Town and Gown

The middle western town in which I grew up had a state university as it major employer.  My mother was a faculty widow, her late husband, my father, having been chair of a major department of the School of Medicine.  She had an onlooking outsider's vivid concern for the workings of the university and taught me from an early age about the gradations in rank from instructor to dean to college president, the last of whom was a good friend who invited her to all the major receptions to which I was often dragooned to go as her escort; she would have been a great success at the court of Louis XIV.  She also reinforced constantly the notion of the superiority of academics who did not work for profit over those in the town like store owners who worked hard to build up their business.  That made me into the snob I am as one who shudders when at social gatherings I overhear my husband asking questions about salaries or sale prices of real estate.  My mother turned my older sister, on the other hand, into a fellow traveler as they used to call persons of leftist sympathies during the forties, who disdained the idea of profit taking and personal gain as opposed to the common good. She could not bear the endless discussions of rank and hierarchy that animate academic conversations. The town was divided by a river and a novelist might have used that as the great divide between those who worked for the university for relatively modest salaries and those who labored for profits.  The latter tended to live in much grander houses and a lot of them drove Buicks, although interestingly enough, everyone seemed to agree that driving a Cadillac was pretentious and bad taste.  Mother's elitist attitude toward academics and her disdain for moneymakers made deep impressions on my psyche, and I find it comic that here in Sarasota we are sometimes invited to gatherings of donors for the very splendid Asolo Repertory Theater to which we give our characteristically tiny mite and there I am chatting it up with a real estate developer or retired financial services figure, in sum, people who used to be "in business."  My instinct to consider their life work utterly pointless is amusingly blunted by the obvious mystification and disparagement which they visit upon me when learning that I am "a retired professor."  That revelation usually ends our attempts at conversation.  A quizzical look rearranges their features that often dissolves into active repugnance or at least that is my sense of it.  But underneath it all, is perhaps the sickly kid who could not catch a ball, never was chosen early one when teams were being formed at prep school.  A little learning is a dangerous thing, I guess, but on the other hand it certainly does a job on your perceptions.