Saving is Not Crazy

My mother was born on a German speaking dairy farm in Moose Lake, Minnesota. She was the third of four siblings to survive to adulthood. She was twelve, when her mother died at childbirth. My grandfather grieved for his immigrant wife and the family stopped speaking German. Her duties increased from milking cows every morning and evening to baking bread, pies and preparing supper. She was curious, had good grades in school and loved to learn. As a student, she collected lunch money from her classmates and kept the books balanced. She saved some of everything she earned for a lifetime.

During her senior year in high school, World War II continued and the FBI was looking to recruit graduates to work in Washington, DC. The agents vetted candidates by talking to the townsfolk. The most common reply started with “What did she do?” She was hired and moved from Minnesota. She was the only sibling that left town. After the war she went to Ketchikan, Alaska, met my father, got married, had me and we moved to the Denver area where he had grown up.

Every summer, in July, we drove to northern Minnesota to visit. My many cousins insisted that it was me and my younger sister’s duty to buy legal fireworks as we drove through Wyoming. This was encouraged by my pyro leaning father. Though, not so much by my mother, or aunts and uncles. But things were pretty rural up there and we got away with it.

One day during a visit, mother was going to the beauty parlor and took me along. I did not want to go into that shop. She gave me my one-dollar weekly allowance saying, as always, “This is yours to spend, but I want you deposit some of it in your savings account.” She went in and I walked down Main Street.

By the state mental hospital, there was a bench on the sidewalk shaded by large trees and a tall black, rod iron, metal fence with spade-like ornaments along the top separating the facility from the town.

I sat and watched the cars drive by. Soon, a fellow rolled to a stop in front of me with a flat tire. I could tell he was in a rush and majorly irritated. He got out cussing, jacked up the car, pried off the hubcap, laid it on the street, started loosening the lug nuts and put them in the cap. I noticed a tall man, in ill-fitting clothes standing inside the fence and watching too. The motorist finally got the flat off and was muscling it toward the trunk when he stepped on the hubcap and flipped all the lug nuts into the storm drain. He was totally ballistic and shouted, “Damn, I’m never going to get where I need to be.”

A voice behind me calmly spoke, “You know, you could take one nut from each of the other tires to get going and buy more lug nuts later.”

The man’s red face, with a blue vein bulging on his sweating forehead looked up and said, “That’s brilliant!” He paused and then asked, “Are you a patient at the ah…, hospital?”

The tall man looked at the white clouds drifting in the blue sky and replied, “They tell me here that I’m crazy, but I know I’m not stupid.”

My mother appeared, grabbed my hand, and pulled me down the street saying, “You walked too far.”

I put that whole dollar into savings.