Sally Thomas--I almost said "is a real person." What I mean is that she's not a name in a book, an alleged person who wrote some poems long ago and far away, but someone who lives in the same world I do.

When I read Sally's work, I always think, "She's the real thing, not just somebody I know that writes."

I guess it helps if you know the world depicted here, but, just as with John Betjeman's Extremely English work, I don't think it's necessary.

I was thinking just that. It is so evocative to me. It's basically my young life, except that women had not yet begun to talk about getting jobs, and our maid didn't make good biscuits and they usually were drinking something harder than tea. I think, though, that the picture is so complete that it works even if you weren't there.

I didn't, at first, think of Bridge as the card game. Before I got to the part about the cards, I had already started thinking about the morning being a bridge from one thing to another. This conversation really is the conversation that was the bridge from the old world to the new. I don't know if that was what Sally was thinking or not.

AMDG

The swinging door. It seems to me that almost everyone had a swinging door in the kitchen. We had one in the house where we raised our kids, but now we don't even have a kitchen door.

My mother had a bridge date for the day of her funeral. I'm sure she hated to cancel. I'm pretty sure all the ladies were at the funeral. My grandmother got very frustrated when she was in her 90s because it was increasingly difficult to find people who could still think clearly enough to play at her level. She said playing with people at her retirement home was like being nibbled to death my a duck. One of my daughters played for a while, but quit a long time ago. I never hear about it from young people or even people my age.

AMDG

Way back in the 1960s, when I was in college, I took some lessons in playing bridge at the YWCA. Never was very good at it, and also didn't care at all for the deadly serious atmosphere and the tension between partners.

Just found a 2006 article about trying to make the game appealing to younger folks by making it less complicated; here's how it starts:

Two years ago, Maureen Hiron -The Independent's bridge correspondent - was playing a weeknight club game with her expat friends in Marbella when there was a break in play. Table seven had been asked to speed up a little. The instruction, quite literally, fell on deaf ears. That night, table seven consisted of a 98-year-old golfing Canadian called Sidney Matthews; Edith Gross, 95, a former ballerina who once danced for Adolf Hitler; Lilian Matthews, a Spanish international bridge player, 90; and 90-year-old Lorenzo Runeberg, a Finnish international known as "Ruthless Runie". They had a combined age of 373.

For some people. Probably wouldn't have been for me.

Yes, that's where our swinging door was, too.

Goren had a TV program! "His television program, Championship Bridge with Charles Goren, was broadcast from 1959 to 1964 on the ABC network. It featured numerous appearances by top players and segments with celebrity guests such as Chico Marx, Alfred Drake, and Forest Evashevski, among others."

My wife is working on a 2000-piece jigsaw puzzle. I can't imagine...

Algebra vs. geometry--that's interesting. I'm pretty sure I would be as disastrously bad at bridge as I was at chess. I learned enough about chess at one time to play with my sons who were something like 10 and 12 years old, and they always wiped me out.

I'm the same way with spatial things. In general men tend to be better at that than women, but my wife is not just superior to me in that respect, we're not even in the same league. Like you, I can't see it until it's on paper. Can't see it *at all*, unless it's fairly simple and I try extra-hard. When we have work done on the house I try to just stay out of the way while she and the builder discuss it in great detail.

The child is in the way - of everyone - of those concerned about being entertained and of she who is concerned about serving.

Maclin, I missed this when you posted it -- even though I knew it was coming. Thank you!

I don't really remember my mother's being that much of a bridge player, but she did everything social back in the day, so I'm sure she did play some bridge. (It didn't occur to me to define what kind of "bridge" I meant!).

The genesis of the poem, though, really is in something she said to me a few years ago -- she had either just seen or read The Help and was talking to me about it, and said something about how she and her friends as young mothers in the early 1960s were trying to "make something of ourselves." Having a maid was kind of an indispensable part of that whole projected picture -- and she herself has also talked about just how hard those women worked, and for how little, and how ironic it was to be sitting there talking about getting a job like it was going to be your ticket to freedom.

Anyway one thought I had as she was telling me all this was, "Because you didn't believe that what you already were, ie my mother, was 'something'?" But I also began to imagine a child's overhearing her mother expressing these thoughts (which I certainly did not, that I can remember). And, yes, being the obstacle in everyone's way, though maybe she isn't entirely aware of this, or couldn't articulate it if she is.

My aunt once actually described going to the doctor because she just felt so tired, and the doctor told her -- not to get a little job, but to go shopping in Memphis -- "and leave that child home with the maid." A good bit of the dialogue was just handed right to me, though these women are a little more monstrous than I was ever conscious of women being when I was a child.

You're welcome.

I did try to avoid the biographical fallacy in thinking about the poem. :-) But clearly it couldn't have been written by anyone who didn't know the milieu. I wouldn't call the women monstrous but they are pretty self-centered.

The whole I-need-a-career-to-fulfill-me thing has always bothered me about feminism. Not that I can't understand the feeling, but, dang, if you see the world that way you're already in a pretty privileged position. Especially if you're able to assume that your job won't be working a cash register at WalMart. Also the implication that the husband is just out there having a great time while you're cooped up at home. Of course the husbands of these women are not doing hard labor.

For some reason it was the racial angle that struck me more than the gender one. S.E. is black, too, I bet.

Good to know. :-)

I didn't get the South Pacific connection, so I looked it up, and I guess it's the song "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught," which I have heard, though I haven't seen the play. I've always thought the song is wrong, or at best half-right. You really don't necessarily have to be carefully taught--hostility to other ethnic groups comes all too naturally to all too many people.

I know what you mean about the way "privilege" is being used now, but of course it's a real thing. I was amused recently to hear myself snarked at for being a privileged white guy--by another privileged white guy. Some privileged white guys seem to love that stuff.

By "they" I'm sure I mean "we."

This is why people like Jordan Peterson. He just won't play that game.

I see that another O'Connor's short story has become The Artificial Negro in many places.

AMDG

John Crowe Ransom suggested to O'Connor that she change the title when he first published it in 1955 in the Kenyon Review.

Agree. It's been a while since I've read the story, but I think the narrator's voice in it always uses "negro", unlike the old man and the boy. O'Connor must have thought the reader would pick up on that.

"Changing the title alone would have been ok. But you couldn't change what the old man says without wrecking the story."

Very true. But wouldn't changing the title somewhat lessen the impact of what he says, given the connection between the two?

"I think the narrator's voice in it always uses 'negro', unlike the old man and the boy."

I'm not sure that there's anywhere in her fiction where the narrative voice uses "the N word."

Caroline Gordon had told her that the omniscient third-person narrator must never speak in colloquialisms. But characters talk how they talk.

I just read Caroline Gordon's Collected Stories not long ago -- and now I wish I could have had her for a mentor.

~~~Re the title, I meant changing it to something else entirely, not just the one word. Ransom just said "We better not use this title."~~~

I see. Yes, that would make sense.

I've never read any of her fiction.

I'm a little sorry to say it but I think I'd get pretty tired of them. I will however insert here a recommendation for an Allen Tate novel, The Fathers. Not one of the greats but interesting.

I've never read All the King's Men. It happens to be sitting on top of a stack of books right now and I'll probably read it before too long.

The Fathers is also a Civil War novel. I'll venture a guess that it's more insightful than GWTW. Not at all romantic, though.

I have to admit it's not a subject that I've ever had all that much interest in, which I guess does not reflect well on my Southernness.