POVERTY IS A BITCH AND A BOSS

Photo: "The Professor"
By Skitch
(Still the best Teddy, after all these years.)

THEN:

Growing up poor in the Appalachian mountains, like most hard times, is both a bitch (at the time) and a boss (later in life.) When you can finally step back, see the silver lining in that dark cloud, tout the lessons you learned, and say, "It's over," then you can feel like you conquered that bad boy and any overcoming is a good thing, an accomplishment that will help you the next time life throws something at you. You have also acquired valuable skills and knowledge that can save the next generation from going through much of what you went through. What doesn't kill you not only strengthens you it teaches you. What doesn't kill you is less likely to injure your children. I overcame some pretty extreme poverty. Of course, I'm not far above the national poverty level now, but it seems like a million miles away. It is like I live in a different world from the one I grew up in. 

I remember having little cousins that became indignant, when I told them we (as in my family and theirs) were poor. "We're not poor! We're rich!" They insisted. At my sophisticated age of seven-ish, I would laugh at them. This happened more than once, and I remember wondering why I had never had delusions about being rich, like they did. In hindsight, it's probably because I was very observant as a child. I witnessed my parents discussing poverty and how many bags of pinto beans we could afford that month and did it mean we would have to pop some popcorn and mix it in with the beans a few meals in order to get the food to last until our food stamps came in again. I remember conversations about how long the "light bill" could wait so you could buy a turkey and a present or two at Christmastime. You can't listen in on many discussions like that one without getting the gist of it. You're left with the strong notion that your family is broke and sort of stays that way. 

You miss a lot growing up poor. You don't have the same kind of clothes and shoes the other kids have. But by default you learn that that is not what is important, that fashion, while sometimes fun, does not really "make the man." You can't talk about the new movie your classmates have gone to or the new songs they have been able to purchase. But you watch the old black and white movies with your folks, and you crank up your parents outdated stereo system and listen to the songs they liked when they were younger. Then, sooner or later, you hear the new songs on the radio. You develop more eclectic tastes than your "with it" friends. You can talk music and films with anyone from eight to 80. You don't get to compare vacations or show off your dad's cool car. But you throw yourself into reading and by that method you visit not only Florida but Jupiter, and you learn how to open a corroborator, and tie up a muffler, and whack a starter if it's going out. In  ways, you learn and live even more than the people with money. Hence, poverty is a bitch AND a boss. But the thing I missed with a capital M, the thing I missed and wish I hadn't, the thing that had such a small silver lining you have to use a magnifying glass after all these years, was food, especially meat. We had very little of that in our diet, and I stayed anemic to prove it. 

Breakfast at our home, more often than not, was biscuits, gravy, and eggs. My family would eat the eggs scrambled, boiled, or fried and "runny". Eggs in general did not appeal to me and runny ones made me sick. I was never forced to eat them, so I had biscuits and gravy for breakfast. It tasted great, but had very little iron or protein. My Dad once told me there was a monster looking down the hole in the ceiling to see if I ate my eggs. If I did not, the monster would notice. He would know I was puny and that he could catch me. If he saw me eating my eggs though, he would know I was strong and he'd leave me alone. It might have been the only time I ate my eggs as a child, and the last time I ate breakfast in the kitchen. 

Lunch was called "dinner" and if we made time for it at all we would eat a mustard sandwich which consisted purely of white bread and yellow mustard. You know, the condiment that most people put on a sandwich along with the meat and cheese? Sometimes I would salt it, partly because I was a saltaholic and partly because I just wanted to eat a sandwich with more than two ingredients on it. Somehow salting it made it seem more "normal". "This sandwich is a complicated gourmet food," I would tell my little niece, Tanya, while we were eating our bread, mustard, and salt. In lieu of a mustard sandwich we might have biscuits (left over from breakfast) and those would be pried open and smeared  thickly with mayonnaise. In the summer months we at least felt rich, for then there would be tomatoes or cucumbers to add to the sandwiches or biscuits, and green onions usually sat upright in a mason jar on the table. Tanya and I did not eat those, we used the hollow green blades as straws for our water or, when truly indulged, our cow milk. Sometime in my teens, my family discovered ramen noodles and that would occasionally be our noontime meal. Still, though actually quite tasty, none of these foods were helpful with my iron deficiency. The only break in the mundane lunches seemed to come when they gave away the "government cheese", big blocks of yellow cheese, un-sliced. We had cheese sandwiches, cheese and crackers, macaroni and cheese. They also gave powdered eggs, and I liked the flavor of those much better than the real eggs. From that, my mother figured out that if she made eggs for me and put flour in them I was more likely to eat them. She called them "egg pancakes" but they were not sweet like normal pancakes. Until I was eight years old and she got so sick that she started sleeping all but about five hours a day, I ate egg pancakes now and then for lunch or breakfast.

