Silver Spoons and Hot Bathwater

 I have been thinking about money lately. It comes to me that I am and have been extremely lucky. I have never missed as much as a single meal because I did not have the price of food, nor missed a roof over my head, a soft, warm bed, cleanliness and hot water (well, except for the ice storm hiatus), transportation as needed. Child of Canada that I am, my education was freely provided until secondary school graduation. A bequest from my grandfather funded my university, along with help from my parents and savings from summer jobs I held because of training my parents paid for me to get.

Since our marriage, my husband and I have incurred no debt beyond mortgages and have paid off those regularly. We have never bought a car or appliance on time; we never had to do so as we could accumulate the necessary cash without much difficulty. In the one low-income portion of our lives, when my husband invested four years in earning a PhD, his and my parents stepped in with goods and cash whenever they saw a need. As an example, when our babies outgrew their cribs, my in-laws provided suitable beds. The first car I even had of my own was a gift from my mother; she got a new one and I got hers.

I know that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Not that I am prodigal with money. Both my husband and I grew up in households run by people who had weathered the Great Depression of the 1930s. We learned care and economy from them. In fact, if I were to run the kitchen the way I saw my grandmother run hers, modern ecologists would praise me. (But I am addicted to my clingwrap and plastic bags. Sic transit gloria and all that.) The bottom line is that I and mine have never had to worry about money; there has always been enough. More than enough in latter years. We saved money to fund higher education for our daughters who funded their education themselves through scholarships and work. And so those investments continued to accrue funds, augmented by inheritances from several sources. The present total is not a small sum.

It is not all that useful, sadly. We are not Bill Gates, and for those of us safe and far away in the peace and plenty of Canada, reaching out to save a starving child in Gaza or the Sudan is not clearcut. Any money you donate takes a tortuous route to the need. (If the Red Cross sends me one more ‘gift’ of a cheap totebag, I think I may have to cut them off.) It is much more ‘transparent’ to help with a funding effort close to home, where there is some clear need, and you can see where the money goes. A thing that really delighted me some years ago was helping to fund books at our local school that went home with children for their preschool siblings. We are very rural and a library was a hard reach for some families. Now there are preschool programs at that local school, and much needed.

I think of the camel and the needle’s eye from time to time. Not just for myself but for all of us in this favoured land. I read today about the USA funding cuts that will eliminate prenatal clinics in Afghanistan and think about our network of hospitals and ambulances and paramedics. The horror stories of misses are written up in detail, but the steady provision of medical care for all of us is less reported. Not that the USA has such provision; the cuts are coming at home too, as I understand what is happening. But, in fact, since WWII, it has been the United States that is the rich man and they have been funding a lot. Perhaps that funding has been coming from too deep into the purses of people without silver spoons – maybe without any spoon – and so such people have put in an administration that is cutting out a lot of that support. I hope they are not, as the saying goes, tossing the baby with the bathwater. We will see. And hope not to hear the baby screaming in the mud while the bathwater cools in the basin.