Skip to main content

Revealing Our Strengths

As afraid as I am of spiders, my fear of real poverty tops it. I'm not talking about living on a budget, eating out less or skipping vacations several years in a row. I know how to do that. The kitchen in our first apartment was a renovated walk-in closet with a one-piece oven/sink/mini-fridge unit that looked like Lucile Ball could have used it in black and white. I drove a 1978 Datsun that was given to us as a gift—in 1985. The finish had worn off, and I had to have it tuned up once a month or so (remember when you had to do that to cars?) because it would stall every time I came to a stop. Try driving in New Jersey under those conditions. And we ate Meatless Mondays (and a few other days of the week) before Meatless Mondays were cool.

I have a particular memory—in the heat of the summer, we had one window air conditioner that we installed in the bedroom, and we would sit at the foot of the bed eating our spaghetti and watching our tiny black and white TV with the cat, Franklin Roosevelt, sitting beside us waiting to lick the sauce from the plates.

No, I'm afraid of being so poor I can't afford food at all, or shelter or transportation or shoes or health care. I was raised on stories of life during the Great Depression, and we had some pretty lean years of our own in the Wells house. My mother tried to keep the details of our strained finances between she and our father, but I remember one hard winter when she hung her head and said, "I just don't know if we're going to make it." That moment has stayed with me.

So, in an effort to assuage my own fear and to inspire the rest of you, here is today's column for Small Town Newspaper.

Comments

dive said…
A truly inspirational and uplifting piece, Robyn. Well written!
I hope you never have to go back to just barely scraping along (I've spent the last year out of work and doing just that and it's not the most fun in the world), but I do know that whatever the future holds for you, with your warm heart and your gift of words you have riches beyond money.
Sheesh, I sound like a Hallmark card. Slap me hard.

Popular posts from this blog

Cindy Loo Who In October

What is it with people and Cindy Loo Who? Of my last one hundred blog hits, forty have been direct visits from regular readers, and fifteen have been as a result of people searching for "Cindy Loo Who," the little pixie from Seuss's How The Grinch Stole Christmas . A couple of years ago, I posted an image of the original Seuss illustration as compared to the TV cartoon image, and for some reason, that post is bringing in the crowds, relatively. Maybe it's the weather. It isn't even November yet, and already we've had frost and have had to dust off our winter coats. When it gets cold like this, I start to think about Christmasy things like listening to Nat King Cole and decorating the tree. It's ironic because I am offended when retailers start pushing holiday stuff early, but I don't mind my own private celebrations. When my sister and I were much younger and still living with our parents, we would pick a day in July, close the curtains to darken the ...

The Ultimate Storyteller—in Life AND in Death

I wrote about The Autobiography of Mark Twain in yesterday's edition of Small Town Newspaper. You can read it here , if you want. This is the photograph I had in mind while I read Clemens' dictations. He really was a masterful storyteller, even when rambling on about the poorly designed door knobs in Florence or in describing the Countess Massiglia, who he described as a "pestiferous character." About her, he said, “She is excitable, malicious, malignant, vengeful, unforgiving, selfish, stingy, avaricious, coarse, vulgar, profane, obscene, a furious blusterer on the outside and at heart a coward.” And I laughed out loud.