When we renovated our old century home, years ago, the walls had a few surprises for us. I’ve been thinking about them lately, for reasons I’ll get to.
In the kitchen, we opened a wall and found creeping jenny growing between the studs. Not dead, dried-up creeping jenny, mind you. This stuff was green and healthy, apparently quite content to live inside a wall.
I’ve always admired a plant with determination, but this seemed a bit much.
Of course, a healthy vine inside a wall tells you something about the wall. There had to be a way in. Light, moisture, and probably a draft or two were getting through somewhere. What looked like a perfectly ordinary, finished, painted wall wasn’t nearly as sound as it appeared.
Upstairs, another wall held a different surprise.
Tucked inside was a full page from an old newspaper, probably dating to the 1940s. I remember a headline something like “Lady Hunter Tames Tiger,” accompanied by a photograph of an attractive woman who looked as though she could have been a movie star.
She wasn’t. She was a hunter, and apparently a rather accomplished one.
I wish I could remember more of the article. I wonder now how much attention the writer gave to her accomplishments and how much to her appearance. The admiration was probably real, and so was the blind spot, and they sat side by side on the same page. Some things haven’t changed as much as we might like.
The newspaper had probably been stuffed into the wall to keep out drafts. Old houses are full of creative solutions like that. Some of them even work. Unfortunately, when we removed the page, it crumbled. Decades in the dark had left the paper so brittle that it couldn’t handle being handled.
All of this came back to me recently when I read a thread online where women were talking about something one of them called “the illusion of aspirational decency.”
As I understand it, the feeling is that many of us have gone through life believing that most people are fundamentally decent. We know there are exceptions, of course. But we assume that beneath our differences, most of us share some basic understanding of how human beings ought to treat one another.
Then we see people in interviews saying that immigrants who are deported to countries they’ve never been to “deserve whatever they get,” even when those immigrants had green cards and were working in the US legally. And we see four police officers tase a young deaf man repeatedly, even though he is not resisting them and tries to tell them “Can’t hear” in a voice that clearly sounds like someone who is deaf.
And we begin to wonder whether we knew our neighbors quite as well as we thought.
The troubling part isn’t that cruelty exists. That’s hardly news. It’s seeing how casually some people embrace it, and how readily others make excuses for it.
That’s what reminds me of those old walls. The gaps didn’t appear when we opened them. They’d been there for years. We just hadn’t looked. And the newspaper upstairs survived for decades, apparently intact, right up until the moment we handled it.
Sometimes our assumptions about people are like that. They hold together beautifully until circumstances put them to the test.
I don’t think the answer is to abandon our expectations of decency. If anything, we need to hold on to them more firmly. But we might need to stop confusing the decency we hope people possess with the decency they’re actually willing to practice.
The newspaper couldn’t be saved. All I have left is the memory of a woman, a tiger, and a headline I can’t quite recall.
But I remember the creeping jenny, too. The same gap that told us the wall wasn’t sound had also let something in, and despite the darkness and the less-than-ideal accommodations, something green was growing in there.
Maybe the point isn’t to pretend the walls are sound. Maybe it’s to be willing to open them, to see what’s really there, and then do the work that needs doing.
After all, a fresh coat of paint won’t fix what’s underneath.
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