One of the stories I’ve been reading recently is set at a dinner party. It’s not exactly Mrs. Dalloway, but it is good, and I can relate to it better because it’s set in America, albeit 1950s America. There is something about the 1950 American dinner party that seems so remote to me; at first when I was reading the story, it was hard for me to identify with the kind of upper-class people being depicted in the story, the whole idea of “summering” away from home, and most of the things they were talking about. (There was a brief debate about literature, though, which was accessible for me.)

As I kept reading, though, I realized that, well, I used to be involved in this sort of thing. My paternal grandparents had a cottage on an island south of Mackinac Island in Lake Huron, and when I was younger I would go up, sometimes with Dad and sometimes with the entire family, and spend a weekend or a week up there, and while I was up there we usually did have dinner parties two or three times a week much like the parties being depicted in the story. It’s no wonder that I blocked out the memory of those dinner parties — they’re one of the main reasons I’ve been a teetotaler my entire life, and that island was where I was raped when I was thirteen — but even if I hadn’t been blocking out those memories, I guess they really wouldn’t have helped me that much because those dinner parties mean much different things to children than they do to adults. Apart from everyone (save my parents, thank Goddess) getting drunk, the main thing I remember about those parties is everyone talking about boring, boring stuff.

I hardly ever think of myself as belonging to the kind of social class that has those kinds of dinner parties. Although my family wasn’t without its financial troubles over the years, by and large we’ve been fairly well-off. At the private school they sent me to, though, our family was one of the poorest families there, and the students there loved to lord that fact over my head. (It wasn’t like I didn’t give them other things to pick on me for, believe me.) When I was a student at the University of Toledo and I visited other students’ homes and apartments, though, I was reminded that, yeah, my family wasn’t all that bad off financially. Still, we live in a part of town that isn’t exactly upper-class, and there are a lot of union families here, and I certainly identify more with them than I do the upper-class families I went to school with when I was younger. I guess I feel a kind of dysfunction when it comes to identifying my own social class, and stories like the one I’ve been reading make me think about this stuff a lot. I can’t really figure out how to clear up this mess in my mind, though.

I mean, I’ve kind of been a hermit for the past four years or so, although I’m getting better at that. I’m trying to figure out why these dinner parties I read about are drawing so much of my attention right now. How are they that different from the “pizza and video games” parties I went to in college, or the meetings at restaurants I’ve been doing lately? If anything, the parties I actually go to should be holding more of my attention, simply because I don’t have to worry about booze at them. Maybe it’s that discussion of literature in the story I’ve been reading; it would be nice to have someone with whom I could discuss literature and similar topics. I don’t see myself hosting, or going to, any “dinner parties” anytime soon, though.