Colored TV and The Game of Village Idiots

People never quite know what others really assume about them, yet everyone has to guess this at one time or another. I have always guessed that others assume I'm not from money (which is true) and have never really been around people who are (which is not). From attending boarding school as a scholarship student and Columbia as one of the hundreds of students whose time there involves jobs serving potatoes in the dining hall and lining up books in proper order in the library, I've had my run-ins with the kind of people who subscribe to Robb Report.

My earliest inkling that there was a class above the one I belonged to, though, came not from school but from my own family. My father's side of the family (though not my mother's--not by a long shot) was always fairly well off (my father might have been so too had he not had found his metier in journalism). The Wilheims were not Bill Gates well off, but people who might have said they were "comfortable" and always appeared so.

When I was young, my grandmother, now of blessed memory, had a housekeeper named Venie. I recall very little about Venie save that she was black, rather heavy-set, and had apparently worked for my grandmother as far back as I, at such a young age, could imagine: my father told me that when he was little, Venie used to ask, by way of a joke, whether he wanted to see "Colored TV", and when he said "yes," would stand in front of the television set, blocking it with her ample girth. Even then, a time when people used the word "colored" to refer to people rather than laundry seemed impossibly far away in the past.

My grandmother saw herself as having an affectionate relationship with Venie and had given Venie various kinds of help over the years. I remember hearing once that, when the house Venie rented was going to be torn down and replaced with a large apartment complex, my grandmother had somehow secured for her first dibs on apartments in the new complex, for no more than she was already paying. Whether Venie held my grandmother in the same kind of affection, I cannot speculate. But to my young eyes, back then, it always seemed as though she did.

Despite her affections for Venie, or perhaps because of them, however, there were certain topics my grandmother did not discuss in front of her. Money was the chief of these subjects. My grandmother had the sense to know that Venie did not want to hear my grandmother whine about what she had just paid for her new Buick when Venie was never likely to own so nice,or so new, a vehicle. I was never explicitly told, by my grandmother or anyone else, not to discuss such things in Venie's presence. It was just sort of unspoken law, a kind of good manners my grandmother imparted by example rather than explicit instruction. In my naivete, I assumed that this basic standard of etiquette was known and respected by everyone who had a little bit of money.

Working in New York, though, I found pretty quickly that most of the upper middle class people I met hadn't had the advantage of a grandmother like mine. As a legal assistant, I had the dubious privilege of getting to hear attorneys gripe about "only" getting a $60,000 bonus, when my base salary was under $40,000. That colored a lot of my attitudes about the moneyed classes in New York.

Nonetheless, I like to think that my feelings about upper middle class people are based less on envy than on pure total incomprehension. After a while, I didn't envy the attorneys with the $60,000 bonuses, because I saw pretty keenly what kind of life they were forced to live in order to get them--a life I decided pretty quickly wasn't for me. But I never did understand how people making $300,000 a year--ten times the average per capita income in New York--could claim they were "just getting by".

I comprehended even less what I saw of the tastes, manners, and worries of people in this social class. Fretting over home equity was a case in point; if someone was wealthy enough to own rather than rent (a group I saw as privileged in New York), I didn't understand why he should care whether his home was worth two million or two million two.

But the thing I really, really never understood about the upper middle class was golf.

Now, I hate sports in general. But I always particularly took to my heart the old joke about golf being a game invented by village idiots in Scotland. I tend to think one needs to be a village idiot to find enjoyment in hitting a ball into a hole, over and over and over, for four hours.

I took a certain joy, then, in reading a story in today's New York Times about the decline in popularity golf is currently experiencing. Various theories for the decline were given, but the one I liked best was that the kind of men who, a couple generations ago, might have spent every Saturday and Sunday playing golf, can't do that any more. Nowadays, these men have to take the kids to soccer, or to run errands that their non-working wives (or Venies) would have done forty years ago. Today's corporate attorney can't spend his whole weekend on the golf course because his wife can't spare him.

Or, as I prefer to think, because the Venie of today gets a better salary than my grandmother's Venie used to, and he can't afford those $2,000 golf clubs so easily.