This After-Christmas Sale thing is something I will have to take advantage of next year. I certainly have this year.
I'm now writing to you from a new toy, a little Toshiba laptop computer I got at an after-Christmas sale today at the electronics place down near the Mall of America. I don't go to the Mall, of course, but there are useful things around it, and I went all over there this morning and early afternoon.
I've wanted a laptop for a while, mostly to do writing on without having to write on paper and then transfer things to the electronic medium later. This one is just what I wanted. On sale, it was only about $1100. It's got a Pentium/133 processor, 32 meg of RAM in it (I bought the upgrade) and a 1.3-gigabyte hard disk. The display is great, the keyboard feels good, and best of all, I got a 56K modem that slips into these little slots in the side. It also has a CD-ROM. Right now it had Windows 95 on it but as soon as I can I want to put Windows NT on. 95 seems slow and unreliable to me now.
So, after getting used to writing on this, and after FTPing some utilities from my web provider (they have a local number here in Minneapolis also) I'll be back in business.
There's a totally different feeling out in public now. In the days leading up to yesterday, it seemed as though people on the street, in the malls, in the stores, all had a sort of optimism about the things they were doing. They had a million things to do, but they seemed upbeat about it all.
Today was totally different. People... trudged. They dragged themselves everywhere, with cars loaded with little kids on break from school, with toys not wanted, sweaters the wrong size, all manner of things rejected or about to be rejected, and they knew that everyone else was out there for the same reason. They were like robots, all listening to the bleep of their kids' Tamigotchis and Giga-Petz.
I wasn't. I wasn't returning anything. I didn't have anyone telling me what was wrong with the gift I'd given them, telling me of inadequacies or shortcomings. And if Fargo had a GigaPet, he'd have just slapped it around until it broke.
I felt very cheerful.
I also got a navy wool peacoat at one of the discount places. Genuine wool, well-made, $48. I bought some blank cassettes, and some red pumps. Don't ask me when I'm going to wear them, but I suppose an occasion will present itself. Somewhere I have a red suit. Ho-ho-ho.
There's more stupid stuff on television today. I'll have to go exploring in the basement and closets and report back later.
It's later. I looked through some boxes in the attic that contained what initially promised to be fairly boring things. Tax returns, pay stubs. Statements from some stock broker. But they turned out to be anything but boring.
It pretty much confirmed what I thought: my parents took the money from Cuba in 1955 and invested it for years and years and years. One part of it that I definitely found un-boring was that the numbers kept going up and up. Early on, it appears that they invested it in U.S. Savings Bonds. I guess they didn't want to think about it or worry about it, and just wanted something safe. They kept it there until about the time they got married in 1959, and then started putting some money in stocks. Mostly big companies. Palmolive. IBM. Some money in a company called Harris that appeared to do pretty well. After they got married it looked like the things they invested in were more the scientific companies, things that my parents would have known about or would have maybe known people who knew.
All I knew for sure was, by the end of the 1960's they had a surprising amount of money. By the time I was born in March, 1968, they had turned $18,000 1955 dollars in about $175,000 1968 dollars.
But you know, my father still never let it get to him. Remember what I said about his father never letting him forget that there were people around them in the Depression who were bad off? I don't think my father ever forgot that. There was a small box jammed with receipts, arranged by years, that showed the things my parents supported with donations. They supported Biafra. They supported Radio Free Europe. They supported relief funds for people who got hit by hurricanes and floods and things. Every year they sent at least a thousand dollars to the United Negro College Fund. There were some other receipts and canceled checks to things I never heard of, as well. They didn't attempt to deduct a lot of these off their taxes. I gathered from some of the correspondence that was stuck in with the receipts that some of these were for desegregation organizations. I really was never aware my parents were concerned about that sort of thing. They both grew up in the North, after all, and I didn't think that was a big deal with them.
There was something fairly disturbing that I noticed. It was pretty subtle. There were, from the late 1950's, some check stubs made out to some orphanage in Havana. After 1958, those stubs stopped appearing. I got the impression that they had somehow got in contact with the orphanage when they were there in 1955 (the pictures of little kids in the village with the dirt streets) but after Castro took over, either the orphanage vanished or they stopped accepting money from Americans. Either way, it left me a little disturbed. I kind of wonder what happened to those kids in the picture. They'd probably be in their late forties now.
There are some things I can fill you in on that might explain some things for those of you who might have been thinking or adding things up or whatever.
If these diary entries have lacked a certain element you might have found in others, namely a concern about where the next can of beans is coming from, it's that I've been able to use the careful planning and investing my parents followed all their lives to eliminate that one concern from my life. Yes, when they died, I ended up with everything.
