AND OF BEING A GARDNER?
Last week Spotify brought my parents back to me through The Ray Conniff Singers’ We Wish you a Merry Christmas album. Dorothy Mae Thomas married Paul John Gardner on August 13, 1948. I came along on September 20, 1949 followed two years later by Peter and three years after that Pat. I am a proud member of the Gardner clan.
Today, Spotify delivers music to us through a fat hot dog shaped speaker we bought in Romania last spring. In 1962 delivery men hauled up our 60 foot drive-way a stereo of the sort pictured to the right. 50 years later – just before our mom entered a Memory Care facility – my brother Pat would pull this sucker down the drive-way, to be picked over by metal scavengers.
I accommodate many identities: partner to Rebecca, son to Dody & Paul, father to Ben, college professor, retiree, friend to Ed & Carol, Democrat, liberal, and American. In this blog, I want to reflect upon what it means to be a member of a family and how that might throw some light on what it means to be a member of a nation. I will begin with two stories.
NO SEATBELTS
In the summer of 1955 my mother’s mother was driving with five year old me in the front seat and my mother in the backseat with my two year old Peter. My grandmother’s car is not equipped with seat belts and so no one is secured in place when another car slams into the left side. The force of the collision ejected me out the windowless right passenger seat to a soft landing on a boulevard and Peter through the windowless back seat onto a hard landing on a curb. My grandmother and mother end up with minor injuries, as do I, while my brother Peter’s left leg will require several operations. He still walks with a limp today.
BUT THERE WERE OTHER KINDS OF BELTS
Throughout the 1950s & 1960s as the three Gardner boys were growing up our dad, on at least three occasions I can remember, threatened his belt as punishment for some wrong-doing. I once climbed up on a chest of drawers and pulled it down as I jumped off. Hearing the crash, dad ran into our room and once he saw we were alive and uninjured started his belt routine. This included: clenching his tongue, moving both hands to the belt buckle, and retracting the tip from the buckle. I don’t remember my dad ever pulling the loosened belt out from its loops. The belt-pause-routine likely saved our butts. But the fact that my dad – a gentle, kind and decent man – would threaten to use a belt suggests where American culture was at that moment, as the cartoon* makes clear.
TODAY’S GARDNER CLAN AND BELTS
No Gardner adult child has ever threatened to use a belt on their kids. Every Gardner adult child has developed the habit of strapping on a seat belt.
The Gardner label moves on but the content of it is changing all the time. What is the essence of being a member of the Dody Thomas and Paul Gardner clan? In The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, Kwame Anthony Appiah writes that we ought to think of identity as a verb and not a noun.
“Identity is an activity and not a thing. And its the nature of activities to bring change.” I like the idea of thinking of my Gardner identity as always evolving. This gives me ownership, to stamp my own imprint. So too for my brothers who add their own particularities to our clan identity. Time for one more Gardner story.
About thirty years ago Pat and I were playing golf at Davenport, Iowa’s Duck Creek public golf course. We teed off on the 1st hole that borders the 9th. I hit a tee shot that sliced into a group coming up the 9th fairway. Angry, one member of this group went up to my ball and hit it back to us.
This ticked me off and so I ran toward him. He reciprocated and advanced toward me. And he was bigger, I could see that the closer we got to each other. With golf clubs in hand – hadn’t I inherited my dad’s belt-pause? – when we were about 10 feet apart I felt my younger but much bigger brother Pat at my side and heard him to say to the other guy “if I was you, I would put the club down.”
Pat and I are different in so many ways, including our politics. He is red America and I am blue America. But on that golf course our Gardner identity trumped our political and other differences.
WHAT IS THE ESSENCE OF BEING AN AMERICAN?
What do these Gardner stories have to do with being an American? Like the changing content of the Gardner label, America moves on. Today, seat belts in America are mandatory and have become routine. We look back at the ‘no seatbelt age’ as if it was the Stone Age. Sadly, parents still beat their children, but the cartoon above makes most of us cringe. That’s because beating our children with a belt or any other weapon has became unacceptable.
Just as being a Gardner is a verb and not a noun, the same is true of being an American. Americans are always recreating their country. This dynamism, this evolving America, is the background for so many of America’s political brawls.
I just watched one of my favorite movies, Miracle, about the 1980 American Olympic Hockey Team’s victory over the Soviet Union’s team. The film demonstrates how America’s differences, for a moment, were overwhelmed by the emotional connection so many had to their country.
This brings me to my final point. There is a reservoir of good will among the members of the Gardner clan, despite our differences. We are committed to sharing our lives as Gardners.
I believe there is this same reservoir of good will among the America’s large, diverse and boisterous clan. America’s differences come from America’s guaranteed freedoms that encourage us to go our own ways. Just as Pat and Paul were encouraged by their parents to carve out their own lives.
Pat’s conservative-red-state-world-view irritates the hell out of me. I am sure Pat would say the same about my liberal-blue-state-ideas. The essence of the Gardner clan is not sameness, it is a commitment by its members to a name that signifies traditions, stories, and a common life together.
The essence of being an American is not the disagreements we have with our neighbors but, according to Anthony Appiah, it is “sharing the life of a modern state…”
TOGETHER
*A friend, Don Fisher, emailed this cartoon to friends with the comment that although he and his wife Laurie cringed at its meaning he decided to send it along anyway. I am thankful he did.
