Ashes to Ashes: Vuppies

About 50 years ago, we began to come across neologisms that had been cobbled up to designate sociological categories. The beatniks came first, I think. Then hippies. Then yuppies. Then dinks (Double Income No Kids). After that, I lost track. But I have one that needs to be added to the list—yuppies. Very Unimportant Persons. This one forced itself on me, since it is the only category into which I can insinuate myself: an English teacher, retired, having spent his entire professional life at very small institutions of which no one has ever heard. I suppose nobbies would do as well (nobodies), but that has a certain ring to it which falsifies the matter. The nobs: That’s British provincial for posh people, and I can’t even scrape up any ancestors who would get me in that door. (I think there was one who saved Robert the Bruce from a bull, hence my middle name, Trumbull, from Turnbull. But that is as close as I can come to the nobs.)

But what do you do when you wake up one fine morning to the bald truth that vuppy is the slot for you? This is the stuff that sends people to their therapists with identity crises. All the little hooks and handles and toeholds and rungs to which you aspired in your youth and middle age as somehow securing you a “place” have come unscrewed, or collapsed altogether. No Rhodes Scholarships. No reverend professorships. No CEO or board chairmanships to fill in on the CV. No fellowships at All Souls. No address to make everyone genuflect. (This is very big in the Northeast, where I live: Jupiter Island, Lyford Cay, Point O’ Woods, the Upper East Side, North Haven, Cold Spring Harbor. Actually, I live—literally—on the wrong side of the tracks in my town.)

So, in my dotage I visit my doctor. Perhaps there is a euphoria pill that will furnish me with some sense of worth? A spa, possibly, where I can be Rolfed (there is such a thing, but I don’t know what it means), and made to feel fit and ready to fight ’em? Maybe a membership in a club that only those who know know about? (My trouble here is that I have a way of dropping out of clubs, feeling like the house oaf.) Whatever.

There is, Deo gratias, another aspect to the thing, however. My father was an ornithologist (no—this itself does not crown me with the dignity). But I grew up among Lapland longspurs, olive-sided flycatchers, prothonotary warblers, godwits, and saw-whet owls. Very interesting birds, these. If you were a member of the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club and could check one or more of these off from your bird-hike, you were, if not a Very Important Person, at least a Very Interesting Person (or had seen a Very Interesting Bird).

At the bottom of the bird list, however, we find the proletarian of proletarians (pops?): the English sparrow. Here’s a nothing bird if there ever was one. Scrapping and cheeping and quarreling away in every bush in every jerkwater town on the map. But this lowly bird has a Very Special Identity. It happens to be the bird singled out by the Most High in the course of His making a major point about Himself. No sparrow falls without your Heavenly Father noting it. Then I don’t have to be a semipalmated plover or a fairy wren in order to catch His glance? Apparently not.

The saints—those anonymous seventh-century Yorkshire monks, forsooth would insist that there is one cachet next to which all other cachets evaporate: to be known by God. There is our dignity.

Author

  • Tom Howard

    Tom Howard is retired from 40 years of teaching English in private schools, college, and seminary in England and America.

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