Memory is a funny thing.
My father was a banker, head of a trust department for many years, and a young man named David worked for him for years. David and his wife Mary became close friends of our family. Then they moved to another city. I reconnected with David about fifteen years later and over a pleasant lunch he told me that his main memory of me and my father was that we argued about politics a lot.
I was so startled I couldn’t even respond. I had to go home and give that a good mulling over. I realized he was right. I had forgotten. My father had been dead for several years and those political arguments had receded in my memory, probably because I wanted to remember happier times with Dad.
Dad loved Ronald Reagan. I did not. That’s all I have to say about that.
My parents loved politics and it was often a topic of discussion around our house. My parents didn’t just “talk the talk” though, they really “walked the walk.” They would volunteer to go work for candidates. They went to dinners where you had to pay to get in, and the money went to a particular candidate. We were middle class and lived within our means so they didn’t contribute a ton of money to the Republican party but they did contribute. We got Christmas cards from the Bush family for years.
I never thought about it except to think that I would never allow myself to be swept away by either party. I always try to evaluate every candidate and vote for the person, not the party. My parents were exasperated by that, but they never criticized me openly about it because they knew I was trying to do what was right. My father’s often heard dictum was “Do the RIGHT thing, always!” [I was startled years later by the title of the Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing, but it is a great title.]
My point is that we don’t have to be like our parents, whether they are middle-class suburban white Republicans, or Yellow Dog Democrats. [By definition, a yellow-dog Democrat is willing to vote for any Democratic candidate even if it’s a yellow dog. I always thought that was a weird image, the swearing in of the yellow dog…]
Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, our parents influence us throughout our lives, in obvious ways and in subtle ways.
My mother found men with fat fannies utterly revolting. I could never date a man with a big butt, and it’s her fault. I myself have a large rear end but it’s okay on a woman -- or so I was taught. (Mom was right, though. If I had married and had children with a big-butted man our children would have had enormous butts and likely would have had trouble finding pants that fit, and life partners..)
My dad never trusted a man with his hands in his pockets. He told all his employees at the bank he better not catch them with their hands in their pockets. To him, a banker with his hands in his pockets was a shifty character. To this day, I rarely ever put my hands in my pockets, except to fish out my phone.
My mother was raised by my Memaw, and Memaw was a terrible snob, which she passed on to Mom. I didn’t really understand that until I started bringing home friends from school (and later dates) and Mom would always ask them “What does your father do?” If the answer was “My dad’s a banker/lawyer/doctor/engineer/store manager etc. that was fine. If the answer was something like “I don’t know. He likes to sit around the house and watch sports but my mom works” my mother’s eyebrow was instantly cocked and loaded into an inverted “V” and I got the stinkeye. I once brought home a guy I was seeing and Mom asked him what his father did when he was growing up. He replied “I don’t really know… I think he was a salesman?” That, combined with the fact my date didn’t put his napkin in his lap for the entire meal meant I never went out with him again. My parents thinly-veiled looks of pity are seared into my memory.
Dad would never, ever, allow a sign in his yard or a bumper sticker on his car, period. I don’t either, except for the For Sale sign that was in front of my house recently. However, when I was in my early 20’s I laughed when my friends put a bumper sticker on my VW Rabbit that said “If it swells, ride it!” with an ocean wave in the background. My father did not think it was funny. He asked me to remove it. I refused.
Mom had a very low opinion of women who couldn’t cook. Her mother was a wonderful cook, and Mom became an excellent cook after she married Dad. However, I’ve heard Mom say a million times “Well, she always looks nice, but she cannot cook a thing.” That was the equivalent of saying “She wasn’t raised right and her heart’s not right with Jesus!” It didn’t matter if the dad was the cook in the home and he liked doing it. Mom thought all females should at least be able to put a decent meal on the table. I have always been puzzled when confronted with a female who doesn’t cook, but the big difference is that I berate myself every time I have an unkind thought about a non-cooking gal, and Mother felt no such compulsion. She would sneer “She brags about not cooking!” in the same disgusted tone she might have said “That fella just ran over his mama at the Winn Dixie!”
Dad never bought a brand-new car in his life, right from a car dealer. He thought that was the height of stupidity, because cars lose their value so quickly. When Dad had been dead about a year I went to a car lot and bought a brand-new shiny black Honda Civic. I was inordinately proud of that car. It was so much more fun than my little used Toyota Corolla had been. I drove the Civic less than a year, and then got in a wreck and it was totaled. When I was sitting on I-285 waiting for the cops to come (I was unhurt, thankfully) I remember looking up at the sky and silently saying to Dad I know you’re up there laughing at me, but just hush! I never bought a brand-new car again and I never will, unless I win the lottery.
My parents were both highly intelligent and moral people. They broke with family tradition and became Republicans because in the 1950’s the Democratic party was the party of segregation and the Old South, which my parents found appalling. However, my father would have been completely mystified by the election of Barack Obama.
Dad would be completely puzzled by the fact that new cars today are scarce because of a shortage of computer chips. He would never have accepted Business Casual as a dress code. He would be appalled at the lack of civility in politics these days, because many of his friends and family members did not share his political views but he cherished those friendships nonetheless.
One of Dad’s favorite sayings was “He ate my barbeque but he didn’t vote for me!” which we both thought was funny – and sometimes very true. Dad hated hypocrisy in any form.
My mother outlived Dad by more than twenty years. She was always fascinated by politics, but in recent years I couldn’t get her to understand the importance of actually fact-checking outrageous political posts that popped up in her Facebook feed. Like Memaw, she struggled with the idea that not everything you read in the paper is necessarily true. I tried to explain to her that editors and producers always heavily influence content – an idea which doesn’t bother me too much – but she was horrified by that.
I try to not discuss politics or hot-button social issues with my friends, because I don’t ever agree with anyone totally, and I hate discord. Unlike my parents, I don’t find politics exciting and fun. I always hold my nose and vote for the candidate I feel will do the least harm. That’s the attitude of most of my friends.
I’m not willing to admit my parents have influenced me too much. I am an independent thinker and proud of it. However, I will grudgingly acknowledge a serious aversion to big-butted men and women who brag that they cannot cook. If I see a politician with hands in his pockets he won’t get my vote. If a candidate is seen driving a brand-new car I am disgusted. Am I proud of those terrible and unfair biases? No. I am just honest about them, which I feel is the first step to Salvation.
I am willing to acknowledge my biases and I am working on being more broad-minded. I would go so far as to posit that if all of us would seriously consider the good and bad ways our parents influenced us, the world would be a better place. Here endeth the lesson. Amen.
