Reading TheraP's most interesting post, "how much is too much" the other day reminded me about something I've felt nearly all my life.  Rags to riches stories have never inspired me.  Sorry Horatio Alger, not a single one of your dime novels quickened my pulse or set me to resolutions about luck and pluck.  I never wanted to be rich...and I still don't.   This is lucky for me, as the middle is where I am and where I fit.  Granted, it's the upper end of the middle: thirty-six years in the same job and with an income in the high five figures, my rut is plush-lined.  But when I read TheraP's essay I felt sorry for those poor, poor, rich folks who couldn't live a satisfying life on five times my earnings.  How sad to be so empty and unimaginative.

I'm of immigrant stock (which means I don't like Lou Dobbs very much, either-he's probably rich so I doubly don't like him).  My grandparents came from Sweden-peasants to the core, and found work over here as maids, cooks, grain elevator operators, tailors, and the like.  The community centered around the church much of which was built by home-grown craftsmen-solidly working class.  I think the wealthiest member of the congregation was the superintendent of a Cemetery.  We called him Graveyard Peterson to separate him from all the other Petersons.  But he sat in the pew next to Magnuson the carpenter and Strandine the butcher, and the plumbers, factory workers and others who spent so much time in each other's company.  The talked funny.. The "j" was an impossibility for many of them.  (They handled Bj or Kj quite well, however).  

The worst any of them could do was put on the dog.  They greeted each other with incredible formality...the women of my grandmother's sewing circle greeted each other as Mrs. Hanson or Mrs. Anderson, though they had been friends and confidants for fifty years.  Their manners, their gravitas, their sense of themselves as serious people would put to shame those of whom TheraP wrote, though none of them had more than an eighth grade education.

So I came to love those workers and to identify with them-right through all those degrees I earned.  It would make me profoundly embarrassed when one of them assumed I had more wisdom and expertise because I was a college man.  In college, this attitude persisted, and to be one of Ivar's crew (Ivar Wistrom was the chief custodian at the school) carried as much prestige as being recognized by Beans Erickson, Dean of the Faculty.

Some graduate school experiences amplified my growing distaste for a certain kind of rich person.  A group from my symphony chorus was invited to entertain supporters of the symphony by singing a few madrigals at the home of one of them-who happened to be the wife of the President of a fairly important electric equipment manufacturer in Cleveland.  The group was polite, we sang well, but after our bit was over the woman of the house pulled me aside and offered to pay me if I would dress up as the Jolly Green Giant and entertain at her daughter's birthday party.  I politely declined, inwardly seething.  It wasn't being asked to dress up...it was her assumption that I wouldn't enjoy jollying her kids unless she paid me for it.  It reminded me that we were her house on suffrance...as must as we were "artists" we were also employees, and were not going to be allowed to forget it.

So I don't envy the rich, and heaven help me if I emulate them.  I don't need stuff to keep myself amused, or events to make me feel alive-my other middle class friends provide that just fine. One of the things I enjoy about Barack Obama is the way he so often starts his address "hello everybody".  My grandfather would have done that-but with a Swedish accent.  He doesn't seem to require sycophants to reassure him that he is someone, and he can say "I screwed up" without feeling that admission somehow diminishes his moral or social stature.  I don't expect he'll ever call an advisor turdblossom, even if the description would fit.

But I'm rambling, which means it is time to quit.  Thanks, Thera, for reminding me once again why Aristotle lauded the middling sort, from aMike, as middling as they get.