Buying A Shirt
The picture is from the 8th grade. I am the tall one in the plaid shirt.
It was a Saturday morning. I was in the eighth grade. When I climbed from the rack, my mother audibly broadcast the news that today she was going to buy me a dress shirt to wear to church. So after breakfast, we packed up and headed for town. Now my mother never once in her life got into the car and drove into town. Because we didn’t own a car. My mother in her 91 years never drove a car from the last letter of the last word in this sentence to the period that follows. Nor did my dad, who left this world at age 61 when I was three months old. She either walked or rode the bus. That was it. Hence, I walked or rode the bus.
Born in 1906, my mother was an extremely conservative country woman who was the most comical lady I have ever met, although she never knew she was funny. She was raised in the hills and hollers of Kentucky in a 3 room house that had neither a bathroom nor an outhouse with a 5 other brothers and sisters and a mother and father who were born before Abraham Lincoln was dead, all of whom were as poor as the proverbial church mouse. The light and heat were by kerosene hurricane lamps, a wood burning stove in the bedroom/living room, and an old-fashioned wood cooking stove in the kitchen where she slept.
She never made it past the seventh grade and always seemed embarrassed about this, even in front of me. Sometimes I would come home from school and see her with her legs up over the easy chair studying some of my books. My sister told me that in her last days as mini strokes began to overtake her, she grabbed the encyclopedia at the letter "A" and started reading it word for word to the end. When she finally went to her reward, she was in the letter "M". During the Depression and at the end of her career, she worked in hotels and cleaned offices for Cincinnati Gas & Electric. Between those bookends, she labored in factories, putting parts together for Crosley Radio. In her late 60s and 70s after retirement, she worked as a maid in the locker rooms of a suburban country club in Northern Kentucky. Of course, she rode the bus.
When my father died, the C&O RR transferred to her his railroad pension that was paid to her monthly. It was small in 1946, but instead of spending it on herself or raising her baby with it, she put each check in the bank for a paltry interest. She did that for 18 years. All of my days in school she would sing into my ears that one day I was going to go to college. She never said how. Just that I was. She beat that into me so much that when the last day of high school came, it was just another three-month break before everything resumed as before. Those 18 years of monthly deposits from my father’s railroad pension to help her raise her child instead paid for seven and a half years of private education through college and seminary “so that you will not have to work like me.” I was the first and only child to go to college in my family. It covered every penny and a little bit more. She saved meager amounts for a long time and rarely spent a dime on anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary. Fortunately - and unfortunately - she drilled much of this philosophy into me.
From my earliest recollection, she had a green sofa that my father bought her in the early 1940s. Almost 60 years later, she still had that thing. There were places in it where it was worn threadbare, and it sank like the Titanic when your backside fell upon it. I was never sure if I was sitting on the floor or the bottom of the frame. If anyone ever got into it, he wasn’t coming out of it if there wasn’t somebody there to pull him up like he was coming out of a deep hole. Whenever I suggested that she buy another one, Mom always said there was nothing wrong with that one.
So off to town on this Saturday we started hiking to buy a simple shirt. Now about six houses up the street from our house there lived a Great Dane that belonged to the Poindexters. He was about the same size as a zebra and always lounged in the darkness about 75 yards deep in his long backyard where he used the sidewalk along his house as a racetrack. Somehow he always seemed to know when my mother was coming up the street. My mother, who was 40 years older than I, always walked on the inside of the sidewalk and plodded along with her head down contemplating deep thoughts, like how not to spend any money. The Lord created this dog specifically to teach my mother the brevity of life. Somehow just before he ever laid eyes on her, he caught her scent from about 100 yards out and calculated exactly where her face was going to be as she coasted within inches of the fence that contained him. Like a greyhound bus coming through an intersection at night, he appeared out of dead silence from around the corner of his territory and roared like a lion into my mother’s freckled face while lunging and snapping at her with his dripping fangs. Adrenalin fired into Mom’s veins like water from a fire hydrant and every nerve in her body yanked her backward like a freight train taking a mailbag off of a hook at 80 mph. It was always the same. Her hands always flew up like she was being mauled by a grizzly and then flared into a high-pitched rage, screaming out, “OH (insert words here)!!! I HATE THAT DAWG!”
At night it got even better. Rover sensed his divine calling, a grand purpose to his existence on earth, which was to scare the crap out of my mother. He had studied and stored my mother’s schedule and habits into his memory bank. He knew just when she would be in her own peaceful world and lugging a bag of groceries back to the house since she always came home from the opposite direction as she had left. So he waited and salivated at the thought that he had one more chance that day to sink his teeth into her head. His yard was wide. This gave him a spacious view over open real estate to spot her as he sat way back in his yard shrouded by a blanket of blackness. As soon as he spotted her, his head came up off his paws like a German Shepherd, and his ears turned and adjusted like radar to take in her footsteps and hone in on her. He licked his chops, measured her tracks, and calculated the exact spot in her progress at which he would launch his carcass as she slinked unawares along the border of his terrain. When she hit the magic spot, he jettisoned off his hind legs like an Apollo rocket and stretched himself out like a cheetah as he silently careened down his route, careful only to hit the racetrack with his cushioned pads while he curled his toenails just slightly off the pavement so as to not give away his speeding presence for maximum effect. Like Dracula ejecting himself into your face from behind a castle wall, Rover slammed into the fence at full speed and nearly came half way across the sidewalk to make a grab for her, thundering a guttural roar like a Harley-Davidson and flashing his incisors like scissors in what little light there was. The effect was the same as if somebody had come up behind you on a pitch-black, lonely, country road at night and blasted an air horn from a locomotive or from the Queen Mary. In daylight, he nearly gave her a myocardial infarction, but at night when you couldn’t see a thing in your periphery, Rover jangled her entire nervous system into temporary convulsions. Adrenalin gushed out of her pituitary and hit the farthest walls of her body from toe to brain, and the extra pressure of the blood rushing through her arteries probably dislodged plaque from inside her veins. She nearly had a stroke.
As we dawdled up the street unawares this Saturday morning, he rushed the fence and almost had her again. She jacked back like a bolt of lightning, nearly leaping into the traffic as she repeated the same spontaneous refrain that only he could get from her. Right at that moment, my mother, a slender woman, could have lifted an automobile, and if she could have laid her hands on that miserable canine male descendant of a female dog in heat, she would have thrown his sorry backside across the Ohio River.
If it hadn’t been before, that dog put my mother’s mind into a heightened state of acute shopping awareness. The retailers were going to have a hard day today getting her to go for anything more than the cheapest shirt money could buy.
When my Mom went shopping, she worked off of 4 immutable, guiding principles.
