Why is it when I read the comments to my blog I can see that more than half of you "just do not get it"?  Your little stories about how privileged you are nowadays do not interest me.  Reading about how you like to indulge your inner child now with leftovers and snacks make it even more clear to me you do not understand what I am talking about. 

Poverty still exists in this town, in this county, in this state in this nation.  Quit over-indulging and volunteer at a food bank, or a homeless shelter, or a soup kitchen.  My remembrances of my childhood growing up poor have nothing to do with your eating habits today. 

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I don't owe you anything

And you do not owe me--

Debt free that is what our hearts are

No longer interest bearing are our bonds

This is a recession haven't you heard?

I can tell you are losing interest

and you are trying hard to cut your losses by

cutting me out of your portfolio

 doing what I can to keep from going under in this tough time

should I seek other ventures that might be more cost effective?

You keep though flip-flopping

Trying to make some sort of profit out of this thing we have

Trying hard to scrape that last penny

 of your small investment out of it

And agreeing with your plan

you balk at my request for restructuring

I am just trying to survive these tough times

And you keep selling out

Do I need to look for other investors or is my stock still good

According to your savvy accountant

According to your heart?

I feel like I have been sold a folio full of junk bonds

Because none of this is turning a profit and all I see

Is a shrinking portfolio and soul

I am not taking that leap though from the 26^th floor

Yet I am staying here depending on a rally in the market

Hoping for a honeymoon period

In the new year and the new administration

I am hoping for the market to rally

and for you to gain interest again.

Maybe this is just a Ponzi scheme of yours

(or mine) and we are just

Robbing Peter to pay Paul wondering when it will end

And hoping soon that it we are found out

So we can breathe a sigh of relief

and await the fallout of our investments gone wrong?

Hope and keep our fingers crossed

that there won't be many victims of a scheme gone wrong

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No, I am not asking for your pity. . .just blogging. . .
Current mood:  contemplative
 

      My family is not one for leftovers.  My brothers, my sisters, they just can’t seem to take that final step and heat up a plate of last night’s dinner for lunch the next day.  Growing up I remember my next -door neighbors were all excited because they were going to have “leftovers for lunch” after we were through playing.  I pondered what that might be “leftovers”?  So I asked the two freckled girls who were my friends since I was three “What are leftovers?” “Meatloaf sandwiches!” they answered in unison.  Now I knew what meatloaf was, my mama made a pretty good meatloaf, and always served it with mashed potatoes, homemade biscuits and peas.  Meatloaf was one of my favorite things to find at the dinner table after washing up at the crowded sink.  So I found out that leftovers was just what my Irish-Italian neighbors called meatloaf, I had always found the intricacies of language interesting.  I buried that away into my memory until the evening would come when I approached the brown laminate dinette and saw what was for dinner.....“Wow!” I exclaimed, “Leftovers!” I was so happy that I had learned a new word, and at the age of five was fairly impressed by my growing vocabulary.  My mama looked at me and said to me “No m’ija, we are having meatloaf.”  I kept insisting that they were leftovers too.  My father got involved and started to yell at me, I ended up going to bed without any leftovers-slash-meatloaf.  

     What I came to realize later on in life was that when I was growing up poor, in the Central San Joaquin Valley, we did not have the luxury of leftovers.  With seven children to feed, plus my parents there was nothing ever left after dinner time. My mother used to make one frying hen stretch between nine hungry mouths.  Two thighs, two drumsticks, a breast quartered and shared along with spinach, and rice, and if we were lucky some store bought bread (instead of tortillas) and butter.  My mama always swore that she loved the wings and the backs of chickens.  It wasn’t until I grew up and was raising a family of my own when I realized just how little meat there was on these parts of a chicken.  I realized then the amount of sacrifice my mother had gone through to keep her children fed.  When I spoke to her about this recently she insisted that she did like those pieces of the chicken.  I smiled inside, knowing she was lying and holding on to that precious bit of her own personal fiction.

      She asked me one day that I was visiting recently if I could drive her into town so she could do some shopping for groceries. Of course I agreed (I love going anywhere with my mom).  When we got to the store her first stop was the meat section.  Looking up and down at the fresh poultry awaiting her selection she chose some boneless, skinless chicken breasts.  I held up a jumbo tray of fresh “chicken drumettes” and yelled at her from my position ten feet away (I am quite probably the loudest person in a grocery store) “Mama, look chicken wings, and damned cheap too.  Let me get some and I will make you up a batch of Buffalo wings!”  She looked at me and rolled her eyes, and said “I hate chicken wings,” then smiling at her giving away her own secret and finished with “ah, you are smart now aren’t you?”  I looked at her and said “Yeah, I get it from my mom.”  I knew why we were sharing one chicken between nine people, and she knew that I knew.  I can blame my father for it all and his need to flash the cash when he was with friends, but I also knew my own generosity with money is due to my father and my mother too.  When you are used to having no money, when you finally get it you are always spending it on everything you coveted or in my mother’s and my case on the people you love.
 

