My mother and I went from living in a 3500+ square foot house to living in a small apartment with no idea how we’d pay the next month’s rent and with the furniture we could move in one trip with a borrowed pickup and about 3 or 4 trips with a Chevette that used more transmission fluid than it did oil (because our car had been repossessed- on the same day my mother was arrested for writing a bad check- and at Christmas time just for melodramatic overkill).
I was 20 at the time and in the prime of resilience- the age when sleeping on a floor isn’t so bad and McJobs are to be expected. My mother however was in her 50s and had absolutely NO savings- not even retirement aside from Social Security [that of course she couldn’t draw for many years]). She had once driven new Cadillacs and was now in said bombed out Chevette and later a post nuclear apocalypse looking Yugo. (God I’ll never forget driving that thing when it had headlights pointing different directions and a constant DINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDING bell that wouldn’t stop because it had been near totalled in an accident, battered like Tina Turner after Ike’s IRS audit by a hailstorm, and nobody in town had the parts to fix it [the Yugo dealership having closed] for months). Sometimes I look back and try to figure out “God, how did we make the rent and pay the utilities that month?” and can’t remember.
Things ultimately recovered. It wasn’t a 24 minute sitcom wrap-up by any means, but a lot of work and improvisation and a couple of lucky breaks, it worked out. When my mother died (19 years after we refugeed to Montgomery) she had more money in the bank than she’d ever had in her life, the favorite house she’d ever lived in (with a sizeable equity) that she’d bought herself without a co-signer in spite of having had a “KILL ON SIGHT AND I WILL ABSOLVE THEE” credit rating when she came to town, and a comfortable retirement income. She came back better off than she’d ever been.
And when I look back on those really bad times (late 80s/early 90s) I really do have a certain nostalgia. Part of it’s because I was 20, of course, but there’s also the closeness we had with each other, and the sometimes brilliant (if not always exactly…uh… ethical or completely legal ways of stretching a buck (it’s a point of pride we never stole from an individual) and for the bittersweet appreciation I now have for simple pleasures (going out to a nice restaurant occasionally, buying a brand new book in hardcover, etc.) that were luxuries on par with rubies then. All in all, though, I’m honestly glad that I went through them.
NOTICE TO ANY GODS, GODDESSES, OR FATES WHO HAPPEN TO BE READING THIS: I DO NOT IN ANY WAY WHATEVER MEAN TO IMPLY I WANT TO GO THROUGH THEM AGAIN- NO REFRESHER COURSE OR BOOSTER SHOTS OF ANY KIND ARE NEEDED I ASSURE YOU!
But I know many people who have come back from being very very very low. They’re some of my favorite people in fact. And while the absence of money definitely contributed heavily to some of my least favorite moments, there were also some happinesses I, and my mother, had in those times that today I’d sacrifice a lot of my much better financial position to have back- the “blackest nights have beautiful stars” type Hallmark cliche, and I so miss the people I knew and loved then who were just irreplaceable and I wouldn’t have met them had things been better.
Anyway, I may not have answered your question but I’ve least negated empty space.