Number one was the price. When it came to buying anything, in her hand she held the one card that trumped all others. There was none higher than this one. You could have had 4 Aces, a Full House, and a Royal Flush. You could throw down an avalanche of shirt cards about construction, quality, style, value, looks, fit, color, and what it matched. You could think that the cards you held in your hand would win the table. But Mom only needed ONE card. As far as she was concerned, just one card in the deck was the Rook. She played it first in every hand and won every game with it. She was like a price-scanning machine at Home Depot when you wave a product over a glass in the self-service line. She only registered the price, and it usually went something like this.
Over the years, we had marked out a retail shopping highway through Covington, Kentucky, that started near the rock bottom of the pricing scale and ascended upwards looking for a miracle. We always started with Montgomery Wards. I strolled over to the counter where boys’ shirts were stacked in this joint and immediately laid my hands on what looked like the kind of threads I wanted. Holding the plastic bag high, I waved it in front of Mom like a red cape in front of a bull and declared, “Here it is. I found it. I’ll take this one.” Those words meant nothing, and I knew it. I had merely announced that the ritual had begun, and I had loosed the hounds to find the scent. It was as if the announcer at a horse racetrack had yelled, “And they’re off!!” It put Mom into her normal Depression-thinking mode so we could get on with the day’s routine as I had seen it a thousand times. We weren’t going to buy this shirt. We never bought the first of anything. That was rule number one even though it had never been stated.
But it started the ball rolling. My announcement had turned Mom in her tracks like a serpent that sensed something ominous had made a noise behind it and closed in to investigate the threat. She looked up with a skeptical scowl on her face and sidled around the corner of the display table away from the sale rack she instinctively followed. Her knowing hands curled around the suspect rag and slowly withdrew it from my hands. She pored over it like a financial planner inspecting a suspicious competitor’s products. I saw her eyes skirt the material, but they locked on the little white sticker divulging the price. They stopped and stared long and hard as if a dermatologist had spotted a melanoma.
Buried within my mother’s mind and cataloged there were the lowest prices from the 1920’s through the Depression, and right now she was staring in disbelief at a skyrocketing price compared to 1933. She recalled the day that shirt cost less that one dollar. The shirt she caressed could have been made of pure gold and studded with precious stones, but all it did was merely establish a price point. Besides, we had ALL DAY and two states separated by the Mason-Dixon line to scour for the cheapest and yet the best shirt money could buy.
She bent over and whispered in my ear, “Dale, this thang is too high. $4.99 is too much. We can get it for less.” I knew that was coming. I had been through this many times before. So I dropped that thing like a dead weight and started to head for the door as we proceeded to the second stop on the route, Sears and Roebuck, about two blocks away. I was starting to get hungry.
Sears was similarly priced to Wards. Still too high. So we headed to Penneys, a block away. I latched quickly onto a shirt and hoisted it high for Mom’s inspection. It was also cheaper. But it was too early to claim victory as Mom sauntered over as cautious as a deer. Her eyes were already narrowing and drawing in on the price tag from six feet out like an owl that could spot a cockroach from 100 yards in pitch darkness. Doubt creased her brow. $4.97. “As soon as I saw her lean in and watched the telling words form on her lips, “We can get it…,” it splashed softly on the counter to be forgotten.
The Parisian on Pike Street was next. It was much more upscale than the other 3. Of the hundreds of times we had been in there, only once did we ever buy anything. But Mom always went there because there was the chance - sort of like winning PowerBall - that we would get a lower price than Penney’s. The country club boys in Florence and Erlanger got their stuff here. Even though on this day they had shirts ONE PENNY more than Wards and hundreds of shirts we had already seen, that one penny was the same thing as paying $250 for a pair of True Religion jeans compared to $12 Levis at Walmart. “I’ve seen the day when I didn’t have a penny,” was always her be-all and end-all argument to the one penny ploy.
So it was back down Pike Street to Coppins Department Store. This was store 5 on the circuit. But embedded in here was a shirt for $4.95. I was hopeful that she would get tired and give in, but Mom was a low-price shopping triathlete. The obsession for the lowest price in the Midwest was like the lead dog on an Iditarod sled that my Mom rode into the shopping wilderness. It led and pulled her to the finish line until she could utter the words, “We found the lowest price.” All Mom saw as we reached mid-afternoon was the coming of the Midnight sun. So with, “We can get it cheaper,” we went up the street to Eilerman’s Department Store.
This was the high end in Covington. In all of our shopping in 18 years till I went to college, we never bought one thing out of that joint. But we always went there. It was sort of like dragging yourself all over the Cincinnati Zoo all day till you could hardly stand up, but you just had to go to the monkey house because you hadn’t been there yet. $5.00 plus shirts sent us out the front door where we stood on Madison Avenue now famished. We had been looking for over 3 hours to save another penny. We could have crossed the street to Kresge’s and packed in a club sandwich at their food counter and bought a shirt at Coppins for $4.95.
But no. Mom looked to her right. And there sticking up above the horizon were the skyscrapers of the Holy City, downtown Cincinnati on the other side of the Ohio River. Mom’s eyes grew distant as she envisioned savings galore if we crossed that river - a mtaphoric Jordan - into Canaan land and walked through Ohio to find one or two more pennies off the price. So we boarded a bus and paid the fare to get to the Ohio goldfields as if we were crossing the High Sierras and descending into Sutter’s Mill.
As soon as we dismounted the bus and set foot on the super highway of fashion within the Queen City of Ohio, Mom felt the need to fasten on the feed bag. So we slogged up the hill from the bus station and landed in Mom’s favorite restaurant. Mills Cafeteria. Cafeteria is the key word here.
Mom did not go into restaurants. Why? Because it was like buying a shirt or anything else. She wanted to SEE the product and examine the price mounted above each dish. She wasn’t taking any chances. So we always ate at cafeterias where the entire menu sat in the open air. It didn’t make any difference where we went. She rooted out a cafeteria. If we were traveling by train on vacation, as soon as the train jerked to a stop and the conductor swore the train would be there when we came back, she risked bandits falling upon our possessions by leaving all the luggage on the train and heading out like a demon in a walking sprint and asking everyone along the way if they had seen a cafeteria anywhere. She only purchased train food if there was no hope of a cafeteria near the tracks. In fact, before we reached any city of some size where she had been informed that we would make a prolonged stop, she would say to me, “Don’t worry, when we get to Omaha (or wherever), we’re going to find a cafeteria."
To her, a cafeteria was the same thing as a midnight buffet on a luxury cruise. We charged off the train one time in Las Vegas when the conductor told us the temperature was 125 degrees and bolted down Fremont Street like we were crossing the Sahara on bare feet and found a you-know-what. We never took a bus because that cost money. We walked or ran. We ate like we could hear the footsteps of the chaplain and the guards at San Quentin coming to a condemned man’s cell just before midnight and then raced back to the train station to see if we had been left behind with our luggage on board.
