What Some People Need Is a Calico Cat

[Afterword: An earlier draft of this article appeared on Associated Content, during the time when AC was shortchanging me on promised page-view payments. Some readers hated it...enough that I now feel that it's a part of my public identity that needs to be available to everyone.]

Calico cats are said to attract money. I didn't notice Patchnose, Polly, or Mogwai attracting a great deal of money while they lived with me...but I've not had a profitable job or an adequate month's income since Mogwai left...and my cash flow has been fractionally better since Bisquit gave birth to a calico kitten.

Mogwai is one of three sisters. In a way their coats do look alike. Mogwai has a mix of black and orange fur on top with white spots below. Grayzel has a similar pattern of gray and buff fur on top with cream below. Bisquit is white with buff spots, similar to her sisters', and one small "smudge" that appears to be dust or ashes but is actually a permanent patch of gray fur.

Mogwai never seemed to want to be an indoor cat. When she went out for a walk with a male friend, she probably didn't realize that some friendly humans in the neighborhood were still grieving for an older relative of hers who had died recently. She is, however, very sensitive to what humans say and how they feel about her; she knows most humans think her face is "funny" at best, and was probably glad to meet humans who had learned to appreciate the way she looks. I could hardly complain when these people latched on to her. I still have two beautiful, clever, almost-calico cats, and Mogwai has a loving home.

But then one job ended, and another job fell through, and then another job fell through, and then there was a bizarre episode where the customer wasn't able to complete paperwork because it turned out that the customer wasn't competent to hire me. For eight months I lived on what I earned from AC and flea markets (I didn't even try to get to upscale craft shows). It averaged about $100 a month. Apparently Grayzel and Bisquit, the almost-calico cats, don't have magical power to attract money (har har).

The best way to find my home has always been to trace the sound of eagles screeching and Abraham Lincoln yelling. There are people who can pinch a penny or a dollar harder than I do, but so far as I know none of them was born in the United States. However, even I can't bring my cost of living in this country below $100 a month. Not having a phone has definitely cramped my writing style.

The weekend before writing the first draft of this article, while burning trash in the wood stove to heat up my rice and beans, I saw an article that was featured in the Kingsport Times-News for December 2010, about a family whose financial needs were so dire that Times-News staff felt they needed more "Christmas benevolence" than even a local charitable organization had offered them.

This family consists of an unemployed young man and his partly disabled, but ambulatory, father, who are apparently living in an old, crumbling house on the father's Social Security pension, which is apparently about $1000 per month. Although the charitable organization had promised to demolish and rebuild their house after the holidays, the young man had a whole list of Christmas wishes newspaper readers were invited to make true.

I don't want to make too many jokes at their expense, because obviously the newspaper couldn't print the whole list of their actual cost of living. People living with physical disabilities have expenses the rest of us couldn't even imagine. However, I did chortle out loud when I read the young man's complaints about his broken-down bed. He can't cut and sand a piece of plywood? Would this be why he's unemployed?

All writers are by definition overprivileged; people who are really poverty-stricken don't have time to write (and they certainly don't have computers). I'm self-employed. I have nice clothes and a beautiful home and obscenely rich relatives. I'm not about to apply for any kind of "public assistance," mortgage my home, or even ask any of the "Oily McFilthy" kinfolks for a loan...but that's partly because I think either prostitution or starvation would be a more ethical alternative to any of those things. It's not because I have necessarily been eating every day. (Yes, Gentle Readers, you need to use that "support" button at the top of the page.)

After burning the old newspaper, I thought back to those FacTapes on which I worked for so many hours in the 1990s. George Peters was a disabled veteran; his combined VA and SSI pensions amounted to about $1000 per month. He got the idea of doing the FacTapes, and hiring young readers and researchers to add to the facts his retired and/or disabled friends could contribute, from his felt need to give some of this money back to the community since it was more than adequate for his needs. I think the other senior citizens who worked on the project had pensions smaller than his. Somehow they managed to launch the project, and pay their able-bodied employees promptly and adequately.

While my rice and beans boiled, I remembered how I met my husband. His older brother's wife had walked out when the brother became disabled. My husband's wife had bankrupted him, then thrown him out since he wasn't meeting her financial needs. These men were sharing a basement flat in northwest Washington. Somehow they managed to afford a shabby chic apartment, budget-conscious mini-vacations, and adequate pay for adequate help, on a combined income of about $2500 a month.

As I ate my rice and beans I remembered how this bankrupt man and I had got a relative to co-sign for our little house in Hyattsville, Maryland. The house was so small, cheap, and poorly built as to be amusing. We didn't whine for handouts to make the improvements. We made the improvements we deemed necessary, and laughed at our funny little house with its low ceilings and narrow hallways (the builder was obviously a small man and didn't like larger people much). Somehow we managed to work at discounts for people we considered deserving, and contribute to charities, on a combined income of about $1500 a month.

His degree had been in economics. Each of us kept a savings account; I never even asked how much money he was saving. The idea was that if I outlived him, I would get whatever equity we had in the house, and a stepson I've never met would get his savings account. (The stepson was actually a more distant relative whom my husband had legally adopted.) For more than ten years after he went bankrupt, I didn't know whether my husband had been able to save enough to cover the cost of stepson's attending the funeral. Then he became ill and needed help with mail and accounting, and I discovered that this account had reached six figures.

Whether stepson had actually died, or the despicable ex-wife only represented herself as the heir to a quarter-million-dollar estate that had stepson's name on it, I would have considered to be their problem...if the ex-wife hadn't also sabotaged my business and used other dirty tricks to cheat me out of the house. I am the widow of a very smart, rather rich man, who's left me about as much as the Oily McFilthy relatives ever gave me--some nice gift items and personal souvenirs.

