One of you this week, emailed to point out I appeared to be more judgmental of Robert Frost's narrator in Mending Wall than of the narrator's neighbor. The reader's observation on this one allows me to understand I put the burden on the cultural misalignment on Frost over his neighbor. I feel okay with that because Frost wrote the account, and was the one who moved next to his neighbor rather than the other way around, and thereby imposes his outsider point of view on the situation.
And, yes, I agree with my reader's observation that I'm not aligned with the neighbor's narrow view of good fences making good neighbors, so I give that point to Frost.
And I want them both to elevate to a higher horizon: good neighbors make good neighbors.
I want them to feel the same way about the practice of mending the wall as other cultural traditions like going to Town Meeting, discussing the school budget together, and voting.
Further, as an outsider to the community of my rural-born neighbors, I feel a responsibility to accept some of the cultural practices that may make me uncomfortable.
When my son entered third grade here, I learned when his farm-reared classmates had their ninth birthdays, they received a .22 rifle as a right of passage. It wasn't the parents' rifle. It was the child's. Farming and farm tools are dangerous, and farmers have a higher occupational mortality rate than active-duty soldiers. I personally knew three good and experienced farmers who were killed by their farm implements. Frost wrote about that, too.
To my farmer neighbors, the rifle is another farm tool that their children need to learn to use and to learn the responsibility for it. Despite being an American under our Second Amendment, I had never handled a gun, much less owned one. Now realizing that my son was in and out of friend's homes and encountering unsecured firearms, I bought a rifle from my multi-generational Vermont neighbor, and my son and I learned how to use it, and use it safely, much as we did with extension ladders and power saws.
I didn't go so far as to give my son unsupervised use of it, although as a teenager reaching the culturally defined age for obtaining a license to drive a car, I gave him unsupervised access to automobiles -- arguably more dangerous than the rifle, but as a native Bostonian, I was freely allowed to drive unsupervised as a teenager on those especially dangerous streets. I looked young for my age, and I got stopped by a cop who shook his head with some astonishment that I was actually old enough to be legally driving.
My cultural upbringing made the risks seem very different when data might indicate otherwise. I had taught third grade for seven years in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nine-year-olds were allowed to walk themselves back and forth to school, as I had been as an urban nine-year-old. We crossed busy streets and needed to be alert to the many potential threats of urban life. And nine-year-olds owning guns was unheard of in urban Boston.
Allowing a nine-year-old to walk unsupervised in an urban neighborhood is mind boggling to my farmer neighbors. In Tokyo this year, walking home in the evening, I observed children younger than nine walking the streets unsupervised. In the Nordic countries, you may observe infants and toddlers left outside napping in strollers or baby carriages, even in mid-winter while their parents are shopping.
How many of you are now uncomfortable hearing what children are allowed in different cultures?
Cultural agreements create shortcuts for what's right and wrong. At what age should someone be allowed to drive a car unsupervised, to marry, to drop out of school?
What is safe? What makes a good neighbor?
More next week.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper