I read the news about the Federal Reserve Board's survey on U.S. median income and median net worth this morning. My income is a reasonable Level 3, and my net worth is up there, thanks mainly to various real estate agents' insistence that each of my houses are worth about twice what I am paying for them. It's all so hypothetical unless you cash it in - the house, the inventory of my shop, the vehicles. In the meantime, there's still rot and old carpet and fading paint.

The scary thing is the fragility of the Level 1 families - little income, and credit card debt eating up whatever they might have counted in their meager assets. I have numerous friends who require credit cards or unfavorable second mortgages to simply exist month after month.

I have been very fortunate - although I have lived through a bad divorce agreement, invasive house mold, and the usual adult issues. It was probably very educational to have a grouchy, introverted mother who raised me on her tiny Sears and Roebuck paycheck. Mama was plagued by migraines and was largely unpleasant - we haven't spoken in years, sadly - and she never seemed to muster a single promotion that might have made growing up more comfortable for us. My father, meanwhile, struggled back in Claxton with a fledgling insurance business and made custody payments faithfully. But it wasn't really enough. Our neighbors sent us homemade chili on Fridays and made their son mow our grass when it needed it. But my mother was proud, and would never stoop to sign my sister and I up for the free lunch program or anything else which might have helped. However, she farmed me out as a babysitter starting at age ten, and by fourteen I spent summers working with Laura Da Vinci, a wonderfully eccentric Italian woman who terrorized Savannah highways with her Laura's Pizza on Wheels RV. Laura could cook a mean rigatoni, and we traveled from construction site to factory serving the finest of Savannah's blue-collar workers. But when I turned sixteen my friend Debbie called from Shoney's and offered me a job. The next morning I told Laura that I was leaving.

I hated Shoney's. I also hated selling Olan Mills portrait plans over the telephone, my next job. But I continued to babysit, and over the college years I cleaned houses, played piano for a kindergarten, worked at an Ace Hardware, Dunkin' Donuts, the school cafeteria, a Chinese restaurant, a motel, a vegetarian restaurant... and what I lacked in work consistency, I made up for in tenacity. I learned to live off of day-old bread stores and thrift shops. I had no car for a year. I learned to like the city bus. I made mistakes - an early marriage, for one thing - but like my mother, I learned frugality by necessity. Most of all, I learned to enjoy the challenge of living within my means. It wasn't really a burden for me.

The hardest thing about the post-divorce years was carrying some credit card debt just to get by. My unfavorable divorce deal left me walking away with little more than an aging Honda Accord, a futon, and my upright piano. But I got to buy my ex-husband's share of our store - although it cost me more than the entire shop was worth at the time. Also, I bought an old house one block from my ex, so that the children could walk back and forth between them. It took thirteen years to crawl out of the debt, between the selling price of The Emporium and the need to provide all the things that children require - braces, clothing, college, etc. But I remained endlessly optimistic (except for a few bouts of dark depression) that everything was possible. And between the shop, festival vending, flea markets, Ebay, Amazon, incense making, bead stringing, and the occasional desperate yard sale - the credit debt is gone and I allegedly have a decent net worth. I was also lucky. And, like my mother, I can be very cheap.

My mother's birthday is this week. I send her a lengthy message on birthday cards every November, but she has refused to speak to me for years. It took a lot of therapy to accept the current limitations, and hopefully things will improve one day. But I suppose that this rambling blog entry is, in its own way, a tribute to my mom. My memories of her crying at the kitchen table over the month's budget, all the eggs and toast and rice and other cheap food, the old Plymouth Valiant, her unwillingness to simply find another husband to rescue her from the dire household finances - I really do appreciate her perseverance, and hope that she knows that her influence has made me a decent money manager and a stronger parent for my own two daughters (both of whom know their way around a Goodwill).

Thanks, mom.

NTD