I am about 90% truthful in representing my authentic self on the internet. That last 10% is a little more rough around the edges, a little more blue collar, and a bit more fundamentalist. But the reason why is real rebellion, so maybe it’s not inauthentic at all.
This story explains why I end up changing the tires a bit more frequently than I could. That might be a strange conclusion of a story, but it will hopefully make more sense by the end.
I grew up on the edge of an elitist empire - just outside the greater Boston metropolis. Within that area, lived most of my relatives. On my father’s side, my grandfather (Nonno) was a blue collar guy. He was a drill instructor in World War 2, and spent most of his career after the war welding and powder coating metal parts for $19 a week. In those days, that paltry sum was enough to pay for a two family house where his mother and sister lived on the first floor apartment, and he lived upstairs with his wife and three sons, all of whom were able to go to college and graduate school.
My dad was the youngest, and the least high achieving in terms of economic success - a fact for which I am eternally grateful, and will explain later on.
On my Mother’s side, I guess there are some good things to say about my grandfather (Grandpa). For one thing, he’s not my mother’s biological father. He adopted her after marrying my grandmother (we called her Beeba) - a single mom whose first husband had fallen in love and ran off with a neighbor shortly after moving from Kansas to Massachusetts. It had not been a terribly meaningful relationship, apparently they got married because it was “the thing to do”. Still, that scummy guy left her alone with a daughter, and I am glad that my Grandfather was willing to fill that role.
He was also a veteran of World War 2, but unlike my Nonno, who was 10 years older and stayed stateside training paratroopers, Grandpa went to the big show over in Europe - he had a German Luger and some bullet wounds to bring back as souvenirs. Grandpa was a talented artist - a commercial artist, who got paid for painting advertisements - but that pay was not great for making a living. He did some work for Gillette, and at one point did something for a James Bond movie; Mom had inherited a diecast Aston Martin that lived in the toybox from that gig.
The persona of the tortured artist haunted my mom’s childhood home; there was real stress revolving around my Grandpa’s disdain for the idea of getting a real job. Beeba ended up working 3rd shift at the hospital, a position that she held for many decades, and which presumably supplied the funds for the large ration of alcohol that they both consumed each week.
Typical for situations like this, my Mom became a “mom” to her half sister, eight years younger long before she met my dad. But all of this is second hand information to me, mostly from the complaints of my aunt, Grandpa’s biological daughter. I never knew Grandpa and Beeba together - I loved Beeba, sober since before I was born, she had been born again and regularly attended Church on TV. A quirky grandmother who was a bit of a hoarder, but always kind, and I begrudgingly tolerated the much less frequent trips to see Grandpa and Barbara.
Barbara Gray was a bonafide elite: here’s a abbreviated rundown from her Wikipedia page:
Barbara E. Gray (née Gantz; October 11, 1926 – March 28, 2014) was an American Democratic politician from Framingham, Massachusetts. She was first elected as a Republican, but switched parties in October 1990.
Gray was born in New York City on October 11, 1926. Her father, Gerald Gantz, was a Republican stockbroker and her mother, Marcella Gantz (née Beck) was described as a "closet Democrat". She was rebellious in high school until her parents enrolled her in a more rigorous private school.
After graduation, she attended Connecticut College where she met Richard Gray. She received her B.A. in 1948 and, after turning down Richard's first marriage proposal, traveled around Europe with a friend, where she attended the Institute of International Education at the University of Oxford. After she returned to Massachusetts, she agreed to marry Richard and they moved to Framingham. She later graduated from Western New England College with a Masters of Public Administration.
Gray worked in public relations for the American Association for the United Nations, as a columnist and editor for a newspaper in Hartford, Connecticut, and in advertising for Esquire.
Gray was first elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1972, She would serve on the Ways and Means committee from 1974 to 1992.
In 1990, she lost the Republican primary and so she switched to the Democratic Party and won the general election to hold her seat. She advocated for women's and children's rights, environmental protection, health and safety, and land use. She focused on legislation relating to mandatory seat-belt laws, river protection, and zoning. She supported gay rights and proposed legislation after Harvey Milk's 1978 assassination. In 2002, she published a memoir on her time in the legislature, titled A Woman's Ways & Means.
Gray was heavily involved in local politics outside her position in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. In the 1970s, she worked with other activists to create the Wayside Youth and Family Support Network, a regional social services agency, and in 1985, she helped found WIN Haven, the first shelter for abused women in the region. She also served on the Framingham Planning Board (which she was the first woman elected to), the Charter Commission, and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. She helped found the Massachusetts Caucus of Women Legislators as well as the Framingham chapter of the League of Women Voters.
