The White Boys Arriveth

Although I lost my mind and arranged for Everything to begin this week, just as we arrive home after two weeks on the road—the internet installation, the siding replacement, the new windows, the roof—at least I seem to have had the good sense not to have scheduled an interview. At least I hope I did not; if I did schedule one, too bad for me. As I sit here typing (“keyboarding,” my ass), the washing machine is going, the trash truck is clanging in the alley, and The White Boys are tearing the siding off our little house.
Now, it may be nothing to you to have a truckload of White Boys show up at your house on a summery morning, but it’s pretty odd here in West Texas, where pretty much every work crew is all Mexican. Not Hispanic—most people I know get their workers from the border (someone with a big job drives down and picks up a crew and puts them up for the duration). When we got estimates for all this work, I talked to a bunch of white men—they’re the ones who come out and make the deal, and then they send in a crew to do the work.
But not the guys we’re using. Rudy, one of the owners, explained about the crew that will do the metal roof, saying he was sending a crew of Mennonites because “Mexicans can’t do metal.”
Now, this sounds like some sort of racist generalization, coming from a white boy, but we’ve got to cut Rudy a LOT of slack:  he’s white, and he’s was raised Mennonite. But he was born in Mexico and didn’t come to the States until he started school, when he didn’t speak a word of English. He did, however, speak German as a second language (Spanish first). So he’s tri-lingual, and he got a degree in business and then married “a Mexican girl,” except she’s actually Hispanic (maybe we’re the only ones who make the distinction between nationality and ethnicity?) and was born in the States, in New Mexico. She is not Mennonite, so he left the church.
Whew.
So he’s got a crew of Mennonites who do the metal roofing. And we picked him to do the job because, it turns out, the other roofing companies sub-contract metal roofing out to him—apparently everyone agrees that Mexicans Don’t Do Metal. I don’t know.All I know is that there are three blond kids in our yard. The one I talked to seems as serious as a congressional representative, so that’s no fun for me. I wish Rudy were actually doing the work (owners never Do The Work) because, although he’s young and white, he’s great to talk to, and I could follow him around and ask nosy questions:  he likes to talk about being a former Mennonite (he left the church when he married outside it) and how things have changed. He talked about how the new generation doesn’t wear the butt ugly dresses and headscarves that identify the older women (and could they dress any less appealingly? You put me in a high-waisted dark floral print dress with a self-belt and matching head scarf, with lacy ankle socks and high-heeled sandals, and I’m going to hurt someone. Badly.).
Anyway. So there’s the sound of siding being peeled off the sides of the house, and it’s creepy, as if they’re skinning my house alive. I want to go out and tell it everything’s going to be OK, that they’re just going to give it a new suit to wear. But maybe it knows who they are and is terrified, thinking it’s giving up its nice, comfortable outfit for something straight out of Grapes of Wrath. (They weren’t Mennonites, but they could have played them on TV.)