A Corner Turned

M and I took our 3 month old to the Comet Cafe for Sunday breakfast this morning. This is a westside cafe for hipsters in their 20's, bespectacled in black-rimmed vintage nerd glasses, blue jeans with chained wallets, sideburns, hoodies, bowling shoes, etc. Our child carrier was bright pink and I noticed that, upon our entrance, there was some reluctance. The female gaze--usually so taken by a newborn--here recoiled backward as if to say "get it out of here!"
We were escorted to a booth by a blackrimmed artista lesbian sort in a too tight vintage AC/DC shirt with too tight brown dickies pants. The fare looked good--lots of intriguing Vegan breakfast scrambles.

We were seated just behind the counter and, saddled up to it were an array of twenty-something hipsters, again bespectacled in the vintage black nerd glasses with tousled hair sipping their espresso shots in the grip of some deep existential reverie. I noticed the waist size on some of their blue jeans: 30, 32. Jesus, I thought, I was in my twenties the last time I fit into those kind of jeans. I was 36 when I started wearing a 36 waist. So long ago...

And, as I was reading the Riverwest Currents (the westside hipster art newspaper), I lingered on an advertisement for ___Flaherty, running for Alderman 3rd District. He was next to a thirty something man (his partner) and they each had their own dog. The caption was ___Flaherty and his partner____ on the banks of the Milwaukee river. It occurred to me, all of a sudden, that I had turned a certain corner in life for I saw what a different sort of a guy ___Flaherty was, how he couldn't possibly understand my needs and interests, how I could understand people with families not voting for him because of that.

I gazed around the establishment and back again at the advertisement. I recalled all the politically correct morality drilled into me at the University: the importance and primacy of gay rights, of feminism, of minorities. And here I was in my mid thirties with my daughter and lady, white, struggling to keep our heads afloat and I thought no, no this is not right. ____Flaherty does not understand my concerns and does not share my point of view. I suddenly saw the political morality of someone in my position: family values, safe neighborhoods, good schools, the inculcation of virtue.

I had turned the corner, and, in turning, I could look back and see where I had been and also where I was going from the coign of vantage given to a traveller for but a moment as they turned down a new street.