I have found the word 'culture' has come up a great deal lately in newsprint and conversation. It has made me think about how culture has changed in the three-quarters of a century that I have been around to observe it.
One of my favorite culture stories happened when I was a newlywed, and facing the first Thanksgiving as the sole chef in my own kitchen. I turned to my friends for suggestions, and one of them said that you had to cut off a little bit of the tail end of the turkey in order to make a successfully succulent bird. When asked why, she found she did not know, so she spoke to her mother. She was told her mother had learned to do that from watching her mother. When that mother broached the issue with her mother on the phone, the other end of the line was filled with nothing but laughter. “Are you still doing that?” her mother asked when she had gotten her breath. “I only did that because we didn’t have enough money to buy a bigger roasting pan, and it was the only way I could get a turkey into the oven.” Needless to say, neither I nor my friend practiced poultry mutilation that year, and our fledgling holiday meals were just fine.
I think of living in Japan as a high school student in the fifties and finding all sorts of cultural differences. They went from the small --Japanese dogs that said wan-wan instead of bow-wow -- to the large-- the debunking of the idea that the emperor was a god. I remember puzzling the foreign residents of a Swiss pension in which my mother and I lived when I was ten, by wearing a homemade Indian headdress to the communal dining room on what was the American Thanksgiving. And long before the hamburger became an international staple, describing this American treat to a French resident, her only comment with an expression of disgust, "You pick it up with your hands?"
One of the advantages of moving around a great deal over the years was that my children learned early something about the pliability of culture. While the pom-pomettes were the be-all-end-all at one high school, the never-before-heard-of sport of water polo was the apex of teenage achievement at another. Neither one was wrong or right, simply different and, quite frankly, equally unimportant in the larger world.
What of the cultural belief that women could not be reliable voters, that African-Americans needed to be disenfranchised, or that homosexuals were criminals and should be penalized by law. These were cultural norms in their time that were soon overturned as society changed. Fear and resistance met all of these changes, but the world continued to turn on its axis, and the next generation was left wondering what all the fuss had been about.
But not all strongly held viewpoints are simply cultural, and one is left with the difficult individual task of differentiating between what is simply a current belief, as against an important individual ethical ethos. This is a tricky, difficult business and takes a great of introspection as the world around us changes. The older we get, the more changes we see so that the challenge of facing the changing world around us increases rather than diminishes with age. We may not be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound any more, but even if we are only rocking on our front porch, our thoughts and attitudes are still very much our own to weed and cultivate on an ongoing basis.