I have never watched Desperate Housewives but I get a sense of what it is from the constant snippets that are used in the ads that promote it. If that show represents a “real” housewife, then I have been a fake most of my life. I am more European than American in some ways, so maybe it’s a 1st generation thing (i.e., parents born in Greece). In my childhood, I never felt totally accepted and one reason was that Greeks (at least then) are very open and have a reservoir of good will that does not always serve us well. Good will is sometimes misinterpreted as stupid.

Anyway, my close friends are 3 to 1 European born and one of the things I like about MyBloggers is that I have found American-born friends who are people I’d like to know better. My close American born friends in New York are also 1st generation. Down here, there are too many people with limited horizons and most are also too conservative in my view. I do know and like a few and invite them to my one big party a year. But when I talk to them, I have to watch what I say. And I have to hide my board with photos of all the right wing folk (Palin, Bachman, Boehner, Kanter, Ryan, and on and on) with pins stuck n their vital areas. It doesn’t actually change anything, but I feel so good doing it.

As for significant others, Jay was born in Oregon in 1910. You can’t get more American than that. His genetic background was English/Scotch/Irish/Anglo Saxon. He had a dog he named Scout and a cat he named Yellow Boy, and he walked 12 miles to a library when the weather was good and the librarian would let him take out more books than normally allowed. He worked all summer picking berries and bought boots with the money and loved that he could now walk in the snow without freezing his feet.

His father was a career army man and they moved around to various army posts. Periodically his father would try to make it in civilian life and they would homestead but the effort would fail and the dad would go back into the army.

Then his mother,tiring of the hard life, divorced his father, married a Mormon and moved to Salt Lake. Jay soon realized that Mormon domination was repressive and ran away at 14 and never looked back. He then self-educated, reading voraciously, started a musical trio, gigged around Los Angeles, joined the Navy in peacetime, went to radio school, came out, worked at Lockheed and left to join the Merchant Marine (to recover from a failed love affair).

While in the MM, he was in the Indian Ocean and intercepted Morse traffic that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. Later his ship was part of the convoys that went to Mermansk, one of the most dangerous routes in WWII. They were torpedoed and sunk and he spent 15 days in a lifeboat in the open sea. He said shipmates who could not tolerate the uncertainty would suicide by slipping over the side in the middle of the night. He was mustered out by the Defense Department to become one of their writers in technology and was sharing an office with other tech experts in the Empire State building when a plane crashed into it. He had observed the approach of the plane and knew it was going to hit, made notes and wrote a definitive report for the DD. He often lamented that his Chinese colleagues there went back to China and Tasmania and were never heard from again and he could not get in touch with them for fear of compromising them in the horrendous political climate of the time.

Then he went on to become a tech writer on aerospace subjects and worked on the electronics manual for the Atlas missile. All this from a formally uneducated boy from rural Oregon who never got to college.

Early on he became skeptical of religion because, using his perception, he did not like the way it made people behave, at least those he observed in his immediate rural environment. He was an atheist and greatly influenced my own development. When he was severely compromised and in the hospital with great memory loss, a priest walked into his room and he looked at him and slowly shook his head. I was so very impressed with the stability of his conviction that he held on to when so much else was lost. His gesture brought tears of gratitude to my eyes because it told me the man I knew was still in there.

Ed is one-half first generation. His mother was born here and his father overseas and he was mainly raised by his European-born grandmother in the Orthodox Jewish tradition. His father died young (there was a tragedy), and his mother had a debilitating illness. All these influences make him in many ways more European. So I tilt at that sometimes because traditional marriage in the European sense can be very confining to such as meself.

Ed got a scholarship to go to Kenyon in Ohio, got his degree and then went to medical school. He left to care for his sister because his mother had died and she was going to go into foster care. When she got old enough, she left to go to Occidental College in California and died in a car crash at 19. He has never recovered from that loss. He then went on to get a post-graduate degree at Boston University before entering the business world.

He spent his business life in medical advertising and, in retirement, started an ergonomics company that was doing well until George Bush struck down OSHA guidelines that mandated that businesses reduce conditions that caused injury. This made it difficult to sustain the business so he closed it down. He could have kept it going but decided he didn’t want to work that hard.

Neither Ed nor I observe religious ritual, although Ed defends staunchly the teachings of his youth. I tilt at him about this because my own experience tells me that all religions discriminate against women. His argument leans toward the “separate but equal” view of Orthodoxy. Oh, ha. In any case, I hold my own.

So I have these two sides of me … the early me who gravitated to a learned savant of great personal integrity, and grew up under a loving and benevolent eye, and the lost European side that re-emerged when I met Ed when in my 60s.

I think I know who I am now. Can one ever be sure?

xx, Teal