The Joy of Not Knowing You Are Poor
One of the great things about being a kid is that for the first five or six years you are oblivious to your family's financial status. Your world is full of play and imagination and a great deal of joy can be found in simple things like laying in the grass making clover necklaces or catching a jar of lightning bugs on a summer night. You don't notice so much what you are wearing or how your hair looks because nothing is really real yet.
Rats- excuse me, the cat is making conversation with a black sock. Will return shortly.
Sorry for the delay - on with the story.
Growing up in a small town in North Carolina, money rarely crossed my mind. The middle child of three, both my parents worked - often shift work. If I had to place my family economically, I suppose it would have been somewhere between dirt poor and barely getting by. At no point were there ever extravagances, but we had a roof over our heads that changed often, the best homemade biscuits in the world on the table, and occasionally on a Saturday night my Dad would throw a bag of candy bars on the floor where we parked ourselves in front of a black and white television.
We had big Christmases, thanks to my Dad always taking on a second job, but the rest of the year after we'd broken all the toys and all the bicycles had flat tires, we were pretty much left to our imaginations to entertain ourselves. After I'd lost all the bullets to my Paladin gun and cut off all the hair on my Suzy Homemaker doll (yeah, we won't go there) I spent the days stockpiling sticky balls for slingshot fights, plotting against the neighborhood snitch, daring the rest of the kids to make daredevil dusk runs through the cemetery, picking junk out of the creeks, and begging every relative who was going anywhere to please, please, please take me with them! Fortunately I had a lot of cousins on my mother's side so I went on many trips to Myrtle Beach, White Lake, and the Cherokee mountains.
In nature, money doesn't matter, we're all the same swimming in the sea or walking in the woods.
I never knew air conditioning until long after I'd moved away from my hometown and ventured out into the workforce. We slept with windows open in the summer and huddled around floor furnaces in the winter feasting on snow cream. Yeah, you could eat the snow then- a large pan of snow, some sugar, condensed milk and grape soda, viola- the best snow cream ever.
Our refrigerator was stocked with the basics, - some condiments from which we often made mayonnaise sandwiches, mustard crackers and fried bologna sandwiches. I never knew there were other kinds of soup other than chicken noodle and tomato. There were also the staples of potted meat (surprisingly tasty), liver pudding (also known as the poor man's pate, also tasty) fatback, eggs and milk. Soda was a luxury item. Life was simple, but then school started.
That's truly where money first rears its ugly head. My best friend in the second grade lived in a house I was sure was Dreamland. She had a room of her own, a closet full of clothes, more than one pair of shoes, and there was always something yummy to eat there. They used dishes that weren't plastic and silverware that matched.
She was seven and didn't flaunt her wealth, but I envied her full box of crayons and the sparkly ceiling her dad had painted in her bedroom of a home they actually owned.
We were renters and moved at least every two years or when we found a larger home or the furnace went out in the old one, whichever came first. Even though I was also only seven, money started becoming very important to me. I noticed things, the nicer clothes, the better notebooks, the extra money for an ice cream sandwich at lunch. I began to feel the social lines being drawn.
What I didn't know then was that some forms of making money, such as being a mill worker, would be looked down upon. At the age of eight I had a burning desire to climb out of poverty, and so hit the streets selling handmade potholders door to door. I wasn't embarrassed by it, I just wanted to make money.
My Dad would bring home bags of sock loops discarded from the textile mills in Burlington and with a cheap metal loom from Woolworth's, I had a business! I'd spend an hour weaving the potholder and sell it for fifty cents, going door to door, only being more challenged by everyone who turned me down. I quickly learned that the rich were an easier target because you can't sell things to people who don't have money, so I mapped out my Saturday route along east Webb Avenue and Fountain Place, where the bulk of the "old money" was in my hometown at the time.
Alas, being only eight and without bicycle wheels, I soon exhausted my territory and ended up letting the rest of my stock go to relatives for half price. That small venture started something within me though and I learned about having to "ask" for what you want, probably the most valuable lesson I would carry forward in my life. You ring the bell, you "ask" someone to buy something, simple. You don't ring the bell, you have no shot of making a sale. I also learned to target a market. In hindsight, pretty profound lessons for an eight year old.
Inspired by my initial success, my next venture came in the way of a magazine ad about making hundreds (hundreds, mind you) of dollars selling flower seeds door to door. The ad featured a drawing of a little girl with a box of flower seeds in one hand and a fistful of cash in the other. I used the money from the potholder venture to buy my 100 packs of flower seeds and basically hit the same market. I was successful in selling almost all my seeds and then my Dad read me the small print on the flyer that came with my seeds, indicating that I had to send almost all of the money I'd made back to the flower seed company. It was something like an 80/20 split. Feeling horribly wronged, so began my quitting of jobs that pissed me off, and later that summer we had a large odd assortment of flowers scattered around our yard.
