Just for the blood-and-soil racist nitwits, you can make oblique and supposedly disparaging references to my Cherokee-and/or-African-American ancestor all you like, but the fact is, I am proud of her.
We don't know a whole lot about her, but she made hard choices and lived with them. She was upwardly mobile. She had smart kids, smart grandchildren, and I like to think subsequent generations weren't especially stupid, either. Heck, I even have IQ tests to support my opinion.
My ancestors look like America. They're from all over -- 19th-Century German farmers and schoolteachers (many of them Mennonites or Old Order Dunkards), 18th-Century Britons and Scots, and who knows what else. They were farmers and millers, teachers, college professors, heavy-equipment operators starting back when that meant enormous horses and an array of arcane equipment, sailors, carpenters, mechanics, fathers, mothers, homemakers and homebuilders. Just about all of them could cook.* There were a few drunks and even one lawyer; but that's not atypical, either.
I'm proud of them. They survived, even thrived. I'm not going to be cowed by any sneering weasel submitting a blog comment; I can outrun and outshoot most people, and I have backup.
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* Both of my parents were younger children of large families with a pronounced gender imbalance: Mom had four sisters and one brother, Dad had six brothers and three sisters (of whom he knew only one, twin girls having died in early childhood of probable TB). That meant they both had to learn a wide array of skills, and took for granted that any competent adult or diligent child could cook a meal, hammer a nail, sew on a button, hang a picture, sweep floors, wash dishes, paint walls, plant/weed/harvest a garden and so on. My sister and I weren't allowed to drive until we could check and change oil and coolant, change spark plugs after checking and setting the gaps, and demonstrate a basic understanding of how the car worked. These were simply "background skills."
BUILDING A 1:1 BALUN
4 years ago
3 comments:
Sounds as though you come from good stock.
Fuck the haters. (And I went to full moderation, probably for similar reasons.)
Oh, Geez, Robert - you had to point out that I missed a step in teaching our daughters to drive? I didn't teach them to gap their spark plugs, or even to replace them. I feel SO inadequate! I did teach them to check and change tires and change oil. I like your family's approach to life.
Cop Car, I learned to drive at least twenty years before your daughters and my sister was six years ahead of me. Her first car was a well-worn VW Beetle and mine was a $20 Ford Falcon with a three-on-the-tree transmission, since Dad also mandated that we had to learn how to drive a manual transmission. Plug gaps were a lot more critical before ignition and engine controls got super-smart. Dad never managed to give us his amazing 360-degree awareness, but we do okay, albeit with histories of getting hit by people who were paying less attention. (Dad never pointed it out, but riding with him growing up, he avoided a lot of wrecks of the exact kind she and I have had, mostly getting T-boned by people who overlook traffic lights and stop signs.)
Dad was always ready to put us to work on his car or ours, and as a result we have both changed points, distributor caps, alternators, fuel filters and a lot of the little conveniences in his big Chryslers (always bought a year or two used). It took a serious problem or major scheduled maintenance for him to take a car to the mechanic.
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