Stranger...

It says something that I have lost track of exactly how many months I have neglected this blog...you know, the one I was promising to update three times every week. So now I come skulking back, feeling entirely too contrite in what is meant to be my space. So what else is new?

I have been working for the last three or four months in the blaze of East Texas summer and the constant drenching sweat of manual labor under the sun. In the course of this work, I have met people virtually every day that I wanted to write about and then every night I have hunkered into sleep promising that tomorrow I will give all these characters their words. So many moments lost, but let us call this tomorrow shall we?

This week, we have been doing finish work on a monstrosity of a house for a retired couple. No grandkids that I know of and just the one surviving son. Which brings me to my story. Several weeks ago, we were working on the remodel of this couple's former home before they sell it, and I (being the nosy electrician that I am) was perusing the family photos still on their walls and was taken by the surprise of recognizing their daughter. In fact, I had danced with their daughter for nearly a decade, but had never known her last name and therefore had made no connection to these people who only had last names as far as I was concerned. But there she was. Pictures of her in every ballet costume I remembered and suddenly I could smell the leather of ballet slippers and hear the canned music that was, to me, so beautiful to dance to. For an hour, as I passed the pictures on each fetching trip for the master electricians, I struggled to remember her name and failed. It was a color? Something like a flower? Maybe Heather? It was all wrong. Finally a friend of her family arrived and my mother asked her in the course of conversation about this known, unknown daughter. The first thing we discovered was that her name was Brooke. The second thing we were told was that she was dead. Almost a decade ago. In a car crash. The finality of it brought an inwash of details -- the girl's easy smile, her heartbreaking grace on the dance floor -- that I had forgotten in trying to remember the obvious detail of her name. Seeking only to place her in a small part of my history, I had just learned to mourn her. Making this an even more awkward sensation was the fact that her death was so far in the past that even mentioning condolences could be offensive. But how sorry I was to find such tragedy in my half-remembered childhood memories.

Now, I could tell you many things about Brooke's parents, having made it a sort of study this last week as we have been working for them. I could tell you that they are of the particular brand of wealth that despises finality because they can afford to make options a way of life. I could tell you that they consider this 10,000 square foot "home" a rural cottage ("It's the garage that makes it look big"...and yes, that is a quote). I could spend an entire post telling you about the full day we spent digging a 500 foot ditch and pulling as many feet of beligerently heavy wire just so that they could turn a light on and off on the barn from the house. But I think more telling than any of this is the fact that I spent the majority of my childhood with their daughter and yet I must wonder if they even know who I am. It would be different if my appearance had changed significantly over the years (and I often wish that it had as going to Wal-Mart in this small town is a constant minefield of ancient acquaintances and family friends). It would also be excusable if ballet had not been such an intensive activity for those of us in Ms. Gobel's advanced class, but, as it was, it was a dominant feature of all of our lives. So, I labor on their shell of a house each day simply wondering if my face reminds them of something they should know and if they have any inkling of the freshly sad memories I have of their dead daughter.

It is a symptom of an overiding theme I have found in this town, but never seen so well put. In essence, it is the reality that there are people of consequence and then there are all the others that maintain those people of consequence.

I danced with a passion far outstripping my potential and calling the attention of the fiery Ms. Gobel in the best of ways. My frame was too large to ever break into the upper echelon of the dancing world, but in the microcosm of Nacogdoches, I became better than I was meant to be under the angry French woman's tutelage. Ms. Gobel began to point to me in class demonstrations as how things should be done, and I remember feeling such anticipation for the greater recognition she was preparing me for. But every recital, I would find myself once again in the unflattering background as I watched less dedicated and less talented girls dance the leads. It wasn't until my last year that I finally had acquired enough disillusionment to see the inexorable connection between the wealth of the parents and the role awarded to the girls. It was of little importance to any of them I'm sure, but the thinking probably went along the lines of: "Well, if I must sit through two hours of watching all this prancing around, then I want my daughter to be in front. Here's a donation Ms. Gobel." And every year, I was simply devastated to watch from the wings as the gangly daughters of doctors and lawyers destroyed roles that they could care less about. There was no suspense in their desires because to want, for them, was to have.

And I return nearly ten years later to find the same place that I left. My degrees and experience do nothing to open the locks that only wealth has the key for here. My smile is interpreted as fawning and my speech is seen as artifice ("Oh my, what big words!"). Certainly this is not an inviolable rule, but it is so pervasive as to warrant damnation. It is also so common as to encourage my current role of subversive in their midst. You see, while they are blinded by the status that is so easy for them to ignore, I am free to observe and record and amass my own wealth of characters and stories. It may be a distant and unlikely revenge, but oh how sweet to imagine any one of them picking up a novel and finding the unflattering portrayal of themselves within. Of course, I would be too idealistic if I allowed myself the daydream without admitting that I am sure they would be as blind to themselves in a story as they are to themselves in reality. It is not so easy for perception to change.