The Older I Get the Poorer I Was as a Child

“That was often our only dinner,” this one fellow said after I had made my comment.

We were all of near the same age, and had all come from poor towns growing up.

In fact one of them had said that on a ranking of the towns in his state by income, his hometown had received a negative number, that is to say if you had added it – let’s say that it ranked as negative #5 – to the actual positive #5 town on the list, then they would both have ceased to exist, since they would have cancelled each other out.

Such was his statement at least, and since the math worked out the rest of us allowed that indeed that seemed fair to middling poor.

But no more than that, no more than middling poor.

But I was telling you about this other fellow and what he said after I had made my comment.

Seems first though that I should tell you what the fellow before me had said, as that prompted my comment.

This third fellow had said that they were so poor that when the Fourth of July came around he and all his brothers and sisters had to make do with a single match for entertainment. He hadn’t known there could be anything more to fireworks than that till he was near out of college.

He seemed to count this as a distinction of some sort, which surprised me.

I gave him a long admiring look, and said “I envy those who come from a background of privilege. You don’t perhaps know how lucky you were, which sadly is typical of the affluent.”

I considered some more.

“For our Fourth of July we would have thought we had died and gone to heaven if we had each had a match.” I sighed. “No, the best we could muster was to wad up small pieces of paper and rub them with shoe polish so that they looked like Black Cats and throw them at one another and shout 'bang' or perhaps 'pow.'"

With this you now have on record what I actually said, which is important to me as I am a stickler for the truth, let the chips fall where they may.

Now we finally get to what this other individual had to say in response, which is about where we started this learned discourse.

This other fellow upon hearing about the wads of paper, the shoe polish, and the pitiful attempts at mimicry of 'bang' and perhaps 'pow,' says, “seems like a waste of perfectly good paper. We would never have gotten away with that.” He held his palms up. “That was often our only dinner.”

I took this under consideration and gazed into the middle distance as if reflecting upon my own long ago.

“You mean to tell me that day in and day out your mother would feed you paper for dinner?”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” he said, laughing softly. “Not every day. Only on special days.” He mused and spoke softly as if to himself. “My goodness, paper for dinner every day? That would have been a treat.”

“We didn’t have such luxuries,” I returned, shaking my head at the very thought. “When we were through with our scraps of paper, we would smooth them out with an iron, and put them back in our shoes. That was often the only thing between our feet and the harshness of the earth.”

This prompted a query from another fellow still who said, “You had an iron?” He whistled admiringly. “I didn’t see an iron till I was in the army!”

But he had nothing on the fellow sitting next to him, who delivered a Broadway production of being stunned into silence for everyone to see whether they wanted to see it or not, but our luck did not hold in this regard, I mean as regards him staying silent stunned or not, for he then said, “You had shoes? I never thought I would meet someone who had shoes as a child.”

I said, “well, they were more like wads of leaves and patches of cardboard and fragments of asphalt shingles bound to our feet with vines or strands of barbed wire than what your luxury-ridden youth of today would call shoes. We considered ourselves lucky to have ‘em.”

“You say, ‘lucky,’ and I have to agree with you.” He spoke carefully the way people do when they want to get a point across. “You see, we didn’t have shoes proper…we had to paint our shoes on.”

This aroused a certain amount of comment, what you would call audience feedback in today’s parlance, as we all expressed uncertainty as to how a soul could actually paint his shoes on, we couldn’t quite picture it, did they do it every morning this painting? we wanted to know, or was it more like a once a week ritual using especially durable paint, and did they suffice with one coat or were two required, and was a coat of primer necessary beforehand, but he wouldn’t back down from it, and we had to take him at his word.

“Insects were mighty big around our parts,” said a fellow sitting with us, taking the conversation in another direction entirely, as though the topic had been weighing on him for some time but something had decided him, this very night, that here finally were like-minded people that he could trust with his innermost thoughts.

“Funny you should mention that,” I said. “I just was thinking last night how we had mosquitoes so big that they’d stand in line at the DMV to try to get a driver’s license. With personalized tags at that.” I let that sink in. "Bugs driving. Bugs. If that don't beat all." As though driving home the point I expanded on the topic as though asking them to consider the situation in all its implications, "flying insects."

This person I speak of eyed me narrowly, as if for some reason he wasn’t quite taking that in whole, but then sank back in his chair and said, “I can’t speak to these mosquitoes of yours who seem to be mightily advanced for their species, but I do know we had horrible caterpillar problems. Soon enough our city cousins wouldn’t be allowed to come visit anymore as too many of them had been carried away, never to be seen again.”

I thought about this. “Mighty big caterpillars.”

“Not so much their size. I don’t want you to let their size deceive you. They have that wiry strength which is so hard to judge. And their teeth?” A shadow fell across his face. “They can take a leg clean off…just like that!” He made a chopping motion with one palm into the other and we all jumped, frankly startled by the image.

Trying to rein in what was turning into a conversation lacking discipline and attention to factual matters despite my best efforts I said, "but what I really want to get across is how poor these mosquitoes were. They came from nothing." I let a beat tick by and did the gaze-into-the-distance business again. "Just like the rest of us in that town." 

“Well, we had shoes,” allowed another fellow entirely, returning to the prior topic, “but only one pair. We had to share it among the fourteen of us through the week. Now that’s a full half day for each of us, which I consider to be pretty generous considering how poor things were around our county when we were growing up.”

A shadow seemed to fall across his face too though, which was starting to be the theme of this conversation, this shadow-falling thing I mean.

Not what I would otherwise call an emotional man but it just goes to show that you never know, you never know, he then near sobbed as he said “it was awfully hard on my sister though! You see, she danced ballet. All the other little children had ballet slippers, you understand, and they looked so graceful and delicate, just floating along! Just floating along. And then when my sister comes across the stage in those big farmer’s clodhoppers, still caked with mud from the fields, clomp, clomp, clomp…” He brushed a tear away with the back of his hand, “it was enough to break your heart, I tell you!” He sobbed a bit and carried on in that manner for more than enough time and said, “break your heart! I can’t go on.”

We relayed that that it just fine with us that he not go on, as the scene he had painted was too heartbreaking – or too something – for the human mind to dwell upon at any length, and we would in fact prefer that he not go on and to some degree regretted that he had ever started going on, which didn’t necessarily stop him or the rest of us, as we talked on far into the night.