The Scarlet Letters of My Life

Webster’s Dictionary has a multitude of definitions on the subjects I write about; but what I’m writing about today is the quality of a person’s empirical character. I am a person watcher. I enjoy the comings and goings of people at the park when I take my daughter up to play. People, as a general rule, fascinate me. I am taken in by the vastness of variety of people around us each and every day.

When I was growing up in the -- pretty much -- middle class neighborhood of Arizona, there wasn’t such a thing as race, at least not that I was aware of. There were all types of people who lived in my neighborhood. The Catholic family that lived on the other corner who had the nine children, the Hispanic family whose mother kept all the furniture covered in plastic, and the regular run of the mill ‘white protestant groups,’ like my own.
I guess it wasn’t until my parents divorced that I realized that people could be segregated, not only by race, but by a standard of living. If you got divorced, you were branded with a scarlet letter -- and not only the people who got the divorce, but the children also. That was “not what normal families did” in my neighborhood, they didn’t get divorced. That was my first taste of prejudice, and my first insights into the character of people as a whole.
As I grew up, I watch ‘clicks’ form in school, just another form of prejudice. Jocks, Nerds, Cheerleaders, and the Dope Heads all worked within their own tiers of hierarchy. Being branded with a scarlet letter here just meant you didn’t belong to a certain group, but it was painful for those who didn’t fit into any group. I was the nerd who played tennis, so I had a cross platform of branding. And to think I waited until I was 30 to get a tattoo -- I had already been branded, they just weren’t noticeable.
To be continued…