It’s truly an impressive resume embracing all the current things.
There’s even a blurb that describes how she came to meet grandpa:
Gray and her husband divorced after thirty years of marriage and she met Norman E. Gardner, a graphic designer, while campaigning in Framingham. They married in August 1985 and were together until his death in 2004.Gray had four children: Suzanne, Linda, Nancy, and John. After retiring in 1996, she moved to Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
They met while she was campaigning . . . and still married to my grandmother. Apparently it was a known thing that he was running around with “Barbie” - but he wasn’t interested in her because she resembled her namesake doll. When I knew her, she was just about the wrinkliest person I’d ever seen, with terrible taste in lipstick - usually a pale shade of orange. You can see her picture from the Wikipedia page - it’s the best I’ve ever seen her look.
In Barbie, Grandpa found an entrance to the world in which a tortured artist truly belonged - finally he could rub shoulders with the sophisticated type of friends he deserved. This is the world in which I knew Grandpa.
He had a soft spot for me, because I was pretty good at drawing and painting - something that I picked up from Mom, who studied art in college, undoubtedly influenced by her step dad. He could really draw something good. When Beeba moved into my parents house for her final years, I remember finding some old Christmas cards he had painted and written as Santa for my mom and my aunt. It was a bit surprising, because it was something a good dad would do.
Most of my memories are of really tense dinners at their house, where Barbara would prepare her one dish - bœuf bourguignon, heavy on the French pronunciation, served well past the hour that normal kids eat dinner, with an apéritif of Grand Marnier. This eventually gave way to slightly less tense dinners at our house when I was older, but the most vivid recollections are of the really stressful vacations at their beach house on Cape Cod, which usually ended with my mom crying and us leaving early, one time during the night, after us kids had gone to bed.
Grandpa really liked arguing with Dad. He thought my dad was a fool, and probably thought Mom was a fool for marrying him. Why? Because my parents were Born-Again Christians. He was an elitist, an atheist, and a tortured genius. He had married a sophisticate who was on the cutting edge of every social issue that the globalists had on their long-term agenda. He must have assumed my Dad was the reason we were being raised in some kind of fundamentalist cult, since he had taught Mom all about art, which was his true religion. If you didn’t see what he could see in the smudges and drips of the modern masters, you clearly weren’t an enlightened soul.
The assumptions about our fundamentalism were false; my parents' beliefs and opinions on both art and morality had been shaped by a very intelligent Gordon Conwell Seminarian that they met in college, someone who introduced them to Francis Schaeffer, whose videos later became part of our homeschool curriculum. That young seminary grad would later go on to write a couple of very influential apologetics books, plant a successful church in a big liberal city, and bend the ears of elites who swam in much bigger ponds - though later critics would point out that the influence tended to go both ways.
But beyond that, Grandpa and Barbara were phonies. They were incredibly lame. They were self absorbed and pretentious. Other than my interest in drawing and painting, I don’t think they ever learned a single thing about me, or my brother or sister. Non-adults were non-persons, even after successfully exiting their mother’s wombs. Their life consisted of listening to NPR and drinking Vodka Tonics from about 9 am till midnight, while Grandpa would occasionally go into his studio to paint abstract modern art that no one ever bought for his Cape Cod gallery friends.
I remember having the same two conversations with Barbara about half a dozen times, one about how she got a seat belt law passed because it’s so important to wear a seatbelt, (she led us to believe this was a novel concept she had single handedly devised) and the other topic was about how she had a trust fund for her grandsons, (her real grandsons, Devon and Bryce), and that she had promised them each some odd thousands of dollars additionally if they promised not to drink alcohol before they turned 21. Grandpa had let us taste the spiked eggnog at Christmas, so we couldn’t say it was unfair.
As we got older, she would also try to ask us thought provoking questions about all the socially progressive issues she supported, trying to subvert whatever fundamentalist nonsense my parents were indoctrinating us with.
They loved the humble-brag “Boston Brahmin” aesthetic. They lived in a super old house with sticky doors and sloping floors, with a big barn in the back where they threw raging holiday parties. A farewell party “The famous barn” was mentioned in one article about B.G. 's departure from Massachusetts after Grandpa’s death. The house sold for around $600k in 2004, the Cape house was worth about three times more.
