Posted: Tue 27 May 2008 15:55 Post subject: Lost in the Middle by Malcolm Gladwell
Lost in the Middle by Malcolm Gladwell
from the book Half + Half:Writers on Growing Up Biracial& Bicultural
I will be finishing this in 2 or 3 takes.
I.FATHER p112
One summer Saturday, when I was growing up, my father piled my brothers and me into the family station wagon and took us to a barn raising. This was in rural southern Ontario, in the heart of Canada's old-order Mennonite country, where it was the custom when someone's barn burned down for friends and neighbors to put it back up. There were probably two hundred people there that day. They came from the surrounding farms in black horse-drawn buggies, the women in cheesecloth bonnets and gingham dresses, the men in white shirts and black pants. The women set up long picnic tables outside, and piled them high with bread and luncheon meat with pickles, and pies for dessert. The men swarmed over the skelton of the barn, those on the roof and on ladders against the walls hammering away in unison, everyone else forming a long human chain, passing plywood and roofing metal and nails hand to hand to hand from the bottom to the top. It was a marvel of improvisional coordination, a communitarian ballet of burly clean shaven Mennonite farmers in straw hats and loose cotton shirts, and in the midst of it all, in happy and oblivious contrast to everything around him, was my father - slender, bearded, and professorial, in the tie he never left the house without.
My father liked Mennonites. He would chat with the farmers who were our neighborhors all the time, talking of crops or the weather or cows or pigs or any of the topics that have always, weirdly, held his interest. The old-order Mennonites of me hometown are rather like the Amish of Lancaster Country in Pennsylvania. They live in the 19th century and keep to themselves. But they seemed to make an exception in this case. He would come home from the nearby college where he taught, or get up from working on some mathematical equation, and go outside and strike up a conversation with one of our black-suited neighbors - my father with his clipped English accent, the Mennonite in his guttural German dialect. I image that's how my father found out about the barn raising, since that's not something that a non-Mennonite would ever be invited to. My father probably asked, in his matter-of-fact way, and our neighbor probably felt compelled to respond. There is something in my father that does not recognize social barriers, and whatever that is makes him difficult to resist. I remember once when we were in Jamaica and my father took us for a long drive far into the mountains, were we all got out and had a a picnic by a mountain stream.
more 2 come
As we ate children from a nearby village began to gather around, fascinated by the sight of what was probably the first pale, bearded Englishman they had ever seen. Before long, my father had organized all of them, and us, into a game, striding about explaining all the rules, energetically supervising a few dozen squealing, laughing nine and ten and elevn year olds, fitting in as happily and easily as if he had been back home in the hills of England, or, for that matter, chatting to a Mennonite and hammering nails in a barn raising. When we left that day, piling exhaustedly into our rented Volkswagen, I remember that the children ran after us down the road, as if my father was the Pied Piper.
My father's name is Graham Gladwell - Graham Maurice Leslie Gladwell. He is a mathematician and a gardener and and art lover and an adventurer and, in the end, a little bit of a mystery. I often wonder about what it is about him that permits him to cross so many barriers, because it's not immediately obvious. He is not charismatic or charming, in the traditional sense of those words. He is friendly, but he's also an egghead, a little bit awkward sometimes, a little bit of a dreamer, a little more comfortable inside than outside his thoughts. Some people, I suppose, might try and break down barriers out of a kind of earnestness, a missionary zeal, but that doesn't quite describe him either. There is something very self conscious about the work of a missionary, and there is nothing self-conscious about my father. He does not bridge differences because he wants to bridge differences. He bridges them because he doesn't see differences at all: when he put on his tie and went to the barn raising, or played Pied Piper to the children on that Jamaican hilltop, he didn't feel out of place because I don't think it ever occurred to him that he should feel out of place. In the most rare and wonderful way, my father is blind, and when I finally understood this about him long after I had grown up, I think I finally understood how it was that my father came to marry my mother.
more 2 come
Last edited by gemini072 on Fri 06 Jun 2008 04:41; edited 4 times in total
My father met my mother in England in 1958. They were both students at University College in London. My father was very young. He had started college at the age of sixteen. My mother was 3 years older. She had taught for several years in her native Jamaica before traveling to Britain to begin university. They met in the university's Christian Union, and she was attracted to him because, despite his youth, she felt there was something serious about him, something profound. They did not date in college. They met each other in groups. Once my father invited my mother to coffee, mistaking her for her twin sister, who was also at University College.
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