Hard Times

Like most young people I grew up oblivious to the social and economic realities around me.  A few days ago I was reading the Boston Globe online about some young woman who had won a scholarship to college after having graduated with high honors from high school while all the while living with her mother on and off in a homeless shelter after the family was reduced to poverty when the father sickened and died leaving them nothing but medical bills.  I thought again how I knew nothing of poverty or want ever since the day I was born, something I finally came to understand when I met the man who was to become my husband.  I innocently asked him in the early days of our relationship where his family spent the summer to which he snorted and shouted with laughter:  "In the same little hole in the wall where I spent the rest of the year.  'Spent the summer'!  We were poor!"  In our family we never mentioned money, seemed to have lived in an economic vacuum, but in fact from mother's perspective ours was a riches to rags story, although most people might be inclined to say "load of crap."  My father died in a car accident when he was fifty leaving her with six children ages four to fourteen and fortunately an annuity that paid an annual income for the rest of her life.  We continued in the large house with four in service and two coming in by the day and so on and so forth until the Second World War by which time the staff decamped to better paying jobs in the war industry.  She made do with a former inmate out on parole--now there was a tough lady!--who left when it was discovered she was a little too light fingered.  And replaced by a very large African American lady whose consort was a handsome guy at least half her age, at best a son, who slept in her room and whom she passed off as "the Reverend."  They were immediately hired away by the local restaurant for its kitchen, and mother began to cook. The incidents were turned into marvelous comic pieces by her--never complain, never explain being her motto. If I had been observant I might have noticed that she also was setting the table and washing the dishes.  And soon she was making the beds and doing the laundry.  The cleaning lady had given her notice announcing that her son-in-law did not want her to work anymore.  He ran a filling station and I can still remember mother driving down there and crying out to him "How could you do this to me?" It was the closest she got to anguish. Then abruptly she chose to move us into a dramatically smaller house; the older kids were had more or less permanently left for the East or the army. I actually noticed this decline in standard and tried to help out a little.  She never ceased to be pleasant, WASP to the end.  I was not much help to her; as a teenager I was more interested in my story and it did not include housekeeping.  Then when I was twenty, and she sold that place and moved into a one bedroom apartment for god's sake, still smiling though, and had a carpenter wall off an alcove for a sofa bed room for me. She had been shedding furniture since our first move, ever accommodating to smaller digs, but now she decided to buy a new chest of drawers for my alcove as a place for my clothes.  "It will spruce up things," she explained cheerfully as we drove to the quality furniture store in Cedar Rapids.  On the way home she was silent and solemn until she burst into tears. "Three hundred fifty dollars!" she exclaimed.  "How could I?  What has become of me?"  She continued sobbing and I was terrified.  This was the first and last time I saw the real person coming through all at once. It wasn't the crying so much, but she had mentioned money.