Stuff White People Worry About

     My daughter introduced me to the website Stuff White People Like, now available as a book. I like this concept because it reminds me that my pre-occupations are of miniscule importance to most of the world. Similarly, my privileges, like education and great health care, are exactly that: privileges. Bear with me, I'm setting the context here for an illustrative anecdote about Susan Cheever, and her first husband, Rob Cowley, that's told from the Cowley perspective in Scott Donaldson's biography of Cheever. In this story, I recognize that same mysterious social insecurity that plagued my father.
     Reading the New York Times engagement announcement of Cheever and Cowley, they sound a matched pair: both were prep school and Ivy League graduates. One's father is described as the novelist and short story writer, the other as the historian and literary critic. Alas, at the wedding itself, "there was some tension between the two principal families...The Cowleys thought the wedding too expensive and ostentatious, while the Cheevers were determined to give their daughter the best sendoff they could afford."
Here are two families, one of New England stock, the other from Pennsylvania, who are indistinguishable in pedigree to, let's suppose, a Parsi, or a Tibetan. But they are worried about appearances. There is a certain irony here, as eventually, Rob Cowley married an heiress, Didi Lorillard, who maintains an etiquette Web site, newportmanners.com .
     At times in his life, my writer father agonized over begin excluded from the "inner circle," of those white males born to wealth and power. Maybe it isn't just white males that worry about this. Maybe some percentage of people from every race and creed are always striving to enter the inner sanctum of their world. I like my father better when he's worrying one of the criminals he wrote about.