"Supper," as we called it, came early in our home. Most of the time we would eat that final meal of the day at approximately 3:30 pm. My mother said they used to eat it later in the evening, but once I started going to school I always came home hungry, so the family got in the habit of having supper ready in time for us to eat when I got off the school bus. Once or twice a month we would have spaghetti, once or twice in the cooler months we would have homemade vegetable soup. I simply did not like most meats and I found myself picking around the meat in the soup and spaghetti. Every now and then we had Shake and Bake chicken. About once a month we would have canned beef stew and canned chicken and dumplings on the same day. We would heat them up and pour them over white bread to make a couple of cans stretch into a full meal for the entire family. About once a month we would have T.V. dinners, and once a month we might have hamburgers heavily stretched with large pieces of bread mixed in with the meat. The rest of our evening meals, about 24 days out of the month, were beans and 'taters (fried potatoes). I did not, in those days, like beans and so I had fried potatoes for supper, more often than not. Despite eating two to three meals a day, I felt hungry a great deal of the time. I suppose it was because my system was still craving iron, protein, and other nutrients and minerals I was not getting. 

In the evenings, Sandi usually got hungry about three or four hours after supper, and she would pop us some popcorn. Sometimes the popcorn was from Dad's garden and Sandi and I could remember removing the kernels from the cobs or "shucking and shelling" it until our fingers ached. Sometimes it was from a plastic bag that we bought in the store with our food stamps. She poured the kernels in the hot oil in a pan and shook it constantly over the burner. The popcorn sounded like mini guns going off under the lid and filled the air with it's delicious aroma. We would eat that in front of the television, watching Lawrence Welk, The Wonderful World of Disney, or enjoying adventures with Laura Ingalls or John Boy Walton. I went to bed many a night full of popcorn and woke up the next morning with a sick stomach. I would belch and Sandi said it smelled like "rotten eggs". She said most people would pass gas and it would offend you but my gas was both silent and scentless. It was my burps, she said, that could kill you. She told me my system ran backwards, that I burped out my butt and passed gas out my mouth. She would make me go read or play in another room on the mornings when I did not have to go to school. On school days, I tried to turn my head and burp silently, exhaling long, trying to blow it far away, but still someone would say, "What is that horrible smell?" Some nights I would wake up crying from severe pains in my stomach. The doctor diagnosed me with "pre-ulcer condition" and put me on stomach and nerve pills. These are the same pills I later tried to kill myself with. I had frequent infection knots under my skin and cold sores on my lips. I had little white reoccurring boils inside my mouth that hurt like the devil, and my hair fingernails grew slowly. Above each of my nails the skin peeled off like weathered paint on the side of a barn. I bruised easily and any kind of healing seemed to take forever. I had frequent strep throat, tonsillitis, croup, bronchitis, and bladder and kidney infections. I was the only kid I ever knew that had a case of shingles. 

When I was very young, my parents managed for a while to keep Vienna sausages and potted meat stored up in cases under their bed, and I alone was allowed to eat it. They guarded it vigilantly and dolled it out to me at every opportunity they could. This made for bad relations with some of my cousins that lived with us as they were every bit as hungry as "The Baby" was. Some of them still mention how "spoiled" I was and how I was the only kid out of the nine in our joined households that was allowed to eat those meats. But my sisters bore it with immense dignity, even as children. I think they were nearly as worried about my health as Mom and Dad were. The doctor had told my parents, in no uncertain terms, "You figure out how to afford some meat and get it into that baby or she will die before the year is out." Since they had already buried one blond haired daughter they were a bit paranoid about my health to begin with, so they "figured out" how to afford some meat and get it into me. I'm alive today due to cheap processed meats, free lunches, government cheese, and food stamps. Without those I have no doubt I would not be here to tell this, or any other, story. 

Free lunch at school was not something you could hide in those days. If you had free lunch everyone else knew it. You were called to the front of the lunch room to get your free lunch coupons with most of the school watching. Sometimes this was embarrassing. Sometimes the kids made fun of you for being poor, but what is a little embarrassment when it saves your life? Even then I knew they were worth it. Those little colored tickets brought me store bought milk, tasty meats, and variety like I had never known. To this day, I look forward to the meals most people hate. I love airplane food, and the food they bring you in a hospital, and school cafeteria food. All of it beats a mustard sandwich ten out of ten times. I almost always cleaned my tray at school because not only was I hungry, but I might not get a chance to have another sloppy joe and spoon full of peaches for months! And that peanut butter cookie? That was saved for last, like the treasure it was, and it was eaten in the tiniest bites I could take. I wanted to make that one cookie last as long as I could.

