Years ago I knew an elderly gentleman who spent his childhood in World War II Italy and in answer to my questions of that time he answered …
” No , we weren’t poor. We had plenty of money… there just wasn’t anything to buy. ”
The wife’s been gone for the past two weeks and I’ve used the time to aquire a different pain in the neck. I’ve finally hung the sheet rock on my hurricane damaged garage ceiling this week and as a rental sheet rock hoist was unavailable I did it the hard way earning myself an aching back and a painful pulled muscle at the back of the neck . One step closer to finishing all the projects and all that’s left is to re texture the ceiling repair .
The rental texture sprayers are available and easy enough to find it seems though the popcorn texture needed to match the rest of the ceiling is nowhere to be found in town . While ordering the needed product from Amazon I thought of a woman I had met in Appalachia years ago who had written a book about her depression era childhood in those mountains . She told me …
” Didn’t matter that we were poor and had no money … there wasn’t anything to buy .”
I needed a few sundries so headed off to Walmart this morning to seek a bag of charcoal and found only one lonely bag of a brand I didn’t like . I wanted only six eggs and found myself confronted by three choices , an 18 pack , a dozen “organic” at $7.65 and one solitary pack of six with a broken one inside . The spot where the needed super strong packing tape usually resides was empty and there was only one , not two , of my choice of new wiper blades .
The brand of shampoo I use comes in different fragrances and my favorite is apple . Given no other choice I went through the check out with but one purchase . A bottle of shampoo that smells like strawberry … .
So forget the Italian and the hillbilly … I got problems of my own
