Alone Time
Sunday after Eric left to Reserve duty in Norfolk was a day spent alone. I always find it a little disconcerting since I normally spend all my waking hours providing care and attention to others, the typical working/mom thing...In order to keep from being bored or even worse, self-absorbed, I tend to keep focused on primarily printed media, since I am steadily growing to hate commercial television and to a lesser extent, the low-grade cable that we have. Commercial TV with the short, choppy programming, it's constant barrage of the incessant repetitive advertisements, precisely target-marketed to statistically significant groups shown to be watching a given channel at a given time, just serves to annoy me, make me feel inadequate, anxious and lonely. Being generally bookish, but more interested recently in topical, seasonal culture and trend analysis, I've been reading dated materials primarily such as the NY Times, Newsweek, Business Week and expensive, glossy magazines I find like Vogue or W.
However, I recently picked up a random book I took after Eric was done with it called "The Man in a Grey Flannel Suit" written by Sloan, published in 1955. An unusual book in that it was a purely conservative perspective of a young, 30-something striver of the post WWII era.
Written from the perspective of a family man, living in the golden age of American industry, living in a bland house, with three faceless kids, and a sweet generic wife in a suburb of NY in 1955. The story is about how (a) man with a wife and family to support in the required nuclear fashion of the time is forced through economic conditions to take risks with his comfortable employment, jockeying for position, back in the day when a house could be bought for $5,000 and a man made a good living at $7 - 9,000 a year, women, unless they were low class, generally did not work, and war babies were conceived all over the European and Pacific theaters of war.
Times were growing noticeably more complex, yet trades were still primarily learned first-hand from mentors and set up through from family connections, not through formal academic subspecialties. The main thing that captivated me about this book was how similar I felt to the man (in the suit) age 33, trying to make it in the ambiguous world of business. Making an effort to develop some kind of long-range strategy: pleasing ones boss, having to decide between being cunning, tactful or simply honest at work in the hopes of becoming noticed and one day successful.
It was a time when neighborhoods were full of young families who hope that their station in life is merely temporary, that the effort towards upward mobility must be strictly adhered to, yet before the term "yuppie" was even coined. When doctors commonly referred to "the tired 30's" when asked by their married patients about a diminishing sex drive, emotional distance from ones spouse or a lack of passion/enthusiasm due to overwork.
How little has changed in 50 years.