Going to my sister Lila's house quickly became a eating adventure. Lila, due to having her own babies ( She married at 15 and had a child by 17.) was connected to programs like Women and Infant Children, otherwise known as WIC, that gave her milk, and cheese, and peanut butter. She also had her own allotment of food stamps and her own ideas about what was healthy and what was not. Her home had many food offerings that were unfamiliar. From her I discovered yogurt, Ovaltine, concentrated orange juice, and several sandwich meats and cheeses I didn't know existed. She always had store bought cow's milk and cans of soup on hand and she almost always fed me when I came to visit. Most of the time, I wasn't even allowed to be there, at my own sister's house, without my parents, but they would hang around long enough for me to eat a sandwich and drink a glass of orange juice. I didn't like the o.j. very much but I drank it because Lila wanted me to. I would have done nearly anything for Lila. She had been my near-constant caretaker until she moved out when I was five, and I the very bones in my body missed her.

Luckily, as a child, I didn't have much of a sweet tooth or I might have been even more malnourished. When given a chance to purchase a treat potato chips, slim Jims, and pickled sausages were usually the snacks of my choosing. These items made my mouth water whenever I accompanied my dad into the store to buy a quart of oil or to pay for the gas we put in the family vehicle. Sometimes he would say, "Possumfrog, you want a meat stick, or a bag of chips, or a pop?" But most of the time we paid for what I saw as the car's food, and we went home to our beans and 'taters. By the time I was three I did not ask for anything when we went into the store. I had learned early that, when there was money for it, my parents would offer. I had already begun to dislike the look of disappointment on their faces when they had to tell me no. I remember overhearing a ten year old classmate pitching a fit for a toy in the local department store one day and feeling scandalized. Her name was Regina and I'd always liked her, but now I entertained ideas of shaming her when I saw her next at school, of calling her a baby and telling her she should never be so mean to her parents again. By contrast, I will tell you that when I was nine I followed my dad into a pharmacy. While he waited on Mom's medication, I browsed the shelves playing, for just a moment or two, with toys I'd never own. A pink teddy bear called out to me with his bright blue eyes. They reminded me of my daddy's eyes. I picked the bear up and he seemed to whisper, "Hug me," so I did. It felt good to hug him. He was a fun hug and a beautiful bear. I stood there and held him and brushed his pink hair this way and that with my fingers until Dad said it was time to go. On the way home we were talking about all the stuff in the store, and I told him the best teddy bear ever was in that store. I told him it had bright blue eyes just like his, and it was soft and pink. The next day, Dad told mom he had forgotten something in town and he'd have to go get it. It was quite unusual for him to make two trips to town in two days. Usually, we only went to town about twice a month. He wanted to go alone that time, so I quickly swallowed my disappointment and went to the swing he had made me. I did not beg or push my way into his life, but I liked to follow him around as much as he would allow. My swing was a great compensation prize. I knew it was the best swing in the world. Dad had climbed so high in the tree when he hung that swing, that it swooped like a trapeze. Mother had stood at the bottom of the tree with me saying, "Honey. Be careful! Oh my Lord! He is going to kill himself!" But I smiled at her. Daddy knew what he was doing. He could hang a wet noodle on a bear. This was nothing. That swing became my favorite spot in the world, and I spent hours there every day that it was not raining. A few hours later and Dad came back and I jumped from my swing and raced to meet him. He got out of our truck with that teddy bear in his hands. My eyes teared up when he gave it to me. 

"I'm sorry I told you about him, Daddy." 

"Why?" My father asked. 

"I know we can't afford him." But Daddy insisted that he knew what we could afford and what we could not. He said to let him worry about that, and that I needed to keep the bear that I was still trying to give back to him. With a little girl's heart full of joy, I took the teddy to my swing and I held him on my lap and swung high, in the best swing in the world, with the best teddy bear in the world in my arms and my tears fell into his soft pink fur. Maybe we were poor, but I still had so much! I named him Professor Bayer, because Sandi was reading "Little Women" to me, and I was in love with Jo's professor. To this day, Professor Bayer sits in a place of honor in my bedroom. His hair is not as soft as it once was but his eyes seem just as bright, and every time I look at him, he seems to whisper, "Hug me," and I do. And when I hug him I remember that my Daddy could make the best swing in the world and afford the best teddy bear in the world for his little girl, and I know that I have so much!

