My parents raised us to be unique. We were the first ones on the block to drive a foreign car. When other families were tooling around in their American vehicles – the paneled station wagons - my father brought home an odd Swedish vehicle he called “The Volvo”.
We were Lutheran long before Garrison Keilor made it popular. We’d drive for miles and miles to find a Lutheran congregation when out of town on any given Sunday, and not any brand of Lutheranism could do, either. It had to be our own unique Lutheran brand, the rarest.
Even their educational choices were unique for us. When the neighborhood children carpooled to the private Montessori school, my brothers and I rode our bikes to the local recently integrated public school. We were proud to be a part of our community, to embrace each other’s uniqueness. Of course, once the uniqueness wore off, we went to private school. By then the neighborhood children were riding their banana seat bicycles to the public middle school, so my parents loaded us up in “The Volvo” and sought out the new Lutheran school which had opened.
Even things typically male or female were switched around in our house for uniqueness-sake. My brother got the braces, I got the college education. My brother played musical instruments and learned to paint. I ran cross country and track and had a job after school. My brother was the baker and played with the children. I mowed the lawn.
But with all of our need to seek out the different, we clung to our own idea of what was normal and what was not, pointing fingers at those deemed stranger than we were. We poked fun at people with strange dialects. We turned up our noses at those who ate canned vegetables, or ordered the meat cooked well-done. We rolled our collective eyes at the families whose diet was so weak the children required vitamins to nourish their bodies. We shook our heads at people who didn’t wear shoes. Whatever we did was the standard for what was right and necessary. If others didn’t share this understanding, they were obviously intellectually inferior.
I didn’t realize the extent to which these differing mores had affected my outlook until long after I was out of college. It wasn’t really until I’d been married a number of years, and began examining relationships of my peers, discovering how very different my view of the world had become. When I became an adult, I sought out those things “normal”. I married a man whose family owned the paneled station wagon, attended the closest church, and went to school at the “proper” high school. His sisters cooked, he worked, but they all went to college. They even – gasp – ate canned vegetables and went shoeless in the summertime.
Now, I find myself seeking out all things “normal” for my son. We own the updated version of a paneled station wagon called SUVs. We are members of a Methodist church. Our son attends the local public high school. He plays baseball, takes drum lessons, mows the lawn, and takes vitamins. Instead of seeking to be unique, I seek now to blend in. I even got my teeth straightened.
The difference, now, of course is that when I was growing up in this town, everyone looked just alike. We were all white. Our parents were white. Our teachers were white – until integration. Being unique meant standing out from the crowd, being different. Now, this town is a mix of a little bit of everything. Our neighbors cover every color in the rainbow. They’re Hispanic. They’re Asian. They were born in Ukraine, or Canada. Their ancestors came from Sweden and Germany, Kenya and Iran. To blend in with this crowd takes less effort than it took for my parents to stand out.
But if I were to go look at me now from back in time, I bet I’d still look pretty unique - or maybe just intellectually inferior.
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