snoburbia, the blog

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Letter to the editor, The Washington Post:

Regarding the Dec. 7 front-page story “Obama Assembles an Ivy-Tinged League”…

… The article seemed to define elite to include the Ivy League schools, MIT, Stanford University, the University of Chicago and certain British institutions.

All of these schools undoubtedly qualify as “elite,” and I am sure they identify themselves that way. But it may have been a surprise to Secretary of State-designate Hillary Rodham Clinton (to say nothing of former secretary of state Madeleine Albright) to find that their alma mater, Wellesley College, did not qualify.

Helen M. Rosenthal
Kensington (Maryland)
The writer is a 1950 graduate of Wellesley College.

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the overclass has its own santa

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Why is it that Santa gives better Christmas presents to rich kids?

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my other car is a porsche

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“What kind of car is that?” I asked the handsome gray-haired man getting into the red convertible sports car next to me. “A Ferrari,” he said.

“Do you ever get to drive it, I mean really drive it?” I asked. “Not really; not in Bethesda,” he sighed. I said I would find this infinitely frustrating – having a powerful car and not being able to drive it fast, with speed cameras and traffic bearing down on you all over snoburbia. He agreed.

Then why own one, I thought to myself? I got my answer, when he volunteered, “Yeah, my wife has a Porsche, and my four adult children have our other cars, so I have to drive this one. Sometimes when I go up to Rhode Island, where my daughter is on her college field hockey team, I can drive it on back roads.”

Showing suitable awe, I waved goodbye and sped off in my nondescript minivan.

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special orders don't upset us

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Overheard on a sidewalk in snoburbia: A Filipino nanny to the children of two doctors was walking from the grocery store to her job.  She was carrying four heavy grocery bags, her arms pulled straight from the weight. Her cell phone rang, so she set the bags down and scrambled to answer it.

She soon had a pained look on her face.

Nanny: “I couldn’t find the raspberry vinaigrette. I’m so sorry!”

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don't cry for me appalachia

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When the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently announced the name of The Unhealthiest City in America, I cringed. It was my hometown in Appalachia, from which I moved when I left for college years ago. I felt saddened – but not entirely surprised. When I leave snoburbia, and go back home, I am always taken aback by the number of obese people, and especially by the many fat children and smokers.

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When I was growing up there, people were not fat. Kids played for hours outside every day. There were physically-demanding factory jobs for those high school graduates not going on to college. Those jobs are gone (and 35,000 people with them) since I moved away, and in their place are two hospitals that have tripled in size as their patients have, taking over more and more real estate.

The CDC’s finding shouldn’t tarnish a wonderful town, with its university and mini-snoburbia of its own, where residents send their kids to ballet and soccer and attend classical concerts at the excellent art museum. My hometown has a world-class, WPA-era park. Its popular running path is lined with towering oak trees, stone arches and bridges. And, as in any gym in the snoburbs, the big YMCA there has lines for its treadmills and stairmasters. The city now has a marathon.

But exercise is something mostly done by the educated upper classes. For most people there, exercise seems out of reach, and they go for the familiarity and ease of their cars and the heart-attack-on-a-biscuit drive-through joint.

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