Hunger can easily lead to theft. I was three years old when I first shoplifted food. I was craving a Slim Jim like no one's business. "Jonesing" for it, as the kids say these days. I had gone into the store with Dad to pay for the car's food and I had looked at the Slim Jims and the potato chips, sitting on the shelf waiting for people with money to buy them. No one offered to buy me anything that day and I tried to swallow my disappointment. I realized my dad was deep in conversation with the store owner, Billy. They were talking about gardening and the spring weather, and I suddenly knew I could slip that Sim Jim in the pocket of my long fake fur winter coat and neither of them would notice. So I did. In the car on the way home, it occurred to me that I could not open the Slim Jim. I had not yet mastered the hand/eye coordination necessary and I knew if I asked anyone, even my sisters or my adopted uncle Crit, I would be ratted out and questions would be asked about where the Slim Jim came from. I finished the journey home trying to think of some way to get that snack opened, but nothing worked. Momma kept her scissors up high, and I had to ask permission to use them, and she always watched me. Dad kept his razor blades up really high, and I wasn't allowed to even touch a kitchen knife. In the hallway at home, while dad was in the middle of taking off his coat, I pulled the Slim Jim out of my silky pocket and showed it to him. 

He paused with his coat half on and half off, "Where did you get that?" 

"Billy and Myrtles." My voice was just a whisper.

"Possumfrog, I didn't pay for that." I nodded, and his coat when right back on.

He explained to mother that their daughter had stolen something and we had to take it back right now. The looks on their faces were much worse than the looks I faced when asking for snacks and the answer was, "No."

Dad took me back to the store and told me before we went in, what he expected of me. Myrtle was now at the counter instead of her husband, and I cried after I told her I was sorry and it would never happen again. You could tell that her heart went out to me. She tried to give me the Slim Jim, but Pop shook his head. No daughter of his would be rewarded for being a thief. I was broken by the look of shame and disappointment in his and my mother's eyes the rest of the day. They didn't say another word about it, but I hurt over that mistake many times in the future. It was the not the last time I stole food, but it was the last time in many years, and the next time I stole it, it was more for someone else than for myself.

When I was a twelve we moved to a house in town and my niece Tanya and cousin Ramona continued to be as my companions as often as their parents would allow. Since I was ten years old, Rae and Tanya had spent every weekend and summer vacation they could with me and much of their spring breaks, Thanksgiving breaks, etc. When school was out and their parents would allow it, the three of us were together. I was only allowed to visit their homes, in the daytime and almost always with my parents along. But they could come and stay with me for days on end. That was the way the world worked, and I was just grateful for their company. When I was about 13, we were sitting around fantasizing about food and it occurred to me that they didn't have to be hungry with me. They could be at home with their store bought milk and their peanut butter. The thought spurred me into action. I took the girls to the Paylo Supermarket in front of my house, and shoplifted some jars of baby food. Small, easy to slip into your pocket, cheap enough for my parents to assume that Ramona or Tanya had brought a little bit of money with them, and a tasty addition to a mustard sandwich. For the next two years I swiped food when they were there, never when they were not. We were allowed to walk to the Piggly Wiggly and back during the day, and I would steal entire huge sub sandwiches, pops, and big bags of chips. When I started high school, much later than most kids did, I made a new friend named Dreama and she taught me to skip school and to shoplift clothing, jewelry, and makeup. She said, "You tell your parents that I gave you this stuff and I'll tell my parents you gave me my stuff and no one ever knows we stole it!" It sounded like a foolproof plan and we proved to be very good at it. I walked out of a store with four shirts and three pair of pants on and a soft drink cup full of jewelry and accessories. When I told Ramona, I usually told her everything, she was upset instead of proud and pleased like I had expected. The food theft had always made her nervous, but this was too much! She begged me to stop but her pleas fell on deaf ears. For the first time ever, I could look at something pretty in a store and take it home instead of taking home only the dream of it. I could finally have what I wanted now and then, and I wasn't in any hurry to give that up. She didn't come to see me for weeks after that, which was very unusual. The next time she came to stay with me her parents came in for a visit. This was rare but not unheard of. I thought little of it. But when Ramona's mother Barb came into my room and Ramona slipped out. Barb talked to me in low tones, she was fooling no one. She told me that she had a cousin that worked at "Heck's", the store I had been stealing stuff from most often, and that cousin saw me stealing things on the store videos. This cousin, Barb said, knew that Barb was also related to me, and, instead of having me arrested, she called her and told her to talk to me. Barbara wanted my promise that I would not steal again. I looked at her and tears filled my eyes. I knew the real score. Ramona was so worried about me that she, who had been my constant "Yes" woman since she was three years old, had ratted me out to her mother, and Barb was so worried about me that she cooked up this elaborate story to try to convince me to stay out of trouble. Barb had come directly to me with a big fat lie instead of doing the "grown up" thing and telling my parents. They had both gone to a lot of trouble to try to fix this with minimum discomfort for me. They both apparently cared a great deal about me. I felt very ashamed. Food was one thing, but this was quite another. The shoplifting had been fun, a thrill, and yes what a joy to have something nice, and new, and pretty once in a while. But it was not worth the look of disappointment I now saw in Barb's eyes. It was not worth worrying two of my favorite cousins, or putting a strain on mine and Rae's peaceful relationship. We almost never even disagreed, but Ramona hadn't even been over in weeks. That was a long long time go without her. I wiped my eyes and promised Barb. She probably thought I was afraid of being arrested, but I was not. I never stole another item, food or otherwise. Ramona came back in the room after Barb left. She moved like a kitten, ready to run if the need arose, not afraid of me physically, just afraid of my anger. But when I moved it was to kiss her startled cheek. I had never loved her more.