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Ahhhh childhood. . .lovely. . .

My childhood memories are not happy ones how about yours?

This morning while making a bowl of hot cereal for breakfast I realized that the consistency was not the same as the ones I had previously made, it came out more watery than I liked to eat it.  It was then when I remembered eating Cream of Wheat as a child and how the consistency would fluctuate in direct opposition to my father’s health at the time.

My father was considered a “skilled farm laborer”, which meant he worked as a spray rig operator for a contractor whose livelihood depended on how many citrus groves and stone fruit orchards his crew could do in a day.  The trouble with this was that my father was working pre-OSHA.   He had been given a respirator by his boss to use while running the rig through the tightly packed trees, but it really did no good.

I remember now how thin the cereal was the month we thought my father was going to die.  He couldn’t get well.  He couldn’t get warm.  My mother had all us children help her move the mattress and box spring from my father’s bed into the living room where the stand up gas heater was.  I remember how
hard that was to do.  It seemed like that little full bed of theirs was the heaviest thing ever in the world.  The house was always too cold in the winter, but the living room was always warm because of that heater.

Dr. Moore had diagnosed my father with pneumonia and he gave my father a perscription for antibiotics that we couldn’t fill.  We didn’t have the money, daddy wasn’t working. It was a terrible cycle we had been trapped into.  His boss would call everyday to check on him, and see if he was doing better.  He didn’t pay my father any sick time but he did seem to show concern.  My father was a loyal employee to Mr. Rowell (in retrospect I wonder why).

My father sprayed fruit trees with an insecticide called Parathion, also known as parathion-ethyl or diethyl parathion (C₁₀H₁₄NO₅PS).  It was discovered by the chemist Dr. Gerhard Schrader in the 1940’s, while he was working for IG Farben, a German chemical conglomerate that also held the patent for Zyklon B, manufactured by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung, which IG Farben owned at least 42 percent shares in.

For those of you reading who are not aware of what Zyklon B is; it is the chemical used to kill the prisoners in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps.  IG Farben was also found guilty of not only crimes against humanity, but utilizing slave labor (i.e. Jews from Auschwitz III also known as Monowitz concentration camp were worked until they could no longer hold themselves up trying to make synthetic rubber, when this occurred the were shipped off to Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II for extermination since Monowitz did not have its own gas chambers) but I digress what I want to say is that Parathion is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor.

What does that mean to you?  Why should you care? Basically my father was spraying a nerve agent on fruit trees invented by the same man who brought you Sarin (no odor, no color) and Tabun (a very nice odorless, colorless nerve agent that also has no discernible taste) two very lethal nerve agents that are harmful to mammals, and my father being at least human is a mammal.

My childhood sense of security was taken away from me because of nerve gas my father was allowed to spray on trees before fruiting. Parathion is not picky about who it kills either.  Not only mites, scale insects, succumb to the
power of Parathion but it is also toxic to bees, fish, birds, fetuses (even though it does not produce birth defects, so you would have a nice looking dead
baby), and mammals.

When I remember the symptoms that my father had the winter he “came down with pneumonia” I realize now that he was suffering from Parathion poisoning. Paraoxon (or (C₂H₅O)₂P(S)OC₆H₄NO₂ + 1/2 O₂ → (C₂H₅O)₂P(O)OC₆H₄NO₂+ S) is what happens when the metabolizing of Parathion in the body occurs.  He had all the symptoms of Parathion poisoning, we were just too ignorant to know of them, and just too trusting of  the “Great White Father” Mr. Rowell to not put my father at risk.  Headaches, vomiting, poor vision, lung edema, tremors, abdominal pain, diarrhea, shortness of breath my father had all that and he was diagnosed as having pneumonia.

Parathion poisoning though was what he had, he did not smoke, he rarely drank, and I just remember being scared watching him lying there on the mattress.  Growing pale, as the chill from the scarred flooring crept up my feet and into my spine knowing that my father was going to die.  The Cream of Wheat growing thinner as my mother tried to feed seven kids with what we had left in the pantry.  Looking at the statistics from the mid sixties this was all very possible, all too real. 650 farm workers poisoned, with 100 fatalities out of that number.

I also remember from my childhood how we seven would rumble through the house when we heard my father’s car drive up the gravel signaling his coming home from work.  He would call us his “herd of buffaloes”, and he would try so hard to keep us from jumping up on him, hugging his legs, kissing his sunburnt cheeks, his rough hands so happy to see him again, and how he used to smell a little like rotten sulphurous eggs, or enticingly like garlic, that would send our stomachs growling because supper was going to be served as soon as he got out of his daily shower.  Odors now that I know as the smell of Parathion on his clothing.  Hunger and fear were always my companions as a child . . .as well as poison.