How It All Began

February 2, 2000

Being Poor

Being poor is not good, no matter how many maxims you hear about wealth just being a matter of attitude, but having been poor is useful. It makes you understand what you need for survival: food, shelter from extremes of weather, and basic clothing. It makes you enjoy running water and heat. Little by little your definition of need expands to include a car, indoor plumbing, rent, taxes, books, television, telephone, radio, and before you stop to think, VCR, washer, dryer, computer, fitness center membership, internet provider, on and on. When disaster strikes or you decide to simplify your life, if you have been poor, you know how to be poor again, without panic, and you know how to work your way back down that list.
Through a chain of unfortunate but perfectly logical circumstances we became poor for a time. Hungry poor, with 2 small children to feed. We lived in a house that cost us $1000.00 for 6 rooms and 60 acres of rattlesnake homeland, with soil so full of minerals that gardening was hopeless. I went to bed one night looking at an old copy of Better Homes and Gardens, with page after page of full color, beautiful food. All the food in the house consisted of peas I had canned, and flour. I picked those peas, on hands and knees, with a lot of other women, cleaning up a field after a machine picker had gone through. Pater Familias came in late, full of cheer. "Guess what! Homer gave us a ham!" Joy. "But", he went on, " it bounced off the tractor seat into the mud." This was special mud. I had measured it, twenty inches down before the stick met any suggestion of solid ground.
We soaked that ham. We scrubbed that ham. We tasted mud in every bite all the way down to the bone. A little money turned up and we kept on managing. Somehow there was a day I splurged and made Charlotte's Cheese Cake. It had been so long since we had eaten anything delicious, and we were so hungry, that we decided we would just taste it as it came out of the oven. We stood there and ate the whole thing just one more bite after just one more bite.
Charlotte was a friend of my mother, but she was also the one and only substitute teacher for our entire school, k-9. Never mind the tales you hear from today's subs. I've tried it, and the horror stories are all true. Not so for Charlotte. Instead of a day off, when we came in and saw her at the front desk, we knew we were in for a day of twice the usual work, no talking at all, and trouble if she found reason to speak to our parents. I don't think I ever reached the point of calling her by her first name.
If I ran the world, every school would have as many Charlottes as needed relative to its student population, people who know the school and its ways, people the children see around the building all the time, so that a day with a substitute would be a regular school day, not a riotous vacation that sets the learning back a week or two.
As for Charlotte's Cheese Cake, it's not even related to restaurant or Sara Lee cheese cake. It's light and luscious and while you are eating it you are not poor.