Blackberry picking and Caprese salad - a tale of two worlds

It was the summer of volunteering to teach English and the summer of transitions. I had just graduated from college and was volunteering in a number of places teaching English. I went once or twice a week to teach English to a big family from Burundi, another from Iraq, and to a community center to teach English to a group of Burmese/ Nepali children and their parents. We picked them up in vans, yelling "Namaste!" to the elderly grandparents and aunties, who stayed behind and wore big warm hats even in midwestern July. We exchanged hearty smiles, enthusiastic waves, and occasionally, the best chai of my life in crowded living rooms with plastic tablecloths. Occasionally I would drive some of the girls to my parents' house for blackberry picking, swimming, jumping on the trampoline and baking fun. I would return them to their homes with buckets of blackberries and full hearts all around. I always tried my best to communicate everything we'd be doing with their parents - I knew it had to feel like a risk to let some stranger take your children away in a car, but I know their children had to fill in a lot of the gaps afterwards. Somehow though, we managed to communicate with sincere glances, hand gestures, slow speaking, kind eyes.

After one such outing, I drove to a different neighborhood, an affluent one, to meet an old friend for a pool party. I peeled off my sweaty shorts and grimy blackberry-picking shirt to jump in the pool and then I realized no one else was swimming. I looked around in the August heat to see people wearing cocktail dresses, heels, make-up and masks. Not the kind of face coverings we've grew accustomed to in 2020, but the kind we all had before then. Polite small talk, tinkling, quiet laughs deployed at just the right moment for a line we'd all heard before. It was a potluck and there were 4 different Caprese salads - heirloom tomatoes, fresh mozzarella and basil. 

I'd felt this difference before - so many times before and after, but this particular moment stands out to me as the moment it felt like something broke. I still don't quite have the language for it, the best I can do is talk around it, saying "It was kind of like this, but that doesn't really explain it." What I can say for sure is that it was a conversion moment. Twelve years later, I still am not quite sure how or if I fit into the world of pool parties where no one swims and everyone brings the right on-trend dishes. But I also know that that divide needs to be bridged - because the people who are outsiders to those parties have so much to teach us.