Remembering in The Common Room

Mage B writes today about "87 Things Only Poor Kids Know." It's young adulthood that gave me the lessons of poverty:

It is 1962.

Husband is in a body cast. The accident is not his fault, but the big sugar company he was working for in Wyoming owns the doctor too and he came back to Texas with a "pulled muscle" so there is no compensation. I roll him out of bed every morning and a truck picks him up. At the Manpower Training Center, in Abilene, someone tips him out and he stands all day, being trained as a chef. We have not much hope of the chef thing, but they pay $30.00 every Friday and we live on that -- sorta.

AND MAY JOHN FfITGERALD kENNEDY BE FOREVER BLESSED BY WHATEVER BENEVOLENT POWER EXTANT - for manpower training was his..

We have three small children. I know about nuitrition. They eat Gerber's toddler and baby food so that I can be sure they are nourished.

I am hungry. Very hungry. For the last four days, I have eaten only boiled, reconstituted pinto beans, and few of those. Husband says he eats at school, but it can't be much because he is still losing weight.

We live in an old farm house just on the edge, (across the road) from Abilene Christian College Exxperimental Farm. The house has been divided into a duplex, but the other side has always been empty.

On either side of us are small farms. Their chickens run everywhere, especially loving to peck at the insects occupying the wood of our front porch, which is rotting and dangerous. The sound of their pecking wakes me every morning.

Chickens!

I'm so-o-o hungry and there is baby food for only one more day, which is not Friday. While the children nap, with tears of shame running down my face, I go outaide and take one - steal my neighbort's property.

Once I have that chicken, feeling its struggle and its beating heart and knowing right from wrong, I let the thing go. It is not really regard for the life of the bird - I loathe the silly thing - it is the stealing.

Tomorrow, I must go to my neighbor and beg it. I can wait until tomorrow.

Morning has come. Husband has gone off to the center. Someone knocks on my door. It is a pair of women from the church we attend. They have brought a food box. My house if very clean. My children are clean, neat and polite. Still, the women look like they are afraid to touch anything - like they are afraid of bugs getting on them or catching something. I longe to spit in their priggish faces, but, for the children, I smile and thank them. They can't get away fast enough. As they leave, I hear one of them say,

"I can't believe white people would live ike this."

I open the box. There are three packages of pinto beans, a package of white rice, a very old looking bag of flour and - under everything else, a blessed can of tuna fish.

I surprise Husband with hot rice with tuna broken up in it. There is enough for everyone - some mashed up for baby.

Husband surprises me. His cast has been taken off, the school has one more week and he has a job starting the very next day afterward.

It is a long climb up but the very next month I replace the flour and beans in the church food pantry. I add six cans of meat and leave a signed thank you note, but never set foot in the place again.

We had many struggles to arrive at a place where my house is paid and I probably will not live out my savings.

I won't say I remember every day, but just last grocery buying day, I discovered that I had two cans of something and caught myself tucking the second away under the futon in the sunroom..

I thought I had finally broken myself of squirreling away food..