My Father Wore Two Pairs of Pants

"Americans unloading precious belongings to make ends meet." This article seems to be EVERYWHERE on the Internet. My doctor reminded me yesterday that many of today's youth (anyone under 40) think that The Great Depression is located somewhere in China or can be seen on the Science Channel.

I recently read an article on AOL that interviewed a couple in California who had both been employed by one of the larger mortgage/finance companies. They had both lost their jobs and were unsure of how they were going to make their monthly payments of $10,000.00 a month.

REALITY CHECK:

I was a single mother for twenty-four years and raised two children on $1,276.80 a month. We didn't have cable TV and they didn't wear tennis shoes that cost $140.00 (do the math--that's $70.00 a shoe!).

My son is now in college majoring in Philosophy and minoring in Business. My daughter has a two year old that sits on my lap every morning while we learn to read and sing nursery rhymes.

My father was born in 1919 and came from a family of thirteen. (Makes my dinky hurt just thinking about it.) He stole a tube of lipstick from his sister to give to his sweetheart when he was eleven. He trapped muskrat and sold them to buy shoes--and I've been told he butchered cats and sold them as chicken meat to make enough money to put gas in his brother's car so he could drive to Cleveland to go to work on the ore boats. He shoveled coal in the furnaces below deck. He knew firsthand the desperately cruel poverty of The Great Depression.

When I was ten and it was blistering cold, he came stumbling in from outside wearing two pairs of pants. I could see the blue checks peeking through the holes of the bark colored wool that was crusted with ice. When I finally summoned up the courage to ask him why he was wearing two pairs of pants, he quietly replied, "They have holes in different places."

I made muffins this morning--and a loaf of bread. I have lettuce and spring onions waiting for me in the garden in anticipation of a fine evening salad. And tonight, I will read The Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle and sleep beneath my past--a tattered quilt made from my father's pajamas and two pairs of pants.