I think I've mentioned the sort of families we came from, but I'd like to touch on it again before I continue, because if you can keep this in mind, the rest of the story will make a little more sense. Simply put, we were people of a middle class or even upper class background. Dennis's family had been quite wealthy, an old family with royaly in their ancestry. My father's family was also very well bred and rather privileged, of German (his mother's side) and English/Welsh stock. We ate formal dinners for holidays, and even the daily dinners were formal compared to other people and what we would find in Idaho. We were full of manners and habits, expectations and pride that can only be explained in this context. There's also a certain rudeness that comes with this background, a sense of entitlement, of condecension. If you're eating at a nice restaurant and make a horrific mess, or sing loudly, or behave as you wouldn't at home, what of it? Someone else will clean up the mess, you're paying handsomely to be there, and you'll probably not see them again anyway. We routinely did exactly this sort of thing.

In short, excepting Dennis's workers (he was a contractor) and the children I'd gone to school with, we had little to no experience with the working class, no sympathy with them or understanding of them. In our eyes, they were inferior and their way of life, slightly or outright disgusting. And now I can see just how inauspicious our move to Idaho really was; but then we were starry eyed and blissfully ignorant of the road ahead.