The area that I live in is very pleasant for the most part. It has some great advantages. There is a Wegmans less than ten minutes away. There is an ice rink close by. You don’t have to drive too far to get away from suburbia and enjoy some nature.
But the people. Oh sometimes the people are a bit much. The other day when I was at my favorite supermarket (Wegmans) a young mom was there with her baby. As I pushed my cart past (my high quality cart, because as I mentioned, this is Wegmans) the baby’s bottle flew into the isle and smacked against the concrete floor. The top cracked and started to leak milk.
Mom said, “Oh Gentry, you broke it.”
I grinned and kept walking. Who names their kid Gentry? The Websters definition of the word is literally— “Upper or ruling class.” I’m used to this kind of thing around here by now. In a county that was at one time one of the 50 richest in the US you see stuff like this. Babies wearing onesies with the New Yorker logo on the front. Teenagers barely out of Driver’s Ed behind the wheel of sixty thousand dollar cars bearing bumper stickers for social causes that they have zero real world connections to. So of course one is tone deafly named Gentry. I picture a future Gentry in his suit complete with super skinny suit pants finalizing a deal to buy two blocks of row homes in an economically depressed area. He’ll push out the current residents and turn around and sell the homes to hipsters who will open coffee shops, book stores that don’t sell books that anyone actually reads, and vape shops. When he closes the deal he’ll hang up the phone and do finger guns and say something like “You’ve been Gentrified!” It’ll be a whole thing. Poor kid never had a chance.
Leave a Reply