Saturday, April 26, 2008

New Post

For an example of the stuff I want to see or hear:
I have worked since I was thirteen years old. 99% of that time I have been an honest, reliable, hard working person. 
About the age of thirteen, I stole a mini skirt from a small boutique in Florida and was caught at the door by the screaming owner. She raced me back to the dressing room by the scruff of my shirt. She yelled, "Thief! Thief!" all the way to the back of the store. She finally let me go, heeding my desperate pleas  after threatening first to call the police, then to calling my parents; then, I guess she felt tired of the whole thing and let me go. I can't remember why she let me go but I never stole again. 
No, not in the sense of the real-deal shoplifting, that is unless perhaps you call Goodwill-clothes-dumpster-diving stealing, which my younger sister and I did first as a dare, and then we did it when we were in need of something, anything to spike up our meager wardrobe. We were quite poor at that time, and we would just jump in the boxes with a flashlight. (Easy to get into but not to get back out) . The justification was this: we needed clothes, and the rumor was that probably all the good stuff would be picked over before they went to the Goodwill shop. And if you went to the Goodwill store in 1969-70, you would believe the rumor. Now people throw away a lot of good stuff, so the Goodwill stores are teeming with decent wearable clothing. Why is that? Why do people throw away so many good clothes now? My guess is that now people have more ready money.  Or at least they think so. Credit cards evened out the discrepancy between rich and poor somewhat. I'm afraid to go back to poverty, which I'm sure many of the baby boomers run from. And the credit card era was a help to delay the pain and the shame of being poor in America.  Peace. 





5 comments:

TeresaB said...

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Countrywides_CEO_takes_home_millions_0425.html

Unknown said...

Good start!

welcome to the world of jounalism!

the riff on getting busted

reminded me of my own

learning experiences!

ellwort said...

So! You're the one who took all the good stuff.

pwh.ny said...

Exciting, finally figured how to log on to your blogger site! I have to admit I had difficulty just registering to log in. Sad. Some of us baby boomers are not up to speed with the internet.
I enjoyed reading your blog entry. Will post my thoughts later.

Anonymous said...

funny story on the dumpster diving
I was telling some guys i work with who are from Romania that back in the sixties my older sisters sewed many of their own clothes and by about 1972 or so it was actually cheaper to buy your clothes than sew them yourself. For me that seems to be the point when things changed economically in this country, but what do i know i was a kid. I still remember about 1971/72 my mother was able to buy me three dresses for $10.00 at a back to school sale at Sears.
The guys I work with who got to this country in the past ten years seem to think all Americans were so rich way back then. But both my parents worked and I would say we were either poor or dirt poor.