So the price of the shirt was steadily ascending. We had now added 2 round-trip bus fares to Cincinnati, wear and tear on our footwear, the price of 2 meals, and about 5 hours on the clock. We were soon going to be buying new shoes before we were going to buy a shirt. The route that we had staked out ahead of us was the equivalent of walking through all four floors of The Mall of America about 4x. With fresh horses, we started out on the second leg of the journey by stalking the shirt departments at McAlpin’s, Mabley and Carew, Pogues, and then Shillitoes, all major Cincinnati department stores. These places had sales like everybody else, but by the time darkness fell over Southern Ohio, we still had nothing, and the cheapest shirt was still at Coppins, which was now closed.
I don’t care what it was, whenever Mom wanted to buy me or herself anything, we saddled up like we were taking horses overnight on the Appalachian Trail. We scouted every possible store there was to make sure that we got the lowest price known to mankind. And after Mom did buy something, if it was ever discovered that she had paid a single penny too much, she would hitch up the horses, drag it back, and buy the other one. If that wasn’t enough, she used to embarrass the pants off of me when she at last moseyed up to the cash register and whispered to the clerk, “Can you take a little off of this? I see a spot here that should be taken into account.”
This was the acquisition ladder we climbed when Mom went shopping. But sometimes she stepped off the ladder and went into the basement to survey all the previously-owned crap at Goodwill and St. Vincent DePaul. I’ll never forget the time I accompanied her to one of those joints down the street from our house. On that ignominious day, she bought me a pair of candy apple red corduroy pants to wear to school with my used, brown vintage wingtip shoes from the roaring ‘20s that she snatched off the shelf. They had white shoe polish on the smooth part in the front and around the side. When I put that costume on, I was doing some peer pressure heavy lifting. I put those pants and shoes on out of guilt for wasting my mother’s money if I didn’t wear them. But it was like stepping into an Ultimate Fighter cage without any warrior experience. I took abuse. Every time I showed up in those blood red pants with the Speakeasy wingtips from about the 5th to the 7th grade, the whole place fell to the floor holding their sides in laughter like I was doing a stand-up comedy routine at The Purple Onion in San Francisco.
The second and third immutable guiding principles of shopping go together, no special dates or surprises and no wrapping. In all my years, I can only remember one time when she bought me a Christmas present and delivered it to me as a surprise on December 25. She didn’t deliver things on the designated day - birthdays or any other time. There were no surprises, and nothing was ever wrapped. Like every mother, she bought me gifts. She just didn’t do it like everybody else. She had her own way.
My mother would always buy me something FOR Christmas. But I just never got it ON Christmas. I would likely get it sometime in November or December 2nd or the 17th. Or any other day. Maybe even After Christmas. But never ON Christmas. So for me, Christmas was always anticlimatic. Only one time did I ever get anything exactly on Christmas Day…and it was unwrapped. Wrapping was a waste of money since I was going to tear the paper to pieces anyway.
This practice carried over into all gift-buying. I remember one time my mother announced to me out of the blue early in the month of September in my junior year of high school that she was going to buy me a gold watch for my 17th birthday, which was on November 1. So what did she do? We headed off right then and there for Motch Jewelers. I picked out a 21 jewel Bulova automatic. Out of the case it came and on to my wrist. That day. Right there. Nearly 2 months before my 17th birthday. No surprise other than telling me that morning. No wrapping or party or anything like that. November 1 came and went without notice or any particular acknowledgment. It was always that way except for one time when I was in the 3rd grade when I had a birthday party.
Now why did she do this gift buying weeks, months before the occasion, you ask? Well, the answer is simple because I heard her say it many, many times. “I was going to buy it for you on your birthday anyway. So why wait? You might as well start getting the use our of it.” The occasion or date was irrelevant. With this kind of logic, she should have bought it when I was born.
The people of the Depression and earlier generations had things down inside them that we will probably never plumb. One lady I know said to me that she didn’t know if I was describing my mother or hers. I knew a multi-millionaire in Michigan who came from poverty and then passed through the Depression. He once told me that he felt guilty every time he spent $10 for a meal. My mother passed down to me things that probably were passed to her and came from experiences she had as a young girl. I have seen the house on the top of the Kentucky ridge where she and her siblings were raised with paper thin walls where in the winter time, she told me, she would wake up in the kitchen and water in the bucket was a solid block of ice. I know her oldest sister, Musetta, died in 1910, and I have seen the Potter’s Field in Beaumont, Texas, where she is buried. I saw my grandmother wear one of those bonnets they wore in the TV show “Bonanza” that women wore on the wagon trains. I doubt that my mother had birthday parties like we know, and the Christmases I knew were probably replicated for me in some small way out of her experience. Asking a clerk to discount an article of clothing was probably something she saw here parents do in the General stores. Presents, if there were any, were also probably not wrapped and she probably did not experience spontaneous surprises either. On several occasions, she told me that if she got an ice cream cone as a child, it was one of the most wonderful things she could remember. So wasting money - and not saving it - was not a trivial picadillo; it was a mortal sin, and I often was reminded of this even later in life. Parents pass these things along, and sometimes they become indelible marks on our personalities and habits. Good or bad.
This brings me to the 4th immutable shopping principle my mother unwittingly employed - uncertainty. Mom’s philosophy about buying an article was that a thing should be hunted down throughout the entire universe, handled, inspected, and then when desire was satisfied, selected if you were ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT. But even then that didn’t really do the trick because my mother would ask me a thousand times after I had finally scrutinized and appraised a potential purchase, “Dale, do you like it?” And the conversation went something like this:
“Yes, Mom, I like it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Do you like the red color better than the blue one?”
“Yes, I think I like the red one the best.”
“Are you sure?”
“I think so.”
“Well, if you don’t like it, then get the blue one.”
“No, I like it the red one.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well…no, I’m not sure. I thought I was. But now I’m not.”
All of this kind of stuff works on a kid and stays with him no matter how old he gets all through his life. I got asked if I was sure so many times that the only thing I was sure of was that I wasn’t sure. After hearing it a million times, I am not sure I’m sure of anything anymore. I still run this whole scenario through my brain every time I walk into a store and buy anything. I’ll do graduate school research on an item by reading every word on the box, take the package apart, compare it with every similar item in the store, and when I am satisfied that it has met all qualifications, I’ll take it and head for the cash register. When I get about two feet away, my mother resurrects from the grave in Grant County and whispers what only I can hear, “Are you sure?” It will stop me dead in my tracks. So I march back to where I found it and set it down. Then I say, “This is crazy.” I quickly cancel the voice in my head and pick it back up again. But before I can get to the front of the store, I run into the wall of misgiving again. No, I am not sure. So I set it down again. Then I pick it back up. I usually put it back for the last time and then continue an inventory of every store in the city, if not the United States, before I am absolutely sure. Even then, I second guess myself to infinity. Indecisiveness is a lingering effect, and when uncertainty is mingled with price considerations, that is a formidable foe.
One time I was going to buy a sweater when I lived in Michigan. So I went through all the malls and likely stores in Western Michigan where I would likely find what I wanted in two different cities. I eliminated every sweater but one and bought it because it was the last one. But that meant nothing because I was about to take off on two driving trips, one to Philadelphia and the other to California. On the way to Philadelphia, I perused a million sweaters in cities and stores for 800 miles. And did the same coming back. I was convinced up to that point that I had the sweater I wanted. But the trip to California was coming up, and I would be gone for a few weeks. I passed through Chicago and scoured my favorite haunts and all the outlets and major department stores and small town malls that I could get to as I did my normal working job. By the time I got to San Francisco, I could have been a buyer for Macy’s. I whisked on down to the Los Angeles area and combed many of those places too. And for what? A talking sweater in its original bag in the back seat of the car that chanted its peroration like a magpie, “Are you sure?” Had I found something, I would have returned the sweater to its original chain. But I did not. After about 6,000 miles of driving, I finally lighted on the sweater I bought in Michigan.
But it was endless. I don’t know how many times I have ended up taking things back - even as I do today - because I wasn’t sure. So once I bought something, I still didn’t own it. It was in my hands. I paid for it. I was home looking at it. But I did not own it yet because I wasn’t sure. With my mother, she made me run the Gauntlet of Uncertainty to try to get to the end of the tunnel without any lingering, sniggering doubts. Even when I was sure, there were whispers of dubiety.
So the bottom line for all of this is the following:
1. I don’t enjoy Christmas or birthday parties or most holidays like other people do. They make me feel uncomfortable, and I would rather be elsewhere. They are unpleasant experiences and also among the most boring days of any year.
2. I also find it hard to buy gifts. Surprise gifts are virtually impossible to engineer. I just can’t do it. I take Linda to the store and encourage her to buy what she wants, but it’s not going to be a surprise. That’s because I am not sure if she will want what I buy her. I think she may be a bit like me. Besides, that is how I ever saw gift buying. My mother’s philosophy was to buy something if you are sure you really like it. Thus, you had to see it, handle it, think about it for the rest of your life, possibly return it, and then hike all over the creation to find what you are sure about. That is how I do it. Gifts that are meant for surprises can’t go through that regimen. Most surprise gifts I ever bought seemed to be disappointing to the recipient.
3. The really funny thing is that I nearly break into a sweat and churn over trivial purchases between $1 and $50. But I can make a decision to buy a $650,000 townhouse without a second thought, which I have done.
4. Another residual of being raised like I was is that I can’t buy a single thing without going to a public library and pursuing doctoral research to make sure that I buy the best product obtainable for the optimum price. This has become a by-product of merchandising.
For example, when I went to my first year in college in Chicago, I woke up one Saturday morning and said to myself, “I need a nail clipper.” My buddies were thought they would go with me to a drugstore about three blocks away while I purchased one. I got into this drug store and found a rack on a counter near the front that twirled around with a display of nail clippers for fingers and toes. One of my friends grabbed one and said, “Here it is. Take this.” Suddenly the trigger carefully manufactured and installed in my soul in my formative years slammed down on the firing pin, fired, and like lightning, re-cocked and slid another round into the chamber. It was as automatic as a Glock. As if seized by a space alien overcoming a dupe in a horror movie, I turned like a cobra. My beady eyes laser-scanned the price tag. $0.49.
“What?” I said. “Forty-nine cents for this thing? That’s an outrage. It’s too high. I can find a cheaper one.” Remember, you never take the first of anything. I had the first point of Mom’s shopping code nailed down and in place. That was merely a price point that initiated the hunt. It was about 10 am. So I spent the rest of the day like a bloodhound tracking through Marshall Fields, Carson, Pirie, Scott, and a million stores looking for a nail clipper for less than $.49. I walked all the way to Lake Michigan from LaSalle Street and then took the subway downtown, crisscrossing every street in the Chicago Loop. By the time I had walked several miles, I had to have lunch and still found nothing for less than $.47. But I had left that store way behind hours ago and ultimately had to return to the first store to buy it for $.49 because it was nearly 10 pm and all the other stores were closed. My friends had long forgotten about me and were nearly in bed.
5. In spite of all this, this process did incorporate some good things into me, like honesty. I do not know of a higher standard of probity held by anyone beyond her. She never owed anyone even a penny for more than a day. One time when I was in grade school, I had to borrow a dime from my buddy Billy to buy lunch. When Mom got home, she asked me how school went, and I told her I borrowed a dime from Billy for lunch. She proceeded directly to her purse and said, “Here’s the dime. Take it to Billy.”
I said, “But, Mom, it’s only a dime, and Billy lives way up the street.”
She came back, “I don’t care if it is a penny and Billy lives in New York. Take the dime back to him now.” That principle was pressure-stamped permanently on my life with a drop-forge example that day. None else was ever needed.
I once heard my mother say to one of her friends, “I could lay a million dollars on the table and come back a year later, and it would still be there. Dale would not have taken a single penny.” And that is a true statement. When I work for another and have license to spend an employer’s money for expenses, I will nearly always spend as little as possible. But that did not just come from ferrying that dime down to Billy’s house. It came from everything I have written here. I can still see her fingers raw with open sores and cuts from pressing parts into one another at Crosley’s. When my friends received money from their parents, it was if they had been given a divine commandment to spend it all. But whenever my mother gave me money to spend, rarely did I not bring back every penny she gave me because I knew what she went through to get it. Once when I was in high school, she received a telegram that she had been laid off. She was very discouraged and showed me the check she had earned that week - $25. I just could not spend money she gave me.
This single incident about buying a shirt is a snapshot of the first 18 years of my life. My mother was a powerful, righteous influence. Many things our parents strive to fuse into us don’t stick and we dismiss them early, but some things not so easily, if at all. They bore into our very fiber and marrow and seem to permeate our DNA. As a single mother, she worked with a blade that had two razor-sharp edges. One side made a strategic cut into one part of my human nature that nearly amputated an inherent tendency that many people have about other people’s money and possessions. The other side, the part this story was written about, sliced through part of the bone and severed the nerves. It will never completely heal. Nevertheless, though it has had life-long effects that few understand, even that cut has often been beneficial to me in many ways; it has saved me many times.
