Folks Live in Two Different Worlds

I remember a time that I had gone to a Cub Scout meeting late on a Saturday afternoon. I was ten or eleven-years-old. That morning, as I would often do, I had tagged along with my electrician father on a job installing wiring at a new post office that was under construction. This particular job was a bit messier than most and we had to muck out a bunch of mud so that we could drive a copper grounding rod several feet into the ground.

As we got packed up to leave, my father and I made several valiant attempts to get our hands clean before I was dropped off at my Cub Scout meeting. While my hands were clean, my fingernails were just short of pristine and my Den Mother, the wife of a dentist, went into a rage about all the germs that were living under those dirty fingernails and that her husband could show you that if you put that under a microscope you could see all the microbes and how dangerous it was to have dirt under your fingernails.

I think most kids would have been embarrassed as she carried out this tongue lashing right in front of my fellow Cub Scouts. It didn’t bother me a bit because at that moment, for the first time, I realized that folks lived in two different worlds. One world where folks always had clean fingernails and lived in big houses and another, where folks worked hard, got paid less, and got their fingernails dirty.