I was a first-year in college on a trip back home with one of my new roommates’ families.
His mom cooked dinner, and it was an eye-opening experience.
As I told my mom afterward, famously, “Mom, it’s no fair. Rich people even have bigger chicken.”
The size of the chicken breasts we ate that night, needless to say, were ginormous. We were eating the Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds special.
It put into perspective for me what life was like on the other side of the tracks.
Actually, I’d come to that realization early in high school. I grew up in a trailer park, working class all the way, but in high school, taking the college prep curriculum, I was in classes with the kids from the suburbs of Waynesboro and Staunton.
I was invited over for a couple of birthday parties, and, well, these kids didn’t need to know that I lived in a trailer, I decided, in short order.
So I hid. Never had birthday parties, never had those kids over for anything, until senior year, when I blew my knee out playing football, and one of my college-prep friends offered to pick me up to take me to and from school.
I swore her to secrecy, and I think she kept up her end of the bargain.
Looking back on it, I’d not approach it the same way. Where I came from should have been a badge of honor. Yeah, I might live in a trailer park, yeah, my single mom might only make minimum wage, yeah, I might be on the free-lunch list, but I’m also the class salutatorian, one of the best high-school debaters in the state, a member of the only team at the school to qualify for a national tournament (the pop quiz team; we finished 33rd in the country my senior year).
Where I came from has a lot to do with where I am today, honestly. Part of it is how I dress. I had a single pair of jeans to get me through ninth and 10th grade; now I wear jeans almost exclusively. Going in the other direction, I probably want to eat out too much, because eating out as a kid was a once-every-six-months-or-so thing. I took my mom out to eat at a sitdown restaurant a couple of years ago, and it was weird, to say the least. I mean, they came and took our order and brought us drinks and refills and everything. Can you believe that?
One thing I say a lot, maybe too much, is that I didn’t go through what I went through as a kid to decide that I’m done trying to make it. You push yourself from nowhere to somewhere, and you get a certain amount of hubris about what you can do. I lived in a trailer park and made it through high school with a single pair of jeans; get out of my way, pretty much, because I’ve still got stuff to do.
Sometimes I wonder what I could have done in life if I hadn’t had to work so much harder than everybody else just to get back to even. Then it occurs to me that everything I have in the world, it’s because I earned it.
I still think about that rich people chicken. Looking back on it, I’m not sure it tasted all that different from my trailer-park chicken. It was bigger, though.
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