6. I have been unable to completely shake this malady about which I have primarily written for many years. Even if I won the PowerBall lottery, it would still be as if I had been born with a birth defect. Not a lot would change. But after much effort, it has gotten better. I have been able to buy something without physically going to every store in the United States. But in a way it has gotten worse. I now have the Internet, and, although I don’t have to take a bus or walk anymore, I now visit every web page and online store on Earth. And maybe one day the moon and Mars. Because there are so many stores and it takes so long to check for what I might want to buy, I am certainly not getting any use out of it. And…even if I did buy it, I am not sure I would have wanted it anyway.
Born in 1906, my mother was an extremely conservative country woman who was the most comical lady I have ever met, although she never knew she was funny. She was raised in the hills and hollers of Kentucky in a 3 room house that had neither a bathroom nor an outhouse with a 5 other brothers and sisters and a mother and father who were born before Abraham Lincoln was dead, all of whom were as poor as the proverbial church mouse. The light and heat were by kerosene hurricane lamps, a wood burning stove in the bedroom/living room, and an old-fashioned wood cooking stove in the kitchen where she slept.
She never made it past the seventh grade and always seemed embarrassed about this, even in front of me. Sometimes I would come home from school and see her with her legs up over the easy chair studying some of my books. My sister told me that in her last days as mini strokes began to overtake her, she grabbed the encyclopedia at the letter "A" and started reading it word for word to the end. When she finally went to her reward, she was in the letter "M". During the Depression and at the end of her career, she worked in hotels and cleaned offices for Cincinnati Gas & Electric. Between those bookends, she labored in factories, putting parts together for Crosley Radio. In her late 60s and 70s after retirement, she worked as a maid in the locker rooms of a suburban country club in Northern Kentucky. Of course, she rode the bus.
When my father died, the C&O RR transferred to her his railroad pension that was paid to her monthly. It was small in 1946, but instead of spending it on herself or raising her baby with it, she put each check in the bank for a paltry interest. She did that for 18 years. All of my days in school she would sing into my ears that one day I was going to go to college. She never said how. Just that I was. She beat that into me so much that when the last day of high school came, it was just another three-month break before everything resumed as before. Those 18 years of monthly deposits from my father’s railroad pension to help her raise her child instead paid for seven and a half years of private education through college and seminary “so that you will not have to work like me.” I was the first and only child to go to college in my family. It covered every penny and a little bit more. She saved meager amounts for a long time and rarely spent a dime on anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary. Fortunately - and unfortunately - she drilled much of this philosophy into me.
From my earliest recollection, she had a green sofa that my father bought her in the early 1940s. Almost 60 years later, she still had that thing. There were places in it where it was worn threadbare, and it sank like the Titanic when your backside fell upon it. I was never sure if I was sitting on the floor or the bottom of the frame. If anyone ever got into it, he wasn’t coming out of it if there wasn’t somebody there to pull him up like he was coming out of a deep hole. Whenever I suggested that she buy another one, Mom always said there was nothing wrong with that one.
So off to town on this Saturday we started hiking to buy a simple shirt. Now about six houses up the street from our house there lived a Great Dane that belonged to the Poindexters. He was about the same size as a zebra and always lounged in the darkness about 75 yards deep in his long backyard where he used the sidewalk along his house as a racetrack. Somehow he always seemed to know when my mother was coming up the street. My mother, who was 40 years older than I, always walked on the inside of the sidewalk and plodded along with her head down contemplating deep thoughts, like how not to spend any money. The Lord created this dog specifically to teach my mother the brevity of life. Somehow just before he ever laid eyes on her, he caught her scent from about 100 yards out and calculated exactly where her face was going to be as she coasted within inches of the fence that contained him. Like a greyhound bus coming through an intersection at night, he appeared out of dead silence from around the corner of his territory and roared like a lion into my mother’s freckled face while lunging and snapping at her with his dripping fangs. Adrenalin fired into Mom’s veins like water from a fire hydrant and every nerve in her body yanked her backward like a freight train taking a mailbag off of a hook at 80 mph. It was always the same. Her hands always flew up like she was being mauled by a grizzly and then flared into a high-pitched rage, screaming out, “OH (insert words here)!!! I HATE THAT DAWG!”
At night it got even better. Rover sensed his divine calling, a grand purpose to his existence on earth, which was to scare the crap out of my mother. He had studied and stored my mother’s schedule and habits into his memory bank. He knew just when she would be in her own peaceful world and lugging a bag of groceries back to the house since she always came home from the opposite direction as she had left. So he waited and salivated at the thought that he had one more chance that day to sink his teeth into her head. His yard was wide. This gave him a spacious view over open real estate to spot her as he sat way back in his yard shrouded by a blanket of blackness. As soon as he spotted her, his head came up off his paws like a German Shepherd, and his ears turned and adjusted like radar to take in her footsteps and hone in on her. He licked his chops, measured her tracks, and calculated the exact spot in her progress at which he would launch his carcass as she slinked unawares along the border of his terrain. When she hit the magic spot, he jettisoned off his hind legs like an Apollo rocket and stretched himself out like a cheetah as he silently careened down his route, careful only to hit the racetrack with his cushioned pads while he curled his toenails just slightly off the pavement so as to not give away his speeding presence for maximum effect. Like Dracula ejecting himself into your face from behind a castle wall, Rover slammed into the fence at full speed and nearly came half way across the sidewalk to make a grab for her, thundering a guttural roar like a Harley-Davidson and flashing his incisors like scissors in what little light there was. The effect was the same as if somebody had come up behind you on a pitch-black, lonely, country road at night and blasted an air horn from a locomotive or from the Queen Mary. In daylight, he nearly gave her a myocardial infarction, but at night when you couldn’t see a thing in your periphery, Rover jangled her entire nervous system into temporary convulsions. Adrenalin gushed out of her pituitary and hit the farthest walls of her body from toe to brain, and the extra pressure of the blood rushing through her arteries probably dislodged plaque from inside her veins. She nearly had a stroke.
As we dawdled up the street unawares this Saturday morning, he rushed the fence and almost had her again. She jacked back like a bolt of lightning, nearly leaping into the traffic as she repeated the same spontaneous refrain that only he could get from her. Right at that moment, my mother, a slender woman, could have lifted an automobile, and if she could have laid her hands on that miserable canine male descendant of a female dog in heat, she would have thrown his sorry backside across the Ohio River.
If it hadn’t been before, that dog put my mother’s mind into a heightened state of acute shopping awareness. The retailers were going to have a hard day today getting her to go for anything more than the cheapest shirt money could buy.
When my Mom went shopping, she worked off of 4 immutable, guiding principles.
Number one was the price. When it came to buying anything, in her hand she held the one card that trumped all others. There was none higher than this one. You could have had 4 Aces, a Full House, and a Royal Flush. You could throw down an avalanche of shirt cards about construction, quality, style, value, looks, fit, color, and what it matched. You could think that the cards you held in your hand would win the table. But Mom only needed ONE card. As far as she was concerned, just one card in the deck was the Rook. She played it first in every hand and won every game with it. She was like a price-scanning machine at Home Depot when you wave a product over a glass in the self-service line. She only registered the price, and it usually went something like this.
