First Lessons in Class and Wealth

Mom: rolled-up jeans, freckles. Her dad had a duck farm in NH, where she married Dad.

I was born in New Jersey, and for my first birthday, my parents bought a house. It was small, white, and part of a “development” — that is, it stood where farm fields had been, not long before, and the houses along the half dozen linked roads near it came in several varieties but were all built by the same developer and were sold to young families like ours. I bet each one had a mortgage, like my folks had.