Their clothes were all the ugly stuff that people from New England love (I actually love it too) - everything was bland and plain, but high quality and expensive. A lot of L.L. Bean, worn moccasins and subtle plaid shirts with faded jeans, thick canvas raincoats and muddy duck boots, they loved to be seen walking around like people of the land, like a knock-off version of the British royal family. They pretended to care about the simple pleasures of nature and conservatism, but they would never go hunting, because guns are bad. They would birdwatch instead, carrying their binoculars and field guides in $140 canvas tote bags from their WGBH donations. They had pretentious cars; mostly Saabs and Volvo’s, and an old Mercedes-Benz; they loved to point out that it ran on Diesel - better for the environment.
There’s probably a lot more I could say, but the subject of cars brings us back to the beginning of this story and why my tires are always wearing out. I think it was the last time they came to our house around Christmas time, I might have been 17 or 18. After a dinner spent talking about nothing of eternal consequence, we sat around the living room passing out presents, and I opened the small box with my name on it. It was a tire pressure gauge from Brookstone. Grandpa said that it was very important to check the pressure on your tires and keep them filled up consistently.
It was the exact same gift and speech that I had received the year before, which is why I don’t care about my tire pressure to this day. If you care that little about the people you talk to, why should anyone care what you have to say?
I found out grandpa died by chance when I called mom one weekend during my first year away from home after Highschool. This was back when you had to be conscientious about using too many peak “minutes” on your cell phone. He had become such a small part of her life she didn’t even think it worth calling to let me know.
That might not be much of a story, but it’s a reminder that you can’t put a price on the grace of God, and you can’t buy your way into the Kingdom. My dad is an intelligent man. He’s got a masters of education from a good school, and he probably could have gone the academic administration route if he wanted to - He only started working for the public school system after I had graduated; the limited pension he receives for his 12 year tenure is enough to pay their mortgage here in Texas. Instead he decided to make peanuts working at Christian schools, and spent 25 years living in a parsonage pastoring a congregation of about 20 people because he was transformed by the Gospel, and he saw the world differently. I had some real resentment towards my Dad for his life choices. It was tough, we had to make sacrifices. They sent us to a school in a rich town without rich clothes. We never went to Disney World, takeout was a treat, and we rarely got to see new movies, unless it was a good double header at the Mendon Drive-In, with popcorn cooked at home.
His older brothers far surpassed him in material success. My oldest uncle helped start a giant company that does something to do with chemistry and technology. They lived in a real mansion, with a grand piano in the front parlor, and a big sweeping staircase that overlooked the marble floors of an entryway bigger than our whole first floor.
My other uncle was a Democrat Union President down in Hartford, Connecticut, where his wife was a public school teacher. Liberals in theory, but puritans in practice, like many elites. Their lifestyle was reminiscent of Grandpa and Barbara’s, but a bit more intellectual, a little more JFK and less Bernie Sanders. They moved to Boston when he retired, to be closer to their kids, and baseball games at Fenway Park.
Between the two brothers, they have four daughters. Two have PHD’s, one is a lesbian and a card-carrying communist, one is a she/her non-binary who still wears dresses and is married to a man (but she gets the virtue points), another is a high level executive for a healthcare company with a stay at home husband, the only one with kids, and she has some disturbing instagram pictures of her prepubescent son wearing dresses.
Despite these differences, it’s much easier to get along with Dad’s side of the family. Italians know how to have a good time. There’s food waiting for you the moment you walk through the door; the couches are actually comfortable, and our cousins were still real kids. Both uncles also had second homes on Cape Cod, and they were generous enough to allow us to stay there by ourselves. But the conversations stay above the waterline - not much politics, not much religion.
The seduction of elitism is powerful. Remember the young seminarian who helped my parents when they first got saved in college? They knew him as a long haired hippy who helped them get their little group affiliated with intervarsity. He’s now known as a bald guy who had some real success with a church plant in New York City. Since his passing, it’s rare to discuss his legacy without mentioning the compromises he made by aligning himself with guys like Francis Collins and David French. From what I hear, his kids still love the Lord. But the reason why I still serve the Lord is because my poor dad gave me a far richer life than what I’ve seen from the privileged and elite. I don’t know if my faith could have endured seeing him compromise to get ahead.
So I’m a simple guy, with simple beliefs. I think the world is 6,000 years old, marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think checking your tire pressure is a waste of time. If that makes you feel triggered, you can try to provoke me with arrogance and snobbery, but it won’t work - I’m immune.