Their Entitlement To America, Part Seven

“Homer’s Country”

By the time I was ready to go to high school, there weren’t many immigrants left in the neighborhood, except for a very few from Poland, but they were pretty well along in years. The passing years had whittled away at the more than century old German character of the neighborhood, and by the 1970s, finding locally produced German meats was impossible, as the slaughterhouses and butcher shops had all closed. The only “Limburger cheese” to be found was the processed kind in a jar, but it didn't taste (or smell) the same, something my grandmother would rant about on occasion. In “Polish Town” the situation was evolving in the same manner, but with the Polish immigrants having come to America a bit later, there were still a few of the actual immigrants living in the neighborhood. Over time and ever so gradually, the descendants of immigrants had been moving out of the neighborhood, and thus it would be with me, as my parents bought a home in another part of town. * It didn’t take Randy too long to return, however, as about three and a half years later I rented a small apartment on my own.

When I think about the conservative era that came over the country for so long, I can’t help thinking about a guy in the neighborhood of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant descent. His name was Homer. Now just about anyone named Homer has got to be conservative, and he certainly was. A friend of mine called some people “aginners.” (I guess that's how it should be spelled!) It was his own little term for people who just seemed so miserable that they wanted everyone else to be miserable too, so they were “agin” (against) everything. That was Homer. In all the years I knew him, I don’t believe I ever saw him smile even once. Life was serious business to Homer and so was money. For a number of years I was around him a good deal, and I guess he was in his 50s, but his very manner and the way he dressed made him seem much older. When I think about him now, I wonder if he ever really had a childhood, or at least a childhood that had some fun to it. If you told him you liked chocolate ice cream, he'd say he liked vanilla. If you said you liked vanilla, too, he was apt to say, "I don't even like ice cream!"

First, I have respect for those who have the courage to protest things, even when I don't agree with their point of view. That is part of what this country is about. Sometimes, staunch members of one party, or the other, only see the faults of the opposite political party, and not their own party's failings or complicity in things. Homer could have been the original "tea bagger." Understand, he worked hard at his own business (painting, not the Van Gogh kind), and while I'm sure he wasn't rich, he wasn't too concerned about where he'd get his next meal, either. Some people in the neighborhood called him a "skinflint;" that is, a miser. Homer was "agin" taxes of any kind, and he railed "agin" government at every level as "a bunch of people who waste my money." If there was one thing Homer hated, it was spending...I mean, wasting money, although I'm of the opinion that if he had tried unzipping his pocketbook a little, he might have actually enjoyed life much more. He could never give government credit for anything, and if the city patched a pothole, he'd say they didn't patch it right. And woe be to those who got any kind of government check. Whew! It didn't matter what the check was for, they were moochers. (My father suffered a fairly major back injury as a consequence of a Japanese artillery shell during World War Two and received a small partial disability check for the rest of his life, but I guess he was "My father the moocher.") Homer wasn't afraid to speak his mind, and he regularly attended neighborhood meetings where many a person of Polish or Ukrainian descent would be present. He had a great deep voice and if someone would ask if the city was going to put in new swings at the playground, he would stand up and proclaim that, "This wanting the government to do such things was brought to this country by those socialists from eastern Europe. That's just their mentality. When I was a kid, we tied our own swing over a tree. We didn't need the city to do it for us." (I told you I wondered if he had a fun childhood.) I always felt that if Homer had sung "This Land Is My Land," he would have really meant it! Times change, but Homer never kept up, nor even tried to do so.

* My mother’s family was from this neighborhood, but my father’s family was originally from another part of the state.

WORD HISTORY:
Again (Against)-This word has an unknown ancient history, but it goes back to Old Germanic "gagin," which had the notion of "straight, in a direct line opposite." The Germanic form gave Old Norse "gegn," Old High German "gegin." The then developing Germanic languages added a prefix, in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) it was "on," which gave Old English "ongean," later contracted to the "a" prefix, and modern German has "entgegen." The idea of "opposite" also gave English "against," which was simply "again" + "st," which came into broad usage in the 1300s. There seems to have always been two basic pronunciations of these words, although I'd say in America we pretty much have only "a-gen," but in Britain, besides that pronunciation, there is also "a-gane," with a long "a" sound. German "entgegen" (also with the long "a" sound) means "against," and German "gegen" means "against, toward, towards," Low German Saxon has "gägen" (against), Dutch has "jegens" (against, toward), Icelandic "gegn" (against), Danish and Swedish have "igen" (again) and Norwegian has "igjen" (again).