Over the years, we had marked out a retail shopping highway through Covington, Kentucky, that started near the rock bottom of the pricing scale and ascended upwards looking for a miracle. We always started with Montgomery Wards. I strolled over to the counter where boys’ shirts were stacked in this joint and immediately laid my hands on what looked like the kind of threads I wanted. Holding the plastic bag high, I waved it in front of Mom like a red cape in front of a bull and declared, “Here it is. I found it. I’ll take this one.” Those words meant nothing, and I knew it. I had merely announced that the ritual had begun, and I had loosed the hounds to find the scent. It was as if the announcer at a horse racetrack had yelled, “And they’re off!!” It put Mom into her normal Depression-thinking mode so we could get on with the day’s routine as I had seen it a thousand times. We weren’t going to buy this shirt. We never bought the first of anything. That was rule number one even though it had never been stated.
But it started the ball rolling. My announcement had turned Mom in her tracks like a serpent that sensed something ominous had made a noise behind it and closed in to investigate the threat. She looked up with a skeptical scowl on her face and sidled around the corner of the display table away from the sale rack she instinctively followed. Her knowing hands curled around the suspect rag and slowly withdrew it from my hands. She pored over it like a financial planner inspecting a suspicious competitor’s products. I saw her eyes skirt the material, but they locked on the little white sticker divulging the price. They stopped and stared long and hard as if a dermatologist had spotted a melanoma.
Buried within my mother’s mind and cataloged there were the lowest prices from the 1920’s through the Depression, and right now she was staring in disbelief at a skyrocketing price compared to 1933. She recalled the day that shirt cost less that one dollar. The shirt she caressed could have been made of pure gold and studded with precious stones, but all it did was merely establish a price point. Besides, we had ALL DAY and two states separated by the Mason-Dixon line to scour for the cheapest and yet the best shirt money could buy.
She bent over and whispered in my ear, “Dale, this thang is too high. $4.99 is too much. We can get it for less.” I knew that was coming. I had been through this many times before. So I dropped that thing like a dead weight and started to head for the door as we proceeded to the second stop on the route, Sears and Roebuck, about two blocks away. I was starting to get hungry.
Sears was similarly priced to Wards. Still too high. So we headed to Penneys, a block away. I latched quickly onto a shirt and hoisted it high for Mom’s inspection. It was also cheaper. But it was too early to claim victory as Mom sauntered over as cautious as a deer. Her eyes were already narrowing and drawing in on the price tag from six feet out like an owl that could spot a cockroach from 100 yards in pitch darkness. Doubt creased her brow. $4.97. “As soon as I saw her lean in and watched the telling words form on her lips, “We can get it…,” it splashed softly on the counter to be forgotten.
The Parisian on Pike Street was next. It was much more upscale than the other 3. Of the hundreds of times we had been in there, only once did we ever buy anything. But Mom always went there because there was the chance - sort of like winning PowerBall - that we would get a lower price than Penney’s. The country club boys in Florence and Erlanger got their stuff here. Even though on this day they had shirts ONE PENNY more than Wards and hundreds of shirts we had already seen, that one penny was the same thing as paying $250 for a pair of True Religion jeans compared to $12 Levis at Walmart. “I’ve seen the day when I didn’t have a penny,” was always her be-all and end-all argument to the one penny ploy.
So it was back down Pike Street to Coppins Department Store. This was store 5 on the circuit. But embedded in here was a shirt for $4.95. I was hopeful that she would get tired and give in, but Mom was a low-price shopping triathlete. The obsession for the lowest price in the Midwest was like the lead dog on an Iditarod sled that my Mom rode into the shopping wilderness. It led and pulled her to the finish line until she could utter the words, “We found the lowest price.” All Mom saw as we reached mid-afternoon was the coming of the Midnight sun. So with, “We can get it cheaper,” we went up the street to Eilerman’s Department Store.
This was the high end in Covington. In all of our shopping in 18 years till I went to college, we never bought one thing out of that joint. But we always went there. It was sort of like dragging yourself all over the Cincinnati Zoo all day till you could hardly stand up, but you just had to go to the monkey house because you hadn’t been there yet. $5.00 plus shirts sent us out the front door where we stood on Madison Avenue now famished. We had been looking for over 3 hours to save another penny. We could have crossed the street to Kresge’s and packed in a club sandwich at their food counter and bought a shirt at Coppins for $4.95.
But no. Mom looked to her right. And there sticking up above the horizon were the skyscrapers of the Holy City, downtown Cincinnati on the other side of the Ohio River. Mom’s eyes grew distant as she envisioned savings galore if we crossed that river - a mtaphoric Jordan - into Canaan land and walked through Ohio to find one or two more pennies off the price. So we boarded a bus and paid the fare to get to the Ohio goldfields as if we were crossing the High Sierras and descending into Sutter’s Mill.
As soon as we dismounted the bus and set foot on the super highway of fashion within the Queen City of Ohio, Mom felt the need to fasten on the feed bag. So we slogged up the hill from the bus station and landed in Mom’s favorite restaurant. Mills Cafeteria. Cafeteria is the key word here.
Mom did not go into restaurants. Why? Because it was like buying a shirt or anything else. She wanted to SEE the product and examine the price mounted above each dish. She wasn’t taking any chances. So we always ate at cafeterias where the entire menu sat in the open air. It didn’t make any difference where we went. She rooted out a cafeteria. If we were traveling by train on vacation, as soon as the train jerked to a stop and the conductor swore the train would be there when we came back, she risked bandits falling upon our possessions by leaving all the luggage on the train and heading out like a demon in a walking sprint and asking everyone along the way if they had seen a cafeteria anywhere. She only purchased train food if there was no hope of a cafeteria near the tracks. In fact, before we reached any city of some size where she had been informed that we would make a prolonged stop, she would say to me, “Don’t worry, when we get to Omaha (or wherever), we’re going to find a cafeteria."
To her, a cafeteria was the same thing as a midnight buffet on a luxury cruise. We charged off the train one time in Las Vegas when the conductor told us the temperature was 125 degrees and bolted down Fremont Street like we were crossing the Sahara on bare feet and found a you-know-what. We never took a bus because that cost money. We walked or ran. We ate like we could hear the footsteps of the chaplain and the guards at San Quentin coming to a condemned man’s cell just before midnight and then raced back to the train station to see if we had been left behind with our luggage on board.
