetypes to name. Probably because we are not trying to make so many statements at home. However, consistently, in any High WASP house you will find some things:

a) from a grandmother
b) purchased on a trip to Instanbul (or Finland, or Ethiopia)
c) which required consulting a designer, traipsing through the Design Center, reviewing fabric swatches, and spending a not inconsiderable amount of money

Of course, today being 2009, you might also find furniture from Pottery Barn. What use is a culture that cannot evolve? Or picture frames. From Pottery Barn. (What is it with Pottery Barn and picture frames? In any case they are quite good at frames.)

In my house you will find:

a) a Federalist mirror from my grandmother's Massachusetts house
b) a small wooden figure of Ganesh, brightly painted, from my trip to India
c) a Persian rug I bought in Brooklyn, sometime in the early 80's, before Brooklyn became the cool side of Manhattan

And, yes, a leather chair from Pottery Barn.


The thing is, we High WASPs are unlikely to tell the stories of our homes to others. Home is, as they say, where the heart is. Not our favorite topic, hearts. Home is where we held our small babies on our laps, their lips blistered just that little bit from nursing. Home is where we sit around the table, with linen, with silver, on Thanksgiving, and make toasts choked with emotion. Emotion is appropriate on Thanksgiving, no? Home is where we store old scooters, and ski clothes, and earthquake supplies, for far too long. Home is where the hurt is. I will invent a theory that when you lack for nothing material, you may feel, very strongly, the injury of inevitable human flaws in significant relationships. Simply because you can. Even if you aren't supposed to talk about it.

Home is where we wander out of the shower, soles of our feet still damp on slate tiles, where we lay our bills across the coffee table, where someone we love comes up behind us at the kitchen sink and holds our shoulders. Just for a minute. Until we shake them off because, in fact, dishes still need to be washed.

Good thing we have learned to put Lenox in the dishwasher. Gold rims be damned. The task of adulthood is to build a home you can inhabit. Inhabit fully.

Images
Ganesh, me
Chair, Pottery Barn

Can We Care About WASPs, Or, The Subjective, Personal, Version.

When one reads books as oneself, one might think about, well, oneself.

I mean I think about myself. My apologies. High WASP language. Distance and all that.

Tad Friend's Cheerful Money details the history of his family, along with the mannerisms and habits of Wasps. He calls us Wasps. I call us High WASPs. It's the same thing. I read his book pen in hand. Felt strange to mark up a hardback book. But necessary. At 52 I can no longer remember paragraphs word for word.

I was looking for data points. Sharp pinpricks of recognition. Little snippets that denied or confirmed my own experience. It's remarkable how much similarity I found. Or unsurprising, depending on one's attitude towards information, patterns and coincidence. In any case, differences turn out to matter most.

Tad's family made money in steel, coal, banking. Mine in banking for railroads. His ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence, as did mine. A Civil War flag hangs in one of his family houses, we have a sword. His relatives wandered through Asia, one of mine settled in Africa for a period of time. Documenting the Snake Tribes. His father is an academic, the former President of Swarthmore College, mine a professor and administrator at Stanford University. In fact, my father was in Tad's father's class at St. Paul's. Both families have been known to enjoy alcohol. I envy Tad the family estate on Long Island. Our New Jersey equivalent, burnt to the ground in a fatal accident, has long since been turned into a country club and golf course. The Cape Cod summer house sold to some family with sufficient wealth to maintain three storeys of gray shingles through Nor'easter after Nor'easter.

I recognize the language. Of reserve. Things unfelt, unsaid. The subjunctive, "As it were. If I may? Should you care to..." Evoke. Yearn. So much meaning not understood. My brother (who was most likely at Harvard with Tad, now that I think about it) became a psychoanalyst, perhaps in reaction. Hard to get much more talky about feelings than that.

And yet.

One of the centers of Friend's book is his mother. She went to school with Sylvia Plath, wrote poetry. Always the center of attention, expected to charm. This concept of the High WASP "grande dame" is entirely outside my experience. My family lacked for grandes dames. We are prone to sturdy, if sturdy can vibrate at a high pitch, that is. For example. My mother (attended Smith with Tad's mother, as it turns out. Getting silly, isn't it?) walked door to door for Fair Housing in the 1960's. Had her only moment approaching a breakdown when, in 1961, she hid in the coat closet for 10 minutes, 3 young children calling "Mommy, Mommy," outside the door. My Aunt Eve died at 75 when she asked to be taken off life support. She had broken her vertebra, falling from a jumping horse. Did 10 pushups on our living room floor 5 years before. Known for supporting Ethiopian refugees via her husband's diocese.

