Making Cents

Like a lot of people my first experience with money was receiving a nominal weekly stipend in exchange for doing my chores.  This payment was called an 'Allowance' and with it, I'd go to Phil's - the local penny candy store - and blow it all on Jolly Ranchers and Bazooka Bubble Gum.  If I owned a piggy bank, I don't remember it and if I had one, I'd have busted it open long before it was full of change.

When, as a child, our family went to Cape Cod with friends, we spent a week in Craigville Beach.  I was given 20 dollars for the week.  My friend Liz and I immediately went to the Craigville General Store where I promptly spent every last cent on candy.  My more prudent sister chided me for squandering all my money on candy and for eating nearly all of it by the next day.

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As I grew older and finagled ways to earn a few bucks on my own - shoveling snow, mowing lawns and the occasional babysitting job - the money never accumulated.  I can't begin to tell you what I bought.  I probably ingested most of it, purchased a few cassette tapes, and a video cartridge or two for my Coleco Vision.

When I turned 16, I got a job - a real job complete with a paycheck and tax deductions - as a dishwasher at the now defunct Mansfield Depot Restaurant.  I worked a few shifts a week, usually going in sometime after school - around 3 or 4pm and leaving late, after the last dinner guests had departed, the pots had been scrubbed and the floor mopped.  I earned something less than $4/hr, but was nonetheless thrilled to see paychecks approaching $80.

My father made a deal with me that whatever money I saved for a car, he'd match.  I opened a savings account at the local bank in town and for the first time in my life began to set money aside for a major purchase.  My savings benefited from the free meals I got at the restaurant, though I am sure my dentist can attest to the fact that I was still devoting a consistent portion of my salary toward confectionery.

After about a year, I'd saved nearly $1200 and with my dad's matching funds, purchased a 1974 Volvo 164E.  I named him Ingmar Gustav Volvo Ring.  He was blue and the automatic transmission slipped when shifting from 1st to 2nd gear, making a loud clunking sound that could be felt along the floor boards.  The car was solid like a Volvo should be.  It must have weighed as much as a circus elephant and its rear wheel drive made for atrocious winter traction.  I loved it.  It was truly the first time I made a direct connection between work and meaningful compensation.  Alas, the money I made poured into the car in the form of gasoline and repairs.

(As an aside - a bit more on the fate of Gustav:  The car lasted about a year and half until one spring evening on the way back from a Red Sox game.  I was driving with three German foreign exchange students riding in the rear.  I was cajoled into racing my friend Charles back to Connecticut.  We sped along the Mass Pike, driving as stupidly and dangerously as only a 17 year old can.  I remember the Germans in the back seat chanting, "Do a hundred, do a hundred!"  And while I didn't quite reach those speeds I was going fast enough to enlarge what was already a small oil leak.  As the car slowly bled oil, I failed to notice the rising temperature gauge.  Finally devoid of any lubricant, the sizzling engine block revolted, seized, and threw a rod, busting a fist sized hole in the engine block.  Those Germans will never forget that ride.  We arranged for them to be driven home by my friend while I was relegated to calling my mom to pick me up in the dead of night in the middle of nowhere - ironically that middle of nowhere is mere minutes from where I now reside.  The car was towed to a garage and then to a family friend's house.  We had notions of replacing the engine, but like a lot of notions, it was a foolhardy one.  The car was abandoned and for all I know Gustav's skeleton is still sitting atop a hill off a hidden drive on Mt. Hope Rd. in Mansfield Center, Connecticut.)

When I drove trolley tours, both in Boston and Key West,  a lot of my income came in the form of cash tips.  This was true of my days as a waiter, too.  Walking away from a shift with a hundred dollars in my pocket made me feel like I was a high roller, but after a drink or two with colleagues, I was doing the grownup equivalent of blowing all my cash on candy.  But I had learned how to save a bit and when there was something I desired, I was diligent about setting aside the money to pay for it.  In 1993 when I wanted to finance a vacation to New Orleans for the NCAA Men's Basketball Final Four, I squirreled away $5 bills everyday until I had several hundred dollars to pay for the trip.  Over the years, I've plied the same tactic to pay for other cars, vacations, investments, gifts, a wedding, a honeymoon, and an adoption.  When I was working in the corporate world, a portion of my salary was automatically deducted and put into long term savings/retirement vehicles.  Increasingly my use of credit cards waned and the vast majority of my purchases were paid for with savings.

I've read a host of books on personal finance and savings - a salient point of several of them relied on putting aside 10% of gross income into compound interest bearing accounts.  I loved a book called the Wealthy Barber.  It spoke to me in the simplest of terms:  live frugally, live below your means, pay yourself first - every month!, spend money on expertise you don't possess, and stop trying the keep up with the Joneses.

