Let's say I was thirteen, so this event would have occurred on or our about 1952. I had brought my Raleigh 3-speed to the Cortelyou Road bicycle repair shop which was between East 13th and East 14th. The shop was run by a small, fair, heavily-accented German man who was perhaps 50 years old. He was assisted by his father, an older and smaller, wizened, bald man who must have been in his 80s. Mr. Hart and Mr. Hart.The older Mr. Hart, whom in my adolescent wisdom I thought of as a gnome, was working on my bike -- replacing an inner tube or adjusting the gears (which were fragile and frequently busted). A group of three middle-aged women gathered on the sidewalk in front of the shop, chatting. Mr. Hart the elder, the gnome, didn't like it. He looked up from his work and muttered to me, "A real hen-party." A few minutes later, he said, as if he owned the sidewalk, "they're still there. Hen party."
I had never heard the expression "hen party" but I knew it was a slur. A piece of anti-woman bigotry. I mean, what was the problem with three women talking on a public street?
But what disturbed me was that Mr. Hart took it for granted that I was on his side -- that we were linked by our maleness, our roosterness, against hens. I knew (in language that did not at that point exist), that I was being "co-opted." But although I was uneasy, I was able to offer only silent resistance. I failed. Later I learned to challenge such mini-bigotries but at this point in life I was much too young, too unsure.
Of all the events that occurred in 1952, this trivial encounter is one that clings and needs to be exorcised.
But it is such experiences that shape us. As David Copperfield says, "Trifles make the sum of life."
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