For example. The women in my family feel a tidal pull to have and to care for babies. We don't, as Tad's mother did, look at our babies and wonder are we ready. We're ready. We are, if anything, too ready, too devoted, and too in love with our children. Maybe it's the New England nature-is-just-outside-the-door from my mother's side, maybe the transplant to California, maybe just the workings of the universe. I can't know.

My father follows the High WASP archetype more closely. Except. Once, in my direst straits, I called him on the telephone. I told him I was so ashamed. "L.," he said, "Don't be ashamed. You have worked very, very hard at any number of things. You have nothing to be ashamed of."

Language can save what it threatens to destroy. Even those fond of the ellipse can sometimes speak directly to those they love. Give comfort.

Cheerful Money is still with me. It is many ways a funny book, but the not-so-funny stuck with me longer and harder. The ache and tremble of something just out of reach. A dry-eyed sort of sorrowish feeling, not one that leads to crying. I am far more apt to cry when I write about how much I love my family, how much they have loved me, how much we love each other. We might speak of it with some restraint, but it's there. I have no doubt.

I wish I knew what made this true.

*Thanks again to Tad Friend for the opportunity to review his book. And get all sentimental about family and stuff like that.

Can We Care About WASPs, Or, A Review of Cheerful Money (Objective, General).

Life is a scavenger hunt run backward as well as forward, a race to comprehend. But with Wasps, the caretakers lock the explanatory sorrows away, then swallow the key. (Cheerful Money)

Cheerful Money:
Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor

By Tad Friend
(Little, Brown; 353 pages; $24.99)

The WASP, or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, has a place in America's mythology. Not surprisingly. WASPs were, after all, the source of our first big wave of wealth. We like wealth. We may even love wealth. The question is, while we might feel a prurient curiosity about privilege, do we have any real interest in the WASP story?

The species has been simultaneously stereotyped, ridiculed, and envied, for one reason or another. Again, not surprising. Americans do that to all sorts of cultural species. WASPs, however, have not yet had their brief moment in the blazing sun of the 21st century's popular culture. No Sopranos, no Angela's Ashes. It's hard to make entertainment out of a group that doesn't believe in displays of wealth, accomplishment, or emotion. It's hard to write about a group that has a horror of talking too much. And if you are of the group, well then, indeed.

So how can we know what WASPs were if no one says much of anything? "Were" is the operative word. The species is dying out. Richard Ford and John Updike have written novels characterized by trailing, wistful manliness. Scorcese's Age of Innocence makes an entire movie out of failure to speak. Is that all there is?

Tad Friend, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has decided to say something. His memoir, Cheerful Money, chronicles his life, and the story of his WASP family. He writes two stories, intertwined. One, time-honored, about a boy whose parents don't show him much outright love, who spends his time looking for that love with girls of various sorts, and finds a happy ending, finally, in marrying. You may remember Mr. Friend as Mr. Latte, from a popular New York Times series where his wife, Amanda Hesser, memorialized their courtship.

The second story is the Dickensian history of many people named Tim. And Theodore, or versions of Theodore. Tad is short for Theodore, as is Ted, as is Dorie, Mr. Friend's father's name. (By the way, as is common with WASPs, the Tims and Timmies are girls.) Friend says of his family tree,

I could proceed as a Robinson like Grandma Tim's family (loquacious, madcap, sometimes unhinged); a Pierson like Grandpa John's family (bristling with brains); a Holton like Grandma Jess's family (restless, haughty show ponies); or a Friend like Grandpa Ted's family (moneyed, clubbable, and timid).

Juicy tidbits of privilege and accomplishment abound. Mr. Friend's family owns Century House on the South Fork of Long Island,

...in the Georgica Association, an enclave of two dozen houses on the western shore of Georgica Pond that faces houses owned by Steven Spielberg, Martha Stewart, and Calvin Klein on the eastern.

Images of gray shingled houses against a vivid, blue, privileged sky. As he puts it,

When you hail from families that have lived for generations in houses with dumbwaiters and coal scuttles, your birthright includes a staggering heritage of bric-a-brac that has no bearing on modern life - the junk DNA that gets handed down along the the useful genes. Wasp tableware is anything that abhors the dishwasher: gold-rimmed chargers, etched-crystal wineglasses, pedestaled fruit plates, egg spoons of translucent horn.

