Sunday, 11 January 2009

• I'm working tonight, (well, it's 5:30 in the morning, so I guess it's not night, but...) and the patients are asleep, so I'm bored.  I go in the office closet where all the pt's books are kept and I find old photo albums.  So I start with the first one and it's pics of my pts when they were at college.  Him, studying to be a doctor, tall and handsome and young, the football team's quarterback.  Her, studying ?, thin and young and beautiful.  I look at them in these past lives and picture in my mind the way they look now, and sometimes I have to really search the pictures on the page for resemblences to the ones in my mind.  I'm looking at their wedding pictures, pictures of their first apartment (and subsequent ones).  There are cute little quotes out beside some of the pictures, or at the tops of the pages, in Doris's neat handwriting.  Married in '45; I think, my Dad was born that year.  I think how my grandparents' lives compared to the lives of the well-educated, financially stable people in these pictures, who now, in their old age, have the financial means to pay $18/hr for the privelege of 24/7 personal in-home care.  My father's parents, at the time he was born and my two pts were getting married, were extremely poor, having one two-year old boy already, and living in a two-room shack with no running water or sewer, no electricity.  They would have two more boys, still living in that shack.

  Then, pictures of Doc's time in the service, stationed at Ft. Leavenworth.  In 1948 a new car ($900) and the birth of their first son, now a very successful dentist who has probably never known the kind of financial failure that has plagued those of my parents and their parents.  1950, the year my mother was born, also brought the birth of a second son to my patients, as well as a new home.  Doc is fast becoming a very successful doctor, while Doris hosts cocktail parties and brings up the boys.  My mother's parents were struggling to survive; her father taking whatever jobs he could find, usually blasting rock for quarries.  My grandmother stayed home and raised her children like Doris did, but with much less to survive on, and no cocktail parties for enjoyment!  I'm sure she worried constantly about grandpa blowing himself up in those quarries or caves.

  I looked through three fat photo albums, all the while Doc is becoming more and more successful, building a practice, along with a brand-new office complex.  The family moved to a very large home on the west side of town and joined the Country Club.  They travelled every year to places like the Black Hills, Hawaii, California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, DC, Canada, the list goes on.  The only travelling my father's family did was back and forth to California, trying to make a living somewhere; my mother's family went to Montana once, to Texas, I think once, so my grandpa could work blasting rock or any other kind of manual labor that he could find. 

  I saw pictures of a country club party called a Poverty Party or something like that, Poverty Something, where everyone was dressed in what they considered clothes of poverty, and they drank and danced and laughed.  They didn't know poverty!  Even their "poverty" clothes were crisp and new, untorn and clean.  My mother told me once that as a child, for her birthdays, she wanted a store-bought cake so bad, but they couldn't afford it.  She was embarrassed to have her friends come to her birthday parties because her cakes were always homemade, with thin powdered sugar frost rather than thick buttercream icing.  She was the youngest of the family, and always had to wear her cousin's hand-me-down clothes.  Very rarely got new clothes until she was old enough to get a job and buy them herself.

  I asked Doc once what made him want to be a doctor.  He said he didn't know, he just always wanted to be one, and he was lucky enough to have the financial ability to become one.  There was a doctor in the town he grew up in, and the old doctor knew of Doc's ambitions so he allowed Doc to follow him around and go with him on country calls.  He was Doc's mentor.  My grandfather (who is right about the same age as Doc, give or take) grew up too poor to even have dreams of what he would become when he grew up.  By the time he was 10 his mother was dead, his older sister had to quit school to take care of the house and kids, and my grandfather had to quit school to go to work.  He worked on the WPA.  He left home and worked for the WPA, which paid him something like a dollar a week, but he only actually got to keep ten cents; the rest was automatically sent home to his family for necessities.  He never finished school, had no hope of ever being able to afford college, probably never even crossed his mind.  He worked at whatever he could find and was never afraid of a hard day's work.  He never knew the inside of a country club, or how to swing a golf club, or the beauty of Niagara Falls. 

  Now, Doc and Doris are wonderful, loving, Christian people and I am not at all begrudging them their luck or diminishing their accomplishments.  I never was so involved in anyone's life who had always had so much; so much success, so much money, so much standing in the community as these two wonderful people.  So it has never struck me before, the incongruity of the lives of the Have's and the Have-Not's.  It is such a different way of life, that I saw in those pictures, than that to which I have always been accustomed and which my family has described to me.  I have always heard people talk about the Great Depression from the standpoint of poverty, and the consequences that period of time had in the lives of the rest of my family.  I have never known anyone who was actually, if not rich, at least comfortable during that horrible time in our nation's history, and the pictures I saw tonight were of people who obviously had never experienced the awful hunger and feeling of defeat that poverty brings.  I wonder if anyone at that "Poverty Party" that night gave a thought for those in this world who are really poor, and if they did, I wonder what that thought was and if it led them to do anything about it.  Or did they just drink and dance and laugh and go home at the end of the night without a care in the world, other that what to do with ugly "poor" clothes they would never wear again?

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