Well, not everything.
They left a lot to the causes and people they'd supported all their lives, and as executor of their estate, I made sure their wishes for those things were carried out. They left a lot to the University of Wisconsin. They left quite a bit to an animal shelter up here -- they'd started giving to it after our cat died in 1987. But by and large, they had made sure I would never have to worry about money. The more I look through the boxes, the more I understand that after that one wacky night in the casino in Cuba, any worries that they may have had about money were of their own creation and choice, not out of need.
Spoiled little rich girl?
I was never brought up to take it for granted. I worked in high school. I worked afterward. I took out some loans for graduate school, and paid them back. We didn't live rich.
My parents actually took out and then paid off a mortgage on this place, this house. They probably could have bought it outright in 1971, but I think the interest rate they got the mortgage at, compared to what they could make on the money investing it, it made more sense to borrow someone else's money to buy this place than burn their seed money. True, they paid it off in ten years (I found that box, too) but they did, like everyone else, pay off a mortgage.
I use it to temper my outlook on things. I learned a long time ago that I get really frustrated at little things but deal pretty well with big things. I saw all while I grew up how lack of resources wore people down, burned them out. Ruined their marriages, ate them away from the inside until the shell collapsed. That never happened with my parents, though I didn't know why. When they died, I knew pretty quickly that that outlook was what was going to do me the most good. Don't go crazy, don't get all nervous and jerky about it. Just live with it the way my parents had. Think of it like a spare gold bar in the closet. You leave it there most of the time, and live from day to day like most other people. You get up, you do things, you get paid for doing them, you keep going on. But if the world opens up and tries to swallow you, you've got that little block of security that will keep the world from gobbling you.
I also learned that that means you have an obligation to help other people out when you can. Not carry them, but help them help themselves.
So when I need something, I have two accounts. I have my normal accounts, which contain what I've earned. From my writing, from my new job. That pays my rent on my not-luxurious apartment, buys my non-gourmet food, and put cheap 87-octane gas in my paid-for-over-time Honda. But when something nasty happens, there's something else I can draw on. The Mercedes came from that side of things. I needed a car, I wanted not to ever have to worry about it again, it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, so out came the other account. Do the deed, then back into the closet with it.
I don't know if that explains anything about me or not. I thought it might.
I found a copy of my birth certificate. My parents had to have one to enroll me in kindergarten. One Jeanne Margaret Lawrence, born in Frederick County, Maryland, March 1, 1968. It has my parents' names and places of birth on it. It has a space for my "race," but it's blank. I wonder if they didn't put it down or maybe they just didn't ask it any more but still had the old forms to use up. I weighed exactly seven pounds.
Did your parents keep your school pictures from every year? Mine did. From the fall of 1973, in Miss Smith's class at Northtrop (she got married partway through the year and the next year she quit and moved away) to the Class of 1986 at Washburn, they have a box filled with scores and scores of pictures. 5x7, 8x10, bunches of little shots the size of postage stamps (when I was in high school, all my friends had each others' pictures -- I know of no other use for that little size). You name it, they had it.
I think now's the time I will start to appreciate the fact that my father photographed everything that ever happened. Not the way most parents did: he was never the "OK everybody, hold still" dad with the bad Instamatic where the flash never worked. He never forced the world to stop while he fiddled with light meters and lens settings. He just always seemed to be in the places where things were happening, and he'd photograph them as he saw them.
At the time, I was annoyed that at my graduation, he didn't take many shots of me. But he did take a photograph that day that I still think about, and that I found in an album on a previous trip up here. There was a girl in my class who wore leg braces, and she graduated a year later than she should have because she was sick most of her sophomore year. She came off the platform, and there were tears in her eyes, and she held her diploma up to her parents in the fifth row like it was the Holy Grail, and they were crying, and she was crying, and right then, my father photographed it. I've seen a lot of pictures of people's graduations before and since, and there's never been one like this.
But at the time, I think I was a little annoyed he didn't take more of me. Now I understand.
It's now really, really late Friday night. I think I need to go to bed. Fargo is sleeping in the lid of what looks like the fifteenth box I've gone through. The TV is on, but I turned the sound down. It's some news program from China or something.
Tomorrow I'm going to go out and see if there are any people around here to visit. I've lost contact with most of the people from high school... a lot of my closest friends are gone, moved away. Their parents aren't even around any more. But armed with a phone book and a street map and the laptop, I am going to see what there is -- who there is -- to see.