All this because, in the turn of the century, "...the Friends made enough from steel, coal, and banking to become - briefly - smashingly rich; chauffeur rich, yacht rich, $350,000,000-in-today's-money rich." Mr. Friend himself attended Harvard, where he was elected to the Harvard Lampoon and the Signet Society.

But our overarching impression of Mr. Friend's family history is one of painful complexity, language fraught with anxiety and hanging clauses of regret, along with a family tree that makes it quite simply difficult to figure who is who much of the time. Which Timmy are we talking about? Is Jess male or female? And which wife of which husband is leaving whom for whom?

Luckily, Mr. Friend's personal history is much more direct, and, while less entertaining in the US Weekly manner, both more moving and more universal.

Mr. Friend's mother, as mothers will, had her own unsatisfied needs, leaving her unable to bring heart and soul to child-rearing. He understands this early on.

Feeling that I had failed to delight her, I turned into a wary, watchful child. I began building the internal Wasp rheostat, the dimmer switch on desires.

Dimming the light of desire leads to a family distance sorrowful for all. Spaniel Sam provides the only comfort. Mr. Friend's mother says to him, as she approaches the end of her life,

"We have this beautiful lawn here, perfect for two soccer teams of grandchildren," she said. "And there aren't any grandchildren. I'd always thought my children would live nearby, just down the road, and would be over all the time. But everyone lives so far away."

"And why do you think that is?" I said.

She began to cry. I felt sorry, and guilty, and started crying, too. Sam trotted into the room and looked worriedly back and forth. She gathered him up and wept into his fur.

Neither is Dorie Friend, Mr. Friend's father, a source of direct talk of love. Upon the breakup of one of his son's serious relationships, Dorie faxes from Jakarta,

I think you are wise to use time as a resource for whatever it offers that you may wish to choose, including (1) repair toward commitment or (2) easing off to affectionate detachment; or (2) enabling (1) but not, obviously, (1) entropic to (2).

Indeed.

So Mr. Friend enters therapy. Happily, as narration of therapy is often as terrible as the narration of one's dreams, he writes little of the sessions and more on the outcome. He meets Ms. Hesser, falls in love. Now he can speak. Which he does, proposing marriage.

I led Amanda down an empty hallway behind the bar. The passage was damp and chilly, her two least favorite qualities, but she followed calmly, thinking I was positioning us by the kitchen for hot hors d'oeuvres (one of my moves). She looked astonished when I swung her around with my hand on the small of her back, as if to music, and said, "I've been thinking..." - which wasn't true. My thinking cap was off. When she said, "Yes!" the future compacted to her ear, pink with excitement, and her sheltering lock of hair.

Cheerful Money is about the inability to speak, to speak love in particular. Fittingly, it is Mr. Friend's writing that makes his book worth reading, in the end, invokes our feelings, and leaves us to carry his experience forward when we finally put the book down. He writes, of his grandmother's funeral. "The thunk of earth and skitter of pebbles beading down the coffin sides, the finality of it." We might be interested in WASP artifacts, old lace, ivory, silver, but we listen and feel for the universal. For families, and love, and loss.

The true WASP, while in this day and age prepared at least to acknowledge - maybe even voice - deep feelings, never stays long in the land of full-throated sentiment. Irony, tragedy whispered between teeth, requirements of appropriate behavior and speech at all times. Mr. Friend, despite his hunt for love and truth, is, after all, a WASP. He keeps the mushy stuff just this side of poignant, as you would expect in a culture that so values propriety. As he says, "Extraordinary oddities of conduct are tolerated among Wasps so long as you show up for Christmas." Maybe even the oddity of a confessional memoir.

For most, the story of our background is just that. Background. We lead our real lives with our families. All our loved ones. Freud trumps Marx, day to day. In the end, Mr. Friend's book engages us and moves us largely because he turns out pretty happy. And writes about both his distress and his happiness in an achingly beautiful style, finding a way, in the last, through the ellipses of WASP-talk. We might wish, from time to time, that Mr. Friend and his family had been able to speak more directly, fewer characters, fewer complexities, fewer clauses. But then, so might he.

*Note. My blog friends may wonder where I went. This is me writing. I wrote Tad Friend and asked to review this book. He was very gracious and agreed. Tomorrow, however, I will tell you my reaction as me, rather than as a book reviewer. I hope that is appropriate. Being a WASP and all. Image by me.