These lessons weren't instilled in me, though surely they were told to me.  I try not to rue the wasted spending of my youth - indeed I got to experience a lot owing to a decided lack of frugality.  But as I grow older and know the value of a dollar -  how hard they are to both accrue and retain, I am resolved to teach these lessons to my son and to do so by example.  I might on occasion still let a few extra dollars slip out of my palms, but only after I've put my 10% into that compound interest bearing account.

And best of all, I can still chomp down a bag of candy like I could when I was eight years-old.

Absence

I am not often given to the highs and lows of outward emotion.  When I am happy you can see it in my eyes.  When I am sad you'll have to look more carefully to find it there, too.  I laugh heartily when amused, but I won't patronize a banal joke with more than a polite smile.  When I am sad, I'm simply quiet and taciturn.  Sometimes I don't realize the sadness that dwells inside of me and am genuinely surprised to feel the emotion.  Without warning it percolates in my chest, rises up through my throat to my mouth and causes my lips quiver ever so slightly.  Only occasionally do I feel tears well in my eyes, but even more rarely do they overflow their banks.

With the recent earthquake in Haiti and all the television coverage of it, I cannot help feeling beaten down with anguish and grief for all those that have lost so much and so many.  It's beyond incomprehensible and at the same time so unambiguous.  It hasn't helped my mood that it's January - the dead of winter .  It has seemed especially gray here the last couple of days.  The trees are bare and the air possesses the kind of damp chill that beckons one to bed, inviting sleep until spring.  And silly as it sounds - and is, the sports teams I root for have greatly faltered of late.  The Patriots were summarily dismissed from the NFL play-offs and the UConn Men's Basketball team has lost three painful games in a row.  It just adds to the malaise.

I know I have much to be grateful for - and I am, but there are times when just feeling happy doesn't scratch my emotional itch.  It's times like these I tend to miss my stillborn son, Leo, most acutely.  Had he lived he'd be about six months old now.  I can't help but wonder what our son Max would make of having a little brother.  How jealous would he be if he had to compete for our attention?  How different would the dynamics in our family be if Leo hadn't....  We had a friend visiting with her daughter this weekend and Max was being so sweet with her, sharing his toys and giving the little girl her bottle of milk when it fell to the floor.  "Here you go," he said in his sweet, lilting voice.  I couldn't help but imagine him with Leo and feel both Leo's presence and absence at the same time.

Most days, most weeks even, I do okay with the loss of Leo.  It is and I cannot change it.  I try to derive lessons from and use the experience to help me live a more meaningful and fulfilling life.  And I do.  Cosmically speaking, I feel that I haven't really lost Leo at all - that he's with me, with us everyday.  But he's not tangible.  The pictures we have of him are the way he'll always look.  We have lost something that we can never replace.  What's often worse is that I don't even know exactly what it is we've lost - just what I imagine it might have been.  I don't and won't know him as a person.  And when I am given to this sadness as I have been in these recent days since the Haiti earthquake, it's that absence that I feel most profoundly. When I see the anguish on the face of a Haitian quake victim, I can't help but deeply empathize.  One moment it's there; the next it's gone.  A void forever gaping.

Yesterday I watched most of a program about the Young@Heart Chorus, a group of elderly singers from the Northampton, Massachusetts area.  The show on PBS documented the chorus as they prepared for a live concert.  Just a week before the show, two chorus members passed away.  But show business is show business and the show went on.  I ached for those singers and the loss I knew they felt.  Just as we've 'gone on' in the wake of our loss, I knew that in spite of their brave faces lay heavy tears in wait.  One of the chorus members, Fred Knittle, was to have sung a duet of Coldplay's "Fix You" with one of the recently deceased chorus members.  Instead he took center stage alone.  The poignancy was more than palpable.

For me, the combination of the immeasurable suffering in Haiti, the bleakness of winter, the collapse of my favorite teams, of seeing Max being so tender with a younger child who wasn't his brother, and the sorrow of these elderly singers losing their fellow chorus members set me up for what I should have seen coming.  As I watched Fred Knittle shuffle his aging body on stage, lower himself into that solitary metal folding chair, and heard the rhythmic 'shhh, shhh, shhh' of his oxygen canister fill the auditorium, I began to feel that rare but familiar tightness in my gut.  I felt the muscles in my face brace for the inevitable and involuntary contortion of sorrow; my eyes welled.  Tears didn't stream down my face and no sounds of woe emanated from my mouth, but then again, I am not given to the highs and lows of emotional displays.

Click here to watch Fred Knittle and the Young@Heart Chorus perform Coldplay's "Fix You."