So the price of the shirt was steadily ascending. We had now added 2 round-trip bus fares to Cincinnati, wear and tear on our footwear, the price of 2 meals, and about 5 hours on the clock. We were soon going to be buying new shoes before we were going to buy a shirt. The route that we had staked out ahead of us was the equivalent of walking through all four floors of The Mall of America about 4x. With fresh horses, we started out on the second leg of the journey by stalking the shirt departments at McAlpin’s, Mabley and Carew, Pogues, and then Shillitoes, all major Cincinnati department stores. These places had sales like everybody else, but by the time darkness fell over Southern Ohio, we still had nothing, and the cheapest shirt was still at Coppins, which was now closed.
I don’t care what it was, whenever Mom wanted to buy me or herself anything, we saddled up like we were taking horses overnight on the Appalachian Trail. We scouted every possible store there was to make sure that we got the lowest price known to mankind. And after Mom did buy something, if it was ever discovered that she had paid a single penny too much, she would hitch up the horses, drag it back, and buy the other one. If that wasn’t enough, she used to embarrass the pants off of me when she at last moseyed up to the cash register and whispered to the clerk, “Can you take a little off of this? I see a spot here that should be taken into account.”
This was the acquisition ladder we climbed when Mom went shopping. But sometimes she stepped off the ladder and went into the basement to survey all the previously-owned crap at Goodwill and St. Vincent DePaul. I’ll never forget the time I accompanied her to one of those joints down the street from our house. On that ignominious day, she bought me a pair of candy apple red corduroy pants to wear to school with my used, brown vintage wingtip shoes from the roaring ‘20s that she snatched off the shelf. They had white shoe polish on the smooth part in the front and around the side. When I put that costume on, I was doing some peer pressure heavy lifting. I put those pants and shoes on out of guilt for wasting my mother’s money if I didn’t wear them. But it was like stepping into an Ultimate Fighter cage without any warrior experience. I took abuse. Every time I showed up in those blood red pants with the Speakeasy wingtips from about the 5th to the 7th grade, the whole place fell to the floor holding their sides in laughter like I was doing a stand-up comedy routine at The Purple Onion in San Francisco.
The second and third immutable guiding principles of shopping go together, no special dates or surprises and no wrapping. In all my years, I can only remember one time when she bought me a Christmas present and delivered it to me as a surprise on December 25. She didn’t deliver things on the designated day - birthdays or any other time. There were no surprises, and nothing was ever wrapped. Like every mother, she bought me gifts. She just didn’t do it like everybody else. She had her own way.
My mother would always buy me something FOR Christmas. But I just never got it ON Christmas. I would likely get it sometime in November or December 2nd or the 17th. Or any other day. Maybe even After Christmas. But never ON Christmas. So for me, Christmas was always anticlimatic. Only one time did I ever get anything exactly on Christmas Day…and it was unwrapped. Wrapping was a waste of money since I was going to tear the paper to pieces anyway.
This practice carried over into all gift-buying. I remember one time my mother announced to me out of the blue early in the month of September in my junior year of high school that she was going to buy me a gold watch for my 17th birthday, which was on November 1. So what did she do? We headed off right then and there for Motch Jewelers. I picked out a 21 jewel Bulova automatic. Out of the case it came and on to my wrist. That day. Right there. Nearly 2 months before my 17th birthday. No surprise other than telling me that morning. No wrapping or party or anything like that. November 1 came and went without notice or any particular acknowledgment. It was always that way except for one time when I was in the 3rd grade when I had a birthday party.
Now why did she do this gift buying weeks, months before the occasion, you ask? Well, the answer is simple because I heard her say it many, many times. “I was going to buy it for you on your birthday anyway. So why wait? You might as well start getting the use our of it.” The occasion or date was irrelevant. With this kind of logic, she should have bought it when I was born.
The people of the Depression and earlier generations had things down inside them that we will probably never plumb. One lady I know said to me that she didn’t know if I was describing my mother or hers. I knew a multi-millionaire in Michigan who came from poverty and then passed through the Depression. He once told me that he felt guilty every time he spent $10 for a meal. My mother passed down to me things that probably were passed to her and came from experiences she had as a young girl. I have seen the house on the top of the Kentucky ridge where she and her siblings were raised with paper thin walls where in the winter time, she told me, she would wake up in the kitchen and water in the bucket was a solid block of ice. I know her oldest sister, Musetta, died in 1910, and I have seen the Potter’s Field in Beaumont, Texas, where she is buried. I saw my grandmother wear one of those bonnets they wore in the TV show “Bonanza” that women wore on the wagon trains. I doubt that my mother had birthday parties like we know, and the Christmases I knew were probably replicated for me in some small way out of her experience. Asking a clerk to discount an article of clothing was probably something she saw here parents do in the General stores. Presents, if there were any, were also probably not wrapped and she probably did not experience spontaneous surprises either. On several occasions, she told me that if she got an ice cream cone as a child, it was one of the most wonderful things she could remember. So wasting money - and not saving it - was not a trivial picadillo; it was a mortal sin, and I often was reminded of this even later in life. Parents pass these things along, and sometimes they become indelible marks on our personalities and habits. Good or bad.
This brings me to the 4th immutable shopping principle my mother unwittingly employed - uncertainty. Mom’s philosophy about buying an article was that a thing should be hunted down throughout the entire universe, handled, inspected, and then when desire was satisfied, selected if you were ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT. But even then that didn’t really do the trick because my mother would ask me a thousand times after I had finally scrutinized and appraised a potential purchase, “Dale, do you like it?” And the conversation went something like this:
“Yes, Mom, I like it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Do you like the red color better than the blue one?”
“Yes, I think I like the red one the best.”
“Are you sure?”
“I think so.”
“Well, if you don’t like it, then get the blue one.”
“No, I like it the red one.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well…no, I’m not sure. I thought I was. But now I’m not.”
All of this kind of stuff works on a kid and stays with him no matter how old he gets all through his life. I got asked if I was sure so many times that the only thing I was sure of was that I wasn’t sure. After hearing it a million times, I am not sure I’m sure of anything anymore. I still run this whole scenario through my brain every time I walk into a store and buy anything. I’ll do graduate school research on an item by reading every word on the box, take the package apart, compare it with every similar item in the store, and when I am satisfied that it has met all qualifications, I’ll take it and head for the cash register. When I get about two feet away, my mother resurrects from the grave in Grant County and whispers what only I can hear, “Are you sure?” It will stop me dead in my tracks. So I march back to where I found it and set it down. Then I say, “This is crazy.” I quickly cancel the voice in my head and pick it back up again. But before I can get to the front of the store, I run into the wall of misgiving again. No, I am not sure. So I set it down again. Then I pick it back up. I usually put it back for the last time and then continue an inventory of every store in the city, if not the United States, before I am absolutely sure. Even then, I second guess myself to infinity. Indecisiveness is a lingering effect, and when uncertainty is mingled with price considerations, that is a formidable foe.
