As I have mentioned to friends and colleagues, I’m working on a book.
When asked what it’s about I’ve been saying “private education, in Buffalo specifically – the promises it makes and the mechanisms it employs to encourage class mobility or stasis. So far it’s part memoir, part creative non-fiction, part journalism.”

I often share bits of my writing on Facebook, but I am trying to migrate it all over here, so I’m going to try a bit of a hybrid approach for now and put new chunks I want to share in both places. This is what I shared yesterday:

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Once upon a time in Buffalo, during the wintry dusk of the syndication hours, “Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous” jumped out at me from the bushes surrounding the evening news.

I remember nothing about the show itself except Robin Leach’s nasal whine mingled with the smell of dinner, and the fact that it launched me into a short obsession with Stuff.

I have never been interested in Stuff, before or since. My childhood was full of Stuff – generational silver, a breakfront full of china I was told had value but didn’t actually understand on any practical or aesthetic level.

The value of the Stuff felt threatening to me: I would one day inherit the Stuff, I would need to be a worthy caretaker of the Stuff, I must become the kind of person who would use the Stuff. Naturally, I would fail at all these assignments.

I used to unwrap my grandmother’s teacups, pick a favorite, and wrap them back up again. Right now they are hanging in the built-in china cabinet in my midwestern dining room. They belong there. I am still afraid to use them.

But for a few weeks long ago, the game I played with a friend was “what would you buy if you had 4 million dollars?”

Why 4 million? I don’t know. Did 1-3 seem too precarious, while 4 felt secure somehow? Was 4 million dollars a REAL amount of money – an amount that would make you rich?

I now know people who’ve made more than $4 million from a single job. A number of houses owned by friends are surely worth more. I could google it, but I won’t. Back then, I had no understanding of how much money any of the adults around me had. We did not speak of it.

I only knew that $4 million seemed like Robin Leach money, and that if I had it I might conceivably spend it…in the Brand Names catalog.

Brand Names is a Buffalo thing, our Sears or Montgomery Ward. It’s where a local kid could learn what to want – for Christmas, or to secure our spots as members of the Rich & Famous class.

They had bikes, lawnmowers, watches, jewelry, and housewares, many options to a page, so the discerning consumer could tell the wheat from the chaff. I sat at my friend’s kitchen counter, poring through pages of china, practicing having taste, looking for the dish on which my gourmet meal would be served to me after I flew home from Switzerland on my private jet. I was very into Switzerland (I did not ski).

I had played with Barbies, but even then I never cared about the clothes or the accessories – I cared about the stories. I cared about the world-building, the power dynamics, the intrigue, the emotion. The Stuff helped set the scene, but it wasn’t the point. The beauty was elsewhere for me.

So why did I allow the drone of Robin Leach to seduce me into caring about china? I already had china. I didn’t wish I had someone else’s.

And I’m not certain my actual family ever bought anything from the Brand Names catalog, even once.

Why did I take that trip into the land of “what if I were rich”, and why was it so brief, and why did I leave? I wish I could say that my parents talked me out of it, or my friend did, or that it was boring. I’m sure all those things were true I don’t even remember watching Lifestyles…only that I was one day exquisitely aware that it existed, and within a month I almost never thought of it again.

I wish I knew why my fantasy of class trappings was so intense, specific, misguided, and short-lived.

And I wish I could say I was little when this happened – 7 or 8. But Wikipedia tells me Lifestyles debuted in syndication in 1984. This now feels like the last year of my childhood, the year before I “broke bad” and leapt like a fish out of my stream and into the larger ocean.

Was trying on the china, the jet, the Swiss chalet, my first audition for another life? A world beyond? A yacht, some rock, the Cuervo Gold, the fine Columbian, the champagne wishes and caviar dreams?

What did I want from my imagined “lifestyle”, since I didn’t actually want the stuff and didn’t plan to be rich or famous?

Maybe the appeal was just in the choosing. Maybe I was enraptured by the idea of wanting, getting, and leaving. Maybe the jets and the cars and the teacups held the idea of motion, escaping in a motorboat, the spray in my wake twinkling like stars long after I was gone.