I’ve never been able to pass for a native New Englander. Even though I had lived in my hometown from the age of three, by high school, my classmates were still referring to me as “the new kid”. So imagine my shock last year when I married into an Old Yankee family. Or, more to the point, imagine the family’s reaction to me.
Say what you will about the essential Old Yankee character; there are certain personality traits that you come to expect when dealing with actual Old Yankees. Chief among these are what can be charitably described as practicality and “thrift”. My wife comes from one of the most practical and “thrifty” of Old Yankee families. As soon as I was introduced to the family, my wife’s relatives started sizing me up and asking what I was good for. Never mind that my own family had been asking the same question for years; the in-laws meant the question in a practical and “thrifty” sense; what practical use could be made of me?
If my wife had married a lawyer, the family could have understood that; someone in the family might be sued someday and I might come in handy. Better yet, if I had been a plumber or a roofing contractor, I would have had instant and obvious worth. Unfortunately, as a school teacher and (even worse!) a writer, I pose a bit of a challenge to my wife’s extended networks of aunts, uncles and cousins. Even now, they still don’t know what to make of me.
Now, as I sit in a rented ballroom at the wedding reception for one of my wife’s cousins, I try not to sweat too much at the scrutiny of the family. In accordance with a longstanding and unspoken agreement, the groom and his new bride are off-limits to this examination, so as the next-most-recently married couple, my wife and I are subject to interrogation.
“So, is this your husband?” an aunt asks my wife. I start to introduce myself, but am quickly silenced by meaningful glances all around. By tradition, these questions can only be asked and answered in the third-person.
My wife answers that yes, this is him.
“And what does he do?”
My wife briefly considers telling the truth (“He watches a lot of tool shows on tv and falls asleep in the car”), but in the end, sticks with tradition by giving a strictly occupational answer. “He’s a teacher.”
“Hmph.”
Now, the sound “hmph” is an extremely versatile one with a wealth of meanings. With one emphasis it can express, “Wow! That is very impressive indeed!”, or “Golly, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that job before”, or “Gosh, I shouldn’t have eaten that third helping of tuna casserole”. This particular “hmph” is several degrees beyond any of those. It is a deeply suspicious “hmph”, the “hmph” of someone being exposed to something extremely questionable and possibly dangerous. This is the same “hmph” that anyone in my wife’s family makes when served sushi for the first time and assured that it will not kill them.
I am exposed to several more “hmph”s of this sort before finding a small amount of common ground with my new in-laws; we all really appreciate the open bar – they, because it suits their native “thriftiness” and me, because at this point, I really need a drink.
I am finally saved from further vicarious interrogation by the entrance of the bride and groom. Everyone is shown to their tables, the wedding party is toasted (given the open bar, “toasted” on several fronts) and the guests start digging into their salads. We have only taken a few bites when a piercing and profoundly disturbing noise starts up – something like a cross between a bus full of children on a field trip and a police raid of an illicit nightclub. The guests at the children’s tables have all been given packets of toys and activities to keep them occupied during the reception. This is a really good idea, but in a moment of patent insanity, someone has included plastic whistles in these packets. Within moments, life has gotten even more unpleasant.
We try to ignore the noise, but eventually the sheer unpleasantness of the situation forces me to do something about it. I call out to the first child I see running by with one of these whistles in his mouth. I offer to buy it for a dollar. Because he was born into this family and has “thrift” grafted onto his basic genetic structure, he sells me his whistle before he can think about it very much. I tell him that I will buy any more whistles from him for the same price. Much like a cartoon character, the pupils of his eyes are replaced with little dollar signs.
My new business partner spends the next hour or so mugging other children for their whistles and fencing them to me. The few children he can’t beg, borrow or steal whistles from are so busy hiding them from this kid that they can’t blow them. Other tables take up collections and send over donations to help me continue with my good work. The Head Table clinks their glasses for silence, then toasts me.
Several of my wife’s aunts and uncles look at me with new respect in their eyes and say “hmph”. It’s not a uniformly positive “hmph”, but it’s a good start.
