"Poor You"

"Wall Portraits"

I am surrounded by success. I look out my window and see large homes with manicured lawns and the multiple Lexus. Happy. Safe. But it is not enough. This is what everyone must choose, not the other. Bricked streets and large oaks and careful conversation. "Poor you," one of my pretty neighbors said in her wonderfully aristocratic Alabama accent to one of my life complaints. She meant it, too, glad that she had no such feelings of dismal ennui. She lives in a nice home and has three children and goes to the Y mid-morning to stay imperially slim. Her husband works at something to maintain it all, leaving mornings in expensive clothing, becoming more successful each year, less nervous, more assured. The children grow beautifully, straight and true, attending a private school that promotes academic and social success. Here the orthodontist and his wife, their children now both in good colleges. The radiologist and his second wife, a nurse, of course. The anesthesiologist and his lawyer wife who go to yoga and never seem to age. The lawyer who used to be in government and who is related to the ex-presidential candidate. A contractor with his beautiful wife who has never smiled. The corporate head who moves from company to company, always as CEO.

I've chosen this, of course, chosen to live in the middle of it, for it is much better than where I came from with the drug addicts and drug dealers and broken cars and noise. There is a pretty serenity here.

But I am not part of it. I am in it, but not of it. I don't have the resources, for one thing, nor the personality. But I've learned to smile and wave and not say much. No long conversations. Nothing but trouble there.

All this Victorian covering up and hiding away. Some days, like this morning, I want to crack the veneer and have my way. I want to tell their stories in pictures and in words. It won't happen.

They'd be alright if they didn't wish to smooth over everyone else's lives as well. But they do. They want the un-wealthy to live lives of poor imitation, imitation cars and imitation clothing and imitation manners, not quite up to standards but bowing to them, if you will.

The polls are open now, and I must do my civic duty. I will vote to keep things as they are. I don't want anyone messing up the neighborhood.

"Poor you," I keep hearing my lovely neighbor say, her face fallen in exaggerated sadness. "Poor you."