My Parent's Poor Friends

Sometimes when I talk to my mom, I ask her why all of her friends are more affluent than her. (This may seem weird, but this is very representative of the types of things we talk about). A person's friends have a strong influence on their expectations about themselves and their definition of normal, and to me that means one should try and have poor friends. If one's friends are poor, they are more likely to be comfortable with the amount of money and the number of possessions they have. Of course, I don't investigate prospective friends bank accounts (at least, not that they've ever known about)... but if you hang out at the right places, you can easily meet the indigent. (Trust me, graduate school is one of those places).
But my parents did have some poor friends...

There was one lady my mom knew from church who was very poor. Her name was Kathy. So once, when I was trying to make my mom feel guilty about all her richer friends, I asked her if she still ever talked to Kathy. I don't think Kathy was that old, but because generations are shorter for poorer people, she was a grandparent. (I know this sounds terribly politically incorrect, but so is a lot of stuff on my blog, so deal, people). When we would visit Kathy at her house she was always taking care of several grandchildren, while their parents were off doing who knows what, and her husband was watching television. My mom told me she doesn't talk to Kathy that much anymore because all she does is complain.

When my oldest brother died, my parents took on a strong parental role for many of his friends. He was a bit of a social butterfly, so he had a lot, and they were mostly poor. My parents invited one of them to come live in our house. I was kind of young at the time, so I'm a bit hazy on the details, but the whole thing seemed rather rushed. This guy was probably around 23, and I doubt that he had a lot of prospects. If it had been one of us (my brothers and sisters and I) at the same age and in the same situation my mom and dad would never have invited us to live at home (I think). But because he was one of Jack's friends, that decided it. After about a week of him living with us, my parents were discreetly told that this gentleman was a child molester, or registered sex offender, or something of the sort. To their credit, they immediately asked him to leave.

One Summer my mom was the temporary manager of a soup kitchen while the regular manager was away for a few months (helping a sick relative, I think). This meant we would go there twice a week for dinner. One of the volunteers was named Lura (poorer people often have fairly abysmal spellings of common names like Laura). She was married but her husband was confined to a wheel chair. I'm not sure how, but Lura owned her house outright. Unfortunately, she wasn't aware enough to pay her property taxes, so the government repossessed it to sell at auction. It was a really sad situation and a perfect example of how our society fails the poor and the mentally ill. As a household with so many children, mostly boys, we were often enlisted to help people move. So it was perfectly natural that we helped Lura and her husband move out of their place. Her house was even more cluttered than my high school friend Joanna's house. It was a labyrinth of junk, piled to the ceiling. I guess Joanna's house was that way too, but the difference was, in Lura's house, parts of the junk stacks were alive. Obviously there was her husband, who was set unceremoniously in one corner of the room. But there were also around twenty small dogs, all in crates, barking away. Some crates were on the floor, with papers and boxes and books piled high above them. Some crates were sandwiched between furniture below and boxes above. Some were almost touching the ceiling. The house smelled about how you might expect. As part of her move, Lura had to send her husband to an assisted living facility. My mom was also able to whittle the number of dogs Lura insisted on keeping down to six. (she really did love those dogs, even though she obviously wasn't able to care for them properly) My mom took the rest to the pound. The employees there looked at her really funny, and explained that she'd have to pay to spay and neuter all the dogs (which had never been done previously), but when she explained the situation they were understanding and let her leave them there without paying anything.

I guess writing all this, I realized my parents often did have a lot of poor friends. They weren't really friends, and I always felt more uncomfortable around them compared to my parents affluent friends. But it was probably a good experience to have those types of people around. That still doesn't mean a fellow can't use any and all resources available to try and make his mother feel guilty, though.