One time I was going to buy a sweater when I lived in Michigan. So I went through all the malls and likely stores in Western Michigan where I would likely find what I wanted in two different cities. I eliminated every sweater but one and bought it because it was the last one. But that meant nothing because I was about to take off on two driving trips, one to Philadelphia and the other to California. On the way to Philadelphia, I perused a million sweaters in cities and stores for 800 miles. And did the same coming back. I was convinced up to that point that I had the sweater I wanted. But the trip to California was coming up, and I would be gone for a few weeks. I passed through Chicago and scoured my favorite haunts and all the outlets and major department stores and small town malls that I could get to as I did my normal working job. By the time I got to San Francisco, I could have been a buyer for Macy’s. I whisked on down to the Los Angeles area and combed many of those places too. And for what? A talking sweater in its original bag in the back seat of the car that chanted its peroration like a magpie, “Are you sure?” Had I found something, I would have returned the sweater to its original chain. But I did not. After about 6,000 miles of driving, I finally lighted on the sweater I bought in Michigan.
But it was endless. I don’t know how many times I have ended up taking things back - even as I do today - because I wasn’t sure. So once I bought something, I still didn’t own it. It was in my hands. I paid for it. I was home looking at it. But I did not own it yet because I wasn’t sure. With my mother, she made me run the Gauntlet of Uncertainty to try to get to the end of the tunnel without any lingering, sniggering doubts. Even when I was sure, there were whispers of dubiety.
So the bottom line for all of this is the following:
1. I don’t enjoy Christmas or birthday parties or most holidays like other people do. They make me feel uncomfortable, and I would rather be elsewhere. They are unpleasant experiences and also among the most boring days of any year.
2. I also find it hard to buy gifts. Surprise gifts are virtually impossible to engineer. I just can’t do it. I take Linda to the store and encourage her to buy what she wants, but it’s not going to be a surprise. That’s because I am not sure if she will want what I buy her. I think she may be a bit like me. Besides, that is how I ever saw gift buying. My mother’s philosophy was to buy something if you are sure you really like it. Thus, you had to see it, handle it, think about it for the rest of your life, possibly return it, and then hike all over the creation to find what you are sure about. That is how I do it. Gifts that are meant for surprises can’t go through that regimen. Most surprise gifts I ever bought seemed to be disappointing to the recipient.
3. The really funny thing is that I nearly break into a sweat and churn over trivial purchases between $1 and $50. But I can make a decision to buy a $650,000 townhouse without a second thought, which I have done.
4. Another residual of being raised like I was is that I can’t buy a single thing without going to a public library and pursuing doctoral research to make sure that I buy the best product obtainable for the optimum price. This has become a by-product of merchandising.
For example, when I went to my first year in college in Chicago, I woke up one Saturday morning and said to myself, “I need a nail clipper.” My buddies were thought they would go with me to a drugstore about three blocks away while I purchased one. I got into this drug store and found a rack on a counter near the front that twirled around with a display of nail clippers for fingers and toes. One of my friends grabbed one and said, “Here it is. Take this.” Suddenly the trigger carefully manufactured and installed in my soul in my formative years slammed down on the firing pin, fired, and like lightning, re-cocked and slid another round into the chamber. It was as automatic as a Glock. As if seized by a space alien overcoming a dupe in a horror movie, I turned like a cobra. My beady eyes laser-scanned the price tag. $0.49.
“What?” I said. “Forty-nine cents for this thing? That’s an outrage. It’s too high. I can find a cheaper one.” Remember, you never take the first of anything. I had the first point of Mom’s shopping code nailed down and in place. That was merely a price point that initiated the hunt. It was about 10 am. So I spent the rest of the day like a bloodhound tracking through Marshall Fields, Carson, Pirie, Scott, and a million stores looking for a nail clipper for less than $.49. I walked all the way to Lake Michigan from LaSalle Street and then took the subway downtown, crisscrossing every street in the Chicago Loop. By the time I had walked several miles, I had to have lunch and still found nothing for less than $.47. But I had left that store way behind hours ago and ultimately had to return to the first store to buy it for $.49 because it was nearly 10 pm and all the other stores were closed. My friends had long forgotten about me and were nearly in bed.
5. In spite of all this, this process did incorporate some good things into me, like honesty. I do not know of a higher standard of probity held by anyone beyond her. She never owed anyone even a penny for more than a day. One time when I was in grade school, I had to borrow a dime from my buddy Billy to buy lunch. When Mom got home, she asked me how school went, and I told her I borrowed a dime from Billy for lunch. She proceeded directly to her purse and said, “Here’s the dime. Take it to Billy.”
I said, “But, Mom, it’s only a dime, and Billy lives way up the street.”
She came back, “I don’t care if it is a penny and Billy lives in New York. Take the dime back to him now.” That principle was pressure-stamped permanently on my life with a drop-forge example that day. None else was ever needed.
I once heard my mother say to one of her friends, “I could lay a million dollars on the table and come back a year later, and it would still be there. Dale would not have taken a single penny.” And that is a true statement. When I work for another and have license to spend an employer’s money for expenses, I will nearly always spend as little as possible. But that did not just come from ferrying that dime down to Billy’s house. It came from everything I have written here. I can still see her fingers raw with open sores and cuts from pressing parts into one another at Crosley’s. When my friends received money from their parents, it was if they had been given a divine commandment to spend it all. But whenever my mother gave me money to spend, rarely did I not bring back every penny she gave me because I knew what she went through to get it. Once when I was in high school, she received a telegram that she had been laid off. She was very discouraged and showed me the check she had earned that week - $25. I just could not spend money she gave me.
This single incident about buying a shirt is a snapshot of the first 18 years of my life. My mother was a powerful, righteous influence. Many things our parents strive to fuse into us don’t stick and we dismiss them early, but some things not so easily, if at all. They bore into our very fiber and marrow and seem to permeate our DNA. As a single mother, she worked with a blade that had two razor-sharp edges. One side made a strategic cut into one part of my human nature that nearly amputated an inherent tendency that many people have about other people’s money and possessions. The other side, the part this story was written about, sliced through part of the bone and severed the nerves. It will never completely heal. Nevertheless, though it has had life-long effects that few understand, even that cut has often been beneficial to me in many ways; it has saved me many times.
6. I have been unable to completely shake this malady about which I have primarily written for many years. Even if I won the PowerBall lottery, it would still be as if I had been born with a birth defect. Not a lot would change. But after much effort, it has gotten better. I have been able to buy something without physically going to every store in the United States. But in a way it has gotten worse. I now have the Internet, and, although I don’t have to take a bus or walk anymore, I now visit every web page and online store on Earth. And maybe one day the moon and Mars. Because there are so many stores and it takes so long to check for what I might want to buy, I am certainly not getting any use out of it. And…even if I did buy it, I am not sure I would have wanted it anyway.