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	Abundant Poverty by
Astrology, Tarot, and Self Improvement for the New Age.

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Abundant Poverty

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My mother was a child of the depression. Although her father was employed during those lean years and her mother was busy as the local seamstress, the pinch of shoes worn long past fitting and second-hand dresses, cut down to size, are bitter memories.

Even having a genuine leopard-skin coat, whittled down to her kindergarten frame, given to her mother by one of her wealthy patrons, is now merely a second hand fact. Reliving those days are still nothing but hand-me-down memories.

My father was a teenage boy during those years of generation-wide deprivation. Leaving school at the age of 13, after his father died from drinking kerosene, alone in a hotel room, he worked in the WPA program planting trees on public lands to help support his mom and sisters. A photo of him standing on a dusty Texas roadside, shovel in hand, gives the impression of a southern chain-gang.

My parents tried to teach us the relative insignificance of 'things". At the dinner table, we would hear admonitions to finish all our food because their were starving children in China. "So send them ours," was my brother's reply, parroted by his siblings.

Being a child of the post-war middle class, I had no needs, just wants. For example, I found it intolerable at the age of eight that a class-mate had kneesocks and ribbons to match every outfit and I did not. She was an only child and I would daydream about how wonderful it would be to have no one to share with.

I remember long icy silences between my parents, punctured by the word money. "We can't afford it" rankled me. My greatest burning desire was that $250 pony in the fat Sears catalog, way in the back in the farm implement section. I wanted to keep it in my backyard. To appease me, my dad would take me "horseback sitting" occasionally. He deemed it sitting, because I could seldom get the horse to do anything but run back to the barn, and stand there until my time was up.

Until I was a teenager, indifference to suffering held me, then I learned about need firsthand. Like too many suburbanites, we were living beyond our means, then when my father died the bills started rolling in and a brutal loss of living standard rolled in with them.

In the 1960's it was impossible for an under-educated woman to make a good living wage, so my mom made a not-so-good one. We moved seven times in three years, each time landing in a less desirable place than the one before. Our new relationships degenerated into a fellowship of miserably poor people, who loved company.

Poverty is a relative term. Falling from my perch in the suburbs, above the nameless poor, I was left with fury in my blood at the realization that I was now one of them. The invisible poor were now my neighbors, with broken cars up on cinder blocks in the yard. The trash piled up on porches were treasures rummaged from Wednesday night rubbish picking raids.

So distracted by this dull tapestry that now draped my teenage years, school became an unbearable distraction. I quit. I was very aware of what I wanted to escape from, with no idea what I wanted to run to, but I was sure a husband and a baby would cure my increasing discomfort.

I married a man who had quit life, as well as school. He turned to crime, thinking it was a road paved with quick silver. This road lead instead to the penitentiary, and he ended up literally breaking big rocks into little rocks.

I lived as a young mother raising a son alone, surviving however I could. I was sure being in love and being happy was all that mattered. However, without education or job skills, perspective employers didn't care how happy I was. As for my prince in prison blues, finding a boss that thinks being a colorful guy with a criminal record is cool, is difficult. Scarcity and want tracked us like hounds on a blood trail.

Poverty meant hating the television because, starting in May, the advertisements for amusement theme parks begin. Every year my children's eyes would eagerly absorb the images of hilarious good times and asked when we could go. I'd say, "We'll see", knowing full well there was no way. The same for their bids for swimming lessons, pool passes, summer camp, kids day at Chucky Cheese Pizza, the Ice Capades, the circus or even the newest toy in a McDonald's Happy Meal.

It meant, when the styles changed, ours didn't. Our jeans trumpet loudly that they came from the Salvation Army or garage sales, always out of style. My youngest son, at one point, had just one pair of shoes that a neighbor gave him, because her child would not wear them. He was happy. To him they were new.

Poverty meant, before my husband's pay check made it home on Friday, we both knew it would be gone by Wednesday, and that the threatening letters in the mailbox, trying to collect what we didn't have, would continue.

When the car needed tires because the threads showed, and the windshield had been cracked for a year, we put these needs off for another week to pay the doctor on last winters bill and get our son's asthma prescription. We knew the money can't possibly stretch far enough, but to say it out loud meant admitting a burden that would make it impossible to get out of bed tomorrow and go to work, again, accepting that next week would be just like the last.

Poverty is not like a temporary set back such as a lay-off that has some end in sight. It is knowing that no matter how hard and long you work this week, there still will not be enough money to even meet your families needs, let alone desires. It is knowing that next week, next month, next year, won't really be any better.

It is knowing that the house will go unpainted, again, this year and that people driving by will assume that the low-life living here just don't care what their house looks like, that we have some affinity for broken cars and windows. We care. Sometimes the caring became so acute that I got real drunk, to forget for just a few hours that I had become one of those people I once so despised. At times, I wanted to just run away, from that trailer, those kids and the memories of a better life.

There was a woman in church once, whose husband was laid off for some months. She gave a testimony about how trying it was not being able to buy her girls new underwear. I fought back bitterness as I thought about years of not buying new underwear. Then I battled feelings of regret, as I thought about all the people on earth who live and die without ever having underwear.

When you are poor, you are cold in the winter because fuel is so expensive and hot in the summer unless you escape to the mall's air-conditioning. The mall was much more an endurance test than a place to hang out. I stayed away if possible, struggling with wanting to buy my children new clothes, rather than shopping for the materials to make the old ones last longer.

Our family, for a long time was not even close, financially, to the middle class I grew up in, but we did have something my middle class home, with its tidy exterior never had. I had children who have never said, "Send them my food," when they heard about starving children in other parts of the world. They, instead, gave the pennies they'd been saving to share with the poor people. They didn't know we were poor.

Maybe we weren't. Perhaps we had something better than material abundance. We had learned that trappings don't bring joy, and excess does not guarantee happiness. That it is a joy to share what we do have and retain a heart to still wants to give more.

Education and time pulled us out of the economic slump of my family's early life, but the most valuable increase came with learning that money does not guarantee wealth. This came from loving and sharing and growing together.

The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words.
~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh ~
Born June 22, 1906

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Last updated January 31st, 2004

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