Money makes people weird. I have been poor in my life, really poor. When I was a kid, in first grade, for a year, we lived in a trailer park in Louisiana. I remember when we first went to look at the mobile home, Dad was working on the offshore rig so it was just Mom and Jolyon and me. We walked through it and the broker told my Mom, it was owned by a little old lady from Pasadena, who only drove it to church on Sundays. I did not know what the hell he was talking about. My parents bought it, and my brother and I were growing up by the bayou in Morgan City, and the water was beautiful with big, flowering lily pads by the shore, but we were not allowed to be by the water by ourselves. A neighbors pet, a little dog, had disappeared. There were perhaps large reptiles beneath the lily pads, maybe waiting to snatch unsuspecting small things from the shore. Maybe, maybe not. But with such high stakes, maybe maybe is enough. Next door to our trailer park, there was a brick home. A boy lived in that home, a boy about our age, I think his name was Travis, and he felt sorry for us because we were poor. After school Jolyon and I would sometimes go to his house, and he would pull out his coloring books in his big playroom in front of his big TV. He would flip through them, and he would give us the pages he didnt want, the pages he had no interest in, so that we would have at least some pages to color for ourselves. I have never been able to make peace with that. Even in first grade, this made me feel small. I can remember my brother (who was in Kindergarten at the time) asking for a particular page of Scooby Doo and Travis telling him no, because that was a good page. We didnt get the good pages. We only got what we got, and that was all that we would get, and we should be grateful for what we got. We did not get eaten by alligators in Morgan City, Louisiana. We threw punches and took punches in Baytown, Texas (Jolyon was MUCH better at that than me). Jolyon moved to Tennessee, I went back to where we were born in North Carolina. Neither of us are poor anymore, far from it. My little brother is a self-made millionaire, and I, well, as long as my investments remain diversified and conservative, money will not be an issue. But money makes people weird.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 08:47:58 +0000
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