I guess the ‘thing’ that continues to hover, even after all these years of grad school which makes possible all kinds of ways to employ myself with a decent wage, is ‘the fear’–that tightening grip in the chest when I think if my account is empty, if some major expense presents itself. No financial net with the comfie parents or siblings or whatnot.

As a result my Mom was always very frugal, too. Growing up, I always had the feeling we weren’t as poor as she claimed, and thus we didn’t really have to live in a trailer and I didn’t always have to wear hand-me-downs and cheap clothes (we never shopped for clothes at Pennys or Sears, or even K-Mart). That feeling that we were “purposefully poor” occasioned some resentment of my parents, which I have since outgrown. What’s kind of ironic, though, is that in one of Mom and Dad’s last fights before they divorced, I remember my Dad accusing her of being a cheapskate. That sticks out in my mind. He could use some of her frugalness now, though. Since they divorced, he’s been living it up a bit too much. I can’t even imagine the level of debt he carries, and I used to be pretty heavily in debt myself.

I have no clue how to categorize my class growing up. We weren’t poor; my dad made a decent enough wage as a lineman for the local electric company. So I guess that means we were middle class, right?

But then there’s the house we lived in. When I was 5, my parents began renting an old farmhouse for $100 a month, rented it up until three years ago, in fact. The owner (understandably) didn’t care about the house, only the land he farmed, so he didn’t do any upkeep though my father could if he wanted, and often did, especially patching the perpetually leaky roof.

Anyway, to make a long story short (and I’ve written about this quite a bit in memoir), the last 5 or so years my parents lived in the house, the house was really unfit to be lived in. The wiring was shot, so Dad only operated the house on 1/3 of its electricity capability; the plumbing, which never had been good, got so bad that when I’d come home to visit and have to use the bathroom, I’d opt to drive over to the church and use theirs rather than figure out how to get anything substantial to flush; my parents sat in the living room under a load up blankets in the winter because the drafts (and furnace) were so bad; and as for the leaky roof, Dad had an elaborate system set up in my sister’s old bedroom to catch the rain in tarps that funneled into enormous barrels. When the barrels got full, Dad opened an upstairs window and dumped out gallons of water.

Part of me thinks these stories are funny, likes that they’re part of my past. That part of me is the part that’s like my dad, the part that’s a cheapskate, the part that has no shame, the part that thinks its funny when townspeople see him dumping water out of a window and that finds humor in a guest’s inability to flush the toilet without having it overflow.

Most of me thinks all this is sad. There’s no reason we had to live like this, that my parents had to continue living in that place long after it was safe or comfortable to do so, which is what troubles me most, I suppose. That my mom had to go without a better house for so long is what bothers me most, probably bothers me more than it does her.

Growing up, my Dad’s family was the last in the area to get electricity, the last to get a toilet. He grew up thinking himself poor, and perhaps he really was poor growing up. “The poor Burnses”–that’s how his family thought of themselves. And they never got past that, even when Dad made enough money to be comfortably middle class.

We went to thrift stores all the time growing up (I used to hate it–Linda and Mom and I would sit out in the car and wait for Dad sometimes an hour or more), but we didn’t buy our clothes there. Once a year, before school, mom drove Linda and I an hour to the mall and we bought our clothes at Penney’s and Sears–not the cheapest, but not the most expensive either. We bought what was on sale, and we didn’t go overboard. We were frugal with mom; with dad, we were cheap.

So what am I class-wise? Eccentrically middle class, I suppose. I choose to shop at thrift stores (though Goodwill’s gotten expensive in recent years), I pull over to look at interesting objects being thrown out with the trash, and, yes, once in awhile I even climb inside a dumpster if things look really promising. Yet I also love good food and can pay $12 for a good meal without thinking twice, something my parents never do even if Mom would enjoy it once in a while. I won’t eat Generios when I can eat Cheerios (yes, I am a name brand whore). But for the most part, I don’t think that much about money, or care that much about it, probably because I have enough of it.

I know that I don’t want to become my father who will haggle over an item marked $1 in a thrift store or at a garage sale because, frankly, it’s not worth it, and $1 is probably a fair enough price, and if it’s not, the most I’ll lose out is ninety cents. And I can afford to lose ninety cents.

In terms of church, I have always tried to belong to churches that seek to keep me accountable for my rampant consumerism, and those churches have been both rich and poor. The rich church i’m going to now, unfortunately has almost no sense of this at all.

I do think there are cultural elements though. I have never had such a sense of what I have or don’t have until I moved to the US. Its such an obsession here.