Inheritance

ESSAY Inheritance Leigh Ann Roman A recent public radio broadcast on children and poverty that singled out Appalachiabrought to light a hiddenbenefit to growing up in that region. After overcoming my initial frustration with my home again being stereotyped as impoverished, I continued to ponder one comment by the radio journalist. More and more in America, he said, there is a sense of "otherness" between the middle class and the poor. That statement made me more proud of my background than frustrated by others' perceptions of it. Although I grew up without any kind of material want, I never considered the poor as "others." I considered them my family and my neighbors. I grew up near Ashland, Kentucky, an industrial Ohio River valley town, where my father worked a white-collar job for a steel mill and my mother worked as a nurse. As part of a double-income family in the 1970s and 1980s, my sister and I had piano lessons, dance lessons, a finished basement to play in, family vactions. Eventually, we even got air-conditioning. But we also received something very precious from my parents that they did not know they were giving to us—a sense of being part of a whole community, notjust the TV version of a middle class, where everyone wore Izod shirts and swam at the country club. My parents gave this gift without thinking, simply telling the tales of their own humble childhoods—stories that always sounded more interesting to me than my life of indoor plumbing and toys to spare. They did something else, too. They took us to gatherings of family and friends, and we met people of means and people in need. As children, we couldn'tjudge themby their bankbooks,justby their faces. One of my uncles stands out. Shaggy hair, a drooping mustache and always a smile to light the lines of his face, my uncle was a neighbor as well as family, because he and his wife and daughter lived in the little back house behind the first house my parents had owned. My uncle had loads of time for children. Disabled by illness—first tuberculosis and then cancer—he was sick for most of the years I knew 41 him, but he never behaved that way. Unable to work much, he took care of his daughter, took his wife to work, and took care of his aging mother, my Mamaw. He was always laughing and joking, poking fun at himself. I never heard him complain about his situation and he outlived all doctors' expectations, dying just a few years ago. All my life, we went to visit my uncle and his family wherever they lived. They never had much, but I didn't notice at the time. Usually, they lived next door or near to Mamaw. His constant attention to her, I believe, enabled her to maintainher autonomy, and she lived well intoher late 90s. My uncle and his family were what the media call the Working Poor. But I learned early that poverty isn't always about lack of motivation or some other lack in a person. It can simplybe a fact of life. The facts of my uncle's life were earlypoverty and then later chronic disease and eventual disability. But the facts also were love, loyalty, and real family values. On the other end of the economic spectrum, my best friend in high school was the daughter of a self-made businessman. She lived in a house similar to my own modest brick home and never indicated by word, deed, or clothing choice that she was, in fact, wealthy. Instead, she chose her friends from people she could trust. They ranged from students who went to the vocational school, to members of Future Farmers of America, to skinny, bookish me. I am grateful now that I grew up in rural Kentucky so that the neighborhoods of my childhood included brick houses and trailers. I'm grateful that my school-bus route snaked past upscale homes and tiny, wooden houses, and that people who got on that bus could be my friends whether they wore the "right" clothes or not. In the more...