Lessons learned about work at the age of eight, if you have something to sell, you have to "ask" for the sale and also, it helps to know your market. Lastly, (and one we've all learned since) if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is!
Stay tuned for my next post - Ignorance Isn't Bliss- It's a Migraine!
Rats- excuse me, the cat is making conversation with a black sock. Will return shortly.
Sorry for the delay - on with the story.
Growing up in a small town in North Carolina, money rarely crossed my mind. The middle child of three, both my parents worked - often shift work. If I had to place my family economically, I suppose it would have been somewhere between dirt poor and barely getting by. At no point were there ever extravagances, but we had a roof over our heads that changed often, the best homemade biscuits in the world on the table, and occasionally on a Saturday night my Dad would throw a bag of candy bars on the floor where we parked ourselves in front of a black and white television.
We had big Christmases, thanks to my Dad always taking on a second job, but the rest of the year after we'd broken all the toys and all the bicycles had flat tires, we were pretty much left to our imaginations to entertain ourselves. After I'd lost all the bullets to my Paladin gun and cut off all the hair on my Suzy Homemaker doll (yeah, we won't go there) I spent the days stockpiling sticky balls for slingshot fights, plotting against the neighborhood snitch, daring the rest of the kids to make daredevil dusk runs through the cemetery, picking junk out of the creeks, and begging every relative who was going anywhere to please, please, please take me with them! Fortunately I had a lot of cousins on my mother's side so I went on many trips to Myrtle Beach, White Lake, and the Cherokee mountains.
In nature, money doesn't matter, we're all the same swimming in the sea or walking in the woods.
I never knew air conditioning until long after I'd moved away from my hometown and ventured out into the workforce. We slept with windows open in the summer and huddled around floor furnaces in the winter feasting on snow cream. Yeah, you could eat the snow then- a large pan of snow, some sugar, condensed milk and grape soda, viola- the best snow cream ever.
Our refrigerator was stocked with the basics, - some condiments from which we often made mayonnaise sandwiches, mustard crackers and fried bologna sandwiches. I never knew there were other kinds of soup other than chicken noodle and tomato. There were also the staples of potted meat (surprisingly tasty), liver pudding (also known as the poor man's pate, also tasty) fatback, eggs and milk. Soda was a luxury item. Life was simple, but then school started.
That's truly where money first rears its ugly head. My best friend in the second grade lived in a house I was sure was Dreamland. She had a room of her own, a closet full of clothes, more than one pair of shoes, and there was always something yummy to eat there. They used dishes that weren't plastic and silverware that matched.
She was seven and didn't flaunt her wealth, but I envied her full box of crayons and the sparkly ceiling her dad had painted in her bedroom of a home they actually owned.
We were renters and moved at least every two years or when we found a larger home or the furnace went out in the old one, whichever came first. Even though I was also only seven, money started becoming very important to me. I noticed things, the nicer clothes, the better notebooks, the extra money for an ice cream sandwich at lunch. I began to feel the social lines being drawn.
What I didn't know then was that some forms of making money, such as being a mill worker, would be looked down upon. At the age of eight I had a burning desire to climb out of poverty, and so hit the streets selling handmade potholders door to door. I wasn't embarrassed by it, I just wanted to make money.
My Dad would bring home bags of sock loops discarded from the textile mills in Burlington and with a cheap metal loom from Woolworth's, I had a business! I'd spend an hour weaving the potholder and sell it for fifty cents, going door to door, only being more challenged by everyone who turned me down. I quickly learned that the rich were an easier target because you can't sell things to people who don't have money, so I mapped out my Saturday route along east Webb Avenue and Fountain Place, where the bulk of the "old money" was in my hometown at the time.
Alas, being only eight and without bicycle wheels, I soon exhausted my territory and ended up letting the rest of my stock go to relatives for half price. That small venture started something within me though and I learned about having to "ask" for what you want, probably the most valuable lesson I would carry forward in my life. You ring the bell, you "ask" someone to buy something, simple. You don't ring the bell, you have no shot of making a sale. I also learned to target a market. In hindsight, pretty profound lessons for an eight year old.
Inspired by my initial success, my next venture came in the way of a magazine ad about making hundreds (hundreds, mind you) of dollars selling flower seeds door to door. The ad featured a drawing of a little girl with a box of flower seeds in one hand and a fistful of cash in the other. I used the money from the potholder venture to buy my 100 packs of flower seeds and basically hit the same market. I was successful in selling almost all my seeds and then my Dad read me the small print on the flyer that came with my seeds, indicating that I had to send almost all of the money I'd made back to the flower seed company. It was something like an 80/20 split. Feeling horribly wronged, so began my quitting of jobs that pissed me off, and later that summer we had a large odd assortment of flowers scattered around our yard.
Lessons learned about work at the age of eight, if you have something to sell, you have to "ask" for the sale and also, it helps to know your market. Lastly, (and one we've all learned since) if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is!
Stay tuned for my next post - Ignorance Isn't Bliss- It's a Migraine!
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