Day 5: Haves and Have Nots

I guess one of the questions is, If we’ve grown up in a world where everything is commodified, are our brains damaged in such a way we can not see from any other perspective?

How much do we get to experience in life that does not have some kind of price tag attached?

If you were very lucky, maybe in childhood your existence was such that you were not aware of the high cost of living. If you were not very lucky, your existence was mired in an understanding of the dichotomy between have and have nots from the earliest age.

I knew, I’d say from birth, that my life was rich with poverty. Living in an ancient rental, without a properly functioning furnace, my father heated our two story home with one, freestanding kerosene heater downstairs, in the center of the kitchen.

All winter, he would make frequent trips to the gas station nearby to fill up the kerosene tank, carrying it in the back of the old car we drove, lugging it into the house in the dark hours of the evening, after finishing his day of work as a middle school teacher.

My mom was both (if I’m being honest) emotionally unstable and highly creative, so while at times she worked at a variety of passion projects and interesting jobs, we lived off of one income, my father’s teacher’s salary. He was new to the field: the job was hard, and the pay was low. He took side jobs and played in a band on the weekends to try to make enough to live off of. Mostly, we were barely scraping by.

If you grow up in a home where poverty is endemic, you do not need to be told how much things cost, because the answer will almost always be “we don’t have the money for that.” Depending on where you live you will notice that many of your friends seem to be having a different experience, that their heat is controlled by a thermostat on the wall in the winter, and that their upstairs rooms are as warm as the downstairs.

You will notice their closets are filled with the types and amounts of clothes you do not, and probably never will have, and that their cars consistently both start, and run smoothly, and that a trip to the mechanic does not put their mother in a state of anxious tears.

You will find that your friends’ cupboards are filled with snacks and things that you wish your mother would buy. You will be thankful your mother is a good cook and can make real meals with not many ingredients. And you will notice that grocery shopping causes much deliberation and calculations in your tired parents while you and your sister roam around rascally in the grocery store, climbing on things you shouldn’t be climbing on and once causing a shopping cart to crash to the ground sideways and chip your sister’s tooth.

You will come to appreciate the rare restaurant meal and you will know eventually how much your parents jumped through hoops so that on Christmas morning miraculously you could feel as fortunate as your friends. You will learn later how much debt went onto credit cards for those luxuries and how after your parents divorced, one of them filed for bankruptcy and one of them consolidated their bills and paid them off for many years, well into your adulthood.

You will understand things like you will need to work if you want to buy a car when you’re 16 like your peers. And you will get a job at 13 and keep working straight through your teenage years even while you try to make grades, and play sports, and be involved in music, and hang out with your friends. You will learn early that working is not fun, but a necessity and you will become good at it and take pride in the longs hours you put into trying to succeed at everything. But you will be tired, and things will start to slip.

You will find that your friends that don’t have to work have more time for other things. And by the time to get to college you will be well on your way to burnout while others are just beginning their careers.

This will make the idea of quitting very attractive. And you may meet a passionate stranger in the bookstore where you work and very quickly drop out of school and head for the west coast.

This decision may lead to the beginning of the rest of your life. And while your friends are fininshing degrees and starting 401ks, you are watching sunrises over red rocks and sitting around campfires starting to understand what feels wrong with the world, and also what feels like you are part of something very ancient, made of magic, and discoverable by each and every one of us if only we were to just stop and LOOK.

You will flip pancakes over a fire, with a carboard spatula you cut out of cereal box you emptied in the last town over. And you will eat those pancakes while the breeze blows in off of some big storms at sea.

Eventually you will learn to grow vegetables, and garden, to forage carefully the foods that take very little tending at all by humans. And you will have a baby, and make things out of plants, and your baby will be born at home, at dawn, and you and your infant will wail in unison at the knowledge that life has shifted forward one loop in the chain which is the way of all things on earth.

And a decade will go by, and some change, and parts of life will dissolve and then build again, until one dark fall night you will be sitting on your couch thinking that the oil tank is yet unfilled in the basement of your home and like your parents befor you, it is not clear how such a necessity will get paid for, despite your hard work and noble attempts at basic survival for all the years you’ve been alive.

But you also know that you are much luckier than very many in the world in many material ways, and that clean water and dry shelter while once available to everyone for free are now held tightly under lock and key. And you find your self explaining to your own children how the sytem is not one that is fair or makes sense, and that it is imperative that we do everything in our power to change it.

And the fact that the smell of kerosene reminds you of home is not lost on you.

It mixes with your memories of childhood.

And feeds the rising flames within your heart.

Thank you for listening,

Love,

Natasha