A day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
-- NOT--
Lesson # 14122
Well the weekend is over and overall I had a great time. Usually when I schedule a full weekend I don't get it all in or most, if not all of it gets canceled and I end up doing nothing. As I said before, I planed to go to an Australian rules football (Footie) match on Sunday morning. I had tried to go before but got lost on the way there and ended up giving up and heading home. This time I went to a friends house who lives near the field where the games were going to be played and went to the match with him. It was way out on the edge of the eastern suburbs.
We were only able to stay for the first match which ended up being a good game. They had games going all day both Saturday and Sunday but even though I would have liked to see more, especially to get a chance to see our own team play, I knew that I had filled up the weekend and wouldn't get another chance to go watch. We next had plans to view a historic house in Independence, one of the near by suburbs. Eric and I both enjoyed seeing the house, our tour guide was very good and the house was interesting.
After touring the house our guide showed a number of us around the grounds. While she was relaying several stories of the family that had owned the house for three generations she told us a story about a photograph showing the last member of the family and one of the servants who was in the background of the picture dancing around. In describing the servant she referred to him as a negro servant. Now I understand that for a woman her age, she looked to be in her late sixties, referring to African Americans as negros or colored would seem natural for her, but I know that all the others kind of flinched. I also know that everyone looked out of the corner of their eye at me to see what my reaction would be. I showed no reaction at all. I personally find the use of the words colored or negro to be quaint ( when said by the older generation) and at times appropriate. In the context that she used it I too would have said negro. I think that when you are talking about blacks in the context of how they lived and were treated in a past era you get a better feeling for the times by refering to them using the nom dejour. When you talk about life in the past people sometimes put themselves and people they know in the roles of those you are refering to, but the dynamics of interpersonal interaction were quite diffeent then and by using the language of the time, we can be jared out of our contimporary though patterns and made to think and hopefully put things more in context for those times.
The end result was that the tour in totality was quite good but truthfully other thatn Eric, I can't think of anyone else I know who would be interested in something like that. After the tour I took Eric back home and went back to my place to run some errands, call Ellen, my sister, and to have some down time. I wasn't able to get a hold of Ellen but finished everyting else.
