Vergil’s Coffee

It was Mrs. Addis who told me that I’d be blind in twenty years if I looked at the solar eclipse back in 1978; I looked and I’m still looking. She also was the first person I remember to complain (or comment) about the poor, or those on welfare. She was telling us how she was in a family’s house who was poor and that “They had a color television set…one nicer than ours,” she said. I think she then went on to make some comment about how it wasn’t fair or right that people who weren’t working to have more comforts than those who actually worked for a living.

My mom sent me to the Christian School in the sixth grade because she didn’t like what she saw at the school my brother was attending. She told me later that “almost every kids was stoned out of their minds” and she was not going to have neither me nor my sister Stephany go to “that public school.” So, she looked in the phone book and decided against the St. Eugene’s (“too expensive and too much guilt”) and enrolled us in Rincoln Valley Christian School in the fall of 1977. Mrs. Addis was my 6th grade teacher and I listened to her most of the time. I remember trying to explain to my best friend, Brad Frost, that I was transferring schools and that we’d probably not hang out a lot. Brad’s dad was a car salesman and I think the Frosts were a bit better off than we were. They had a pool and we had the Santa Rosa Creek.

I know my mom didn’t make a lot of money and the court-order child support checks from my cardiologist father helped us to be clothed and fed and kept a decent house functional until we moved in 1980 out to the Russian River area. Those support checks continued until I turned 21 and I remember appreciating those checks because they basically paid for 3 years of college in Grand Rapids, MI.

I think I became more aware of our lack of money during my sophomore year of high school. We moved back to Santa Rosa into a 3-room apartment and I remember people from the church doing a lot of nice things for me. In fact, I think someone even bought my letter jacket for me because they realized what I knew: we didn’t have much extra cash for luxury items. And though that was to my advantage when I applied for financial aid (for, on paper my family had little), it was an odd feeling using my mother’s food stamps to buy her some groceries when I visited her during the Christmas break of my freshman year of college.

I don’t pretend to fully understand what it’s like to be poor as I come from a family which was upper middle class, then middle class, and then lower middle class. It’s all labels anyway, isn’t it?

I suppose that’s why I had to snap myself when ConcordLive! ran the “Where are you going for Spring Break?” piece last Friday. It’s an annoying topic because you know what’s going to happen: all the rich kids are going to shove in everyone else’s faces what tropical climate they’ll be sunning in while everyone else is stuck in this “nothing-to-do” permaclouded area known as Elkhart County. (I’m hoping you were reading that “all the rich kids” part in an annoying nasal tone; it’s fun. Go back and do it…really; it’ll be fun and effective for the tone I’m trying to set…Spencer, do it; Chris, that’s a great nasal tone).

At least that’s the impression I got when I look on the faces of some of the students in my classes. Their families are working poor or certainly can’t afford to go on holiday for a week or so. These families may or may not own color televisions or letter jackets. But why do those who have more get to tell us about their seemingly wonderful exploits? Do the rich even deserve the wealth they have?

And it’s at this point where I silently slink into another conversation because you’ve heard this rhetoric before. You’ve heard it recently as a battle cry against the “have’s” who make big profits and who get huge tax breaks. The reason I tend to back away from this line of thinking is because of the eventual cliché:

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Cliché because I don’t even know if it’s accurate, but man you can get the Democrats “Amen”ing about this one. We might as well recite the labeling:

• Republicans = Big Business,
• Democrats = Social programs for the individual,
• Ron Paul = Sancho to Don Quixote.

As the ConcordLive! piece ended, I remember making some comment about how each person in the piece were going somewhere warm and exotic, while not one student said that they were staying in town. And at that moment I wanted to make a value judgment, but I stopped myself because the implications are unjust and illogical. People like to blame their misfortune on the fortune of others and that makes for a fairly miserable and cynical permacloud on one’s day. Some days I’m ready to pick up the lance and fight windmills; most days, I’d like to think I might just aim a little lower and be happy with a cup of $1.98 coffee and some blinding sunshine.

Sunshine feels good, doesn’t it?

Even in Elkhart County.