When I came back to Gate City, Virginia, I remember working out that $200 a month was what it would cost me to survive here, where I own a house and the cost of living is relatively uninflated. On $600 a month I could live comfortably. On $1000 a month I could restore my historic, and crumbling, house, and then open a store, and also help some people I consider needier than these guys who were written up in the Times-News...who aren't asking the newspapers to report their financial problems. Long story short: since I've been living at home, I've never actually earned $1000 a month, no matter how many hours of work I've put in.

Most of my neighbors think their needs are greater than mine. I'm sorry to report that in a few cases this is actually true. In most cases, it's based on the way Americans who are not Creative Tightwads overestimate a Creative Tightwad's income based on what a Creative Tightwad is able to do with money. I have lots of nice designer-label clothes, because the only ready-made clothes I buy "new" are shoes and underwear...and so on.

I don't want any "help" or handouts of any kind. Young people want and need financial help to start their adult lives and support their children. I'm not young; I've already enjoyed several years of adult life, have been very happy, and have no children.

I'm not depressive. Most of the time I'm not even discouraged. I'm Irish; I inherited a certain ability to laugh and enjoy the moment, which may be a blessing but is in no way to be confused with any moral virtue. I might sell a posh sweater this afternoon and take care of my financial obligations for the rest of the month. The main reason why I've not tried to give up on self-employment and take a "survival job" is that employers do not actually hire 40-year-olds who try to compete with teenyboppers for the "survival jobs," but I'm not sure that I'd be willing to become a wage slave even if there was a reasonable prospect of my being hired as one. Life (after a time of real happiness) is nothing much to lose, but young men think it is...and I'm not young.

But I have some news for the people who think that money has nothing to do with happiness. They are so wrong. I think it was Ben Franklin who observed that an income that exceeds your expenses by one monetary unit equals financial happiness, and an income that falls short of your expenses by one monetary unit equals misery. This is true. I may have a naturally cheerful disposition but I am not happy with this $100 (or less) per month--and I would be happy with a steady, honestly earned income of $1000 per month.

If I had $1000 to look forward to, once a month, I would able to make several people's Christmas wishes come true. Those people would not include the young man who told the Times-News how desperately he needs a new bed. Unfortunately, not only do I know several hundred people whose needs are greater than his, but some of them even live in the United States. Some of them belong to what may be perceived as the more affluent class--the people who can at least afford to define themselves as self-employed or as small business owners.

I think of a small business owner who was required, due to protectionist legislation, to spend so much time and money launching a restaurant that, by the time the restaurant opened, she was having to ask her church and her friends to help stretch her Social Security pension to cover her mortgage and heating bill at home.

Or I think of a fellow vendor at the Weber City Flea Market. Partly it was being seen with young, good-looking partners that made people guess his age to be about fifty. Actually he was over seventy and, while walking around the market and making reciprocal good-will purchases, he told the rest of us about several surgeries and painful conditions he'd had. Working was his painkiller of choice, and, most of the time, the only one he needed--and that was his downfall. When people weren't buying enough of the secondhand junk he refurbished and resold, or the hand-painted primitive art and gospel music tapes he also sold, he let himself be talked into sharing some medication he didn't need but could easily obtain. Obviously this was a very bad idea, but wouldn't support for his honest work have helped more than treating this old man like a drug dealer?

Or I think of more than one entrepreneur-type friend who opened a business with the idea that the business was going to help several people, including me, make money...and the businesses never have made money even for their official owners. One storekeeper who's checked back with me over the years has put his house up for sale, to finance the business--and not been able to sell it.

It's not always possible to tell by looking which residents of Scott County really can't afford to support each other's efforts. It is certainly easy, for those of us who've walked four miles to spend six hours in an unheated building in hope of earning money for groceries, to lump all the "lookers" together as hateful, un-neighborly people who want us to starve. There are people like that in Scott County; there are welfare cheats, and even a few social worker types, who'd rather see more of us becoming welfare cheats than see other people taking responsibility for our local economy.

Maybe that was part of that other man's temptation when he offered people an opportunity to misuse medications and make themselves sicker. I don't know how many of the "lookers" in the flea markets were actually aware of my dire financial need, and how many were as cold and hungry as I've been, during last winter's Big Freeze. The frightening thing is that, when you're doing honest work and you know some people are sabotaging and ridiculing what you do, you can reach a point where you don't even care which of the people who aren't trading with you are cold or hungry. You want to post a sign that says "No Smiling or Laughing Allowed Without Minimum $50 Purchase."

Of course you don't actually do that. You're still a member of the overprivileged class, and you still have your education and your nice things and your conscience that tells you that you're here to help the poor by not pretending to be one of them...and you wonder what your allegedly Christian alleged neighbors will do if you actually freeze to death when your electricity is cut off, or burn up with your home when you can't report a fire because your phone is cut off. Or starve.

The ideal of reclaiming local responsibility for our local economy is very new and strange to many Americans. I still buy groceries at supermarkets too. Maybe the question we should ask ourselves is whether we're making any discretionary purchases from non-local sources that we could be making from local sources. If you bought what passes for a meal at McDonalds during the past month, you missed an opportunity to support a local restaurant that needed your support. If you bought something "just to look at" from Wal-Mart, you missed a chance to show due respect to the vendors in the flea market and the local art-and-craft stores.

That young man who is living on his father's $1000 monthly pension is never going to displace the neighbors who are actually working on my "Santa Claus list." If he wanted to work or trade, I would be interested in what he had to offer. If he just wants to trust his luck, what he needs is to go to the animal shelter in his county and adopt a calico cat--a "true" specimen, with orange, black, and white spotted fur. The magic of the calico cat is much more reliable than any hard-working, unrewarded person's willingness to play Santa Claus.