The combination of not stealing food and of having menstrual periods was almost my undoing. The doctor said he'd given me enough iron pills to "dissolve a brick wall" and they weren't making much difference, so he prescribed iron shots, every other day. They left big rusty colored bruises on my hips (which lasted for months) and every time I took one I was very sick the next day. So sick that I had to be taken to the ER several times. In the ER they insulted me by insinuating I was using drugs. I was horribly sick, but not too sick to have a temper flare. I loudly told my mother, "This idiot can't be a doctor. He don't know sick from high!" The next day I was fine and took the shot. The day after that I was ill again. This went on for a little over a week before Pop and I decided that the shots were connected to the sickness and were not worth it. We defied the doctors orders and walked out without the injection. But something wonderful came of that hard time too. That incident is what taught me to force myself to eat eggs and beans and to stop picking around the hamburger meat in the homemade soup and spaghetti my mother or father made. I didn't like those shots, or the bruises, or the sickness that followed. So, I determined I would try to eat more meat. The long overdue decision to force meats is all it took to make the shots unnecessary. I liked scrambled eggs now, so I ate them with my breakfast. I tried to save up money and buy meaty baby food for my mustard sandwiches on non-school days, I ate the meat, for sure, on my lunch tray, and I mixed beans in with cornbread and onions and forced myself to eat one bite of the bean mixture for every bite of potatoes that I took. When I went back in to the doctor, I was still anemic, but not dangerously so. I was amazed that just eating what was there was enough to get the doctor to stop wanting to pop me full of iron shots. That lesson paved the way toward forcing myself to eat a lot of other "good for me foods" years later, when I found out I was pregnant. And I made it, not only into adulthood but into middle age!

These days, though I can't always rescue my sons from roach motels, I can pay for a Slim Jim as often as crave them. I had one today. I have an extra store of empathy for hungry kids, I can eat almost anything you put in front of me, including eggs and beans, which I now like, and I worked and work hard to make certain my own kids did not and do not go hungry. I saw to it that they had a variety of foods growing up, including meats, and milk, and yogurt, and orange juice - sometimes concentrated. I put a variety of nutritious foods in front of them and hardly ever any sugar, and they did much better with their health than I had done. My oldest had some anemia now and then, but never anything dangerous. Every now and then I forced my sons to eat things they weren't too fond of, and they always had to take two bites of something if they hadn't tried it in over a year. "Your taste buds change." I kept telling them. But they never had to go hungry, and they never had to force the foods they truly disliked in order to avoid iron shots or to fill an empty belly. The one time I had to put one of them to bed on a sub-standard meal of pickles and biscuits, I got out the next day and walked all over town pushing him in a stroller until I fixed the situation and nothing like it ever happened again. Going without taught me to make sure my kids had better nutrition than I did. It taught me look at how people think and feel in a deeper way than I might have been able to see if my stomach had been full. Full stomachs can be selfish. Doing without also gave me some pretty interesting stories to tell. It played toward my being a writer and toward my being a better parent than I might have been. I gotta admit that poverty is a bitch, but it teaches you, it strengthens you. I learned how I did not want my children to grow up. I toughened up enough to make sure it didn't happen. I learned how to eat foods I don't like until I do like them. Just like anything else in life, poverty can break you or it can make you. Your choice.