Dizzy
Dear friend,
I remember it was Saturdays when Mam would sit at the oval teak dining table at the back of the living room of our house at 31 Sarsfield Road. Behind her, in the garden, the hawthorn hedges would be full of sparrows, and sometimes a shredded plastic bag would get caught in the thorns and stay for weeks. The clouds and stars and moon and sun revolved around her where she sat.
It was Mam’s job to balance the chequebook.
This was before you could use a card to get cash out of a machine.
Dad would get the money for the week ahead in one lump sum. He queued up in the NatWest bank in town on a Saturday morning. That was about all I could fathom about money.
I knew there were ‘rich’ people somewhere and that they were not to be trusted. No one was considered to have become wealthy by honest means. I imagined ‘they’ might be an alien species. Dangerous. Frightening.
And then the papers were full of famous people.
And they were on the television too, and they were living pretty well.
Elvis had it made. Cliff diving and riding motorcycles around on the wall of death in between girls, cars, and songs.
I remember this one Saturday afternoon because Dad was pretty relaxed and approachable. I asked him about the blue slips of paper Mam had on the table, and he said to bring one over and he’d show me.
I imagine I got to sit on his lap, but that might just be wishful thinking on my part. But let’s say I did, and it was warm, and I melted into the strength and solidity of him.
“You work all your life, get paid little, and then the taxman takes half of it from you.”
He showed me a box with numbers in it. I couldn’t concentrate. He was deadly certain of the facts.
“That’s what they take,” he said, pointing to another box, “and that’s what’s left after they’ve got their hands on it.”
I still didn’t understand what balancing the chequebook meant, so I sloped off to kick a ball against the pebble dash. There was something satisfying about the grooves and dugouts on the thick plastic official match-weight ball. I’d burst a few on that wall. You had to blow them up as hard as possible; that way, they zipped back at you like a whip. I mostly practiced goalkeeping. All for the love of flinging myself sideways into the grass and mud.
My first therapist, Danielle, told me that, in her opinion, people are more comfortable talking about their sex lives than their financial lives.
I’ll spare you the irrelevant details of mine.
Only to say my Dad once said to me how money held humanity back. Just think what we could do if we didn’t need money and people just did the right thing. For some reason, his vision of the future, as I remember it, had something to do with building rocket ships in the jungle. Memory is so unreliable. It’s unlikely he said anything of the sort.
It’s easy to get your thinking jumbled.
On important things like money.
Money can be a force for good.
Like any powerful technology, it depends on the consciousness of the person or people in possession.
How confused do you have to be to imagine money should be used to build war machines and use them on civilians?
Or that money is worth more than a living being.
Or life itself.
The planet.
Its children.
Even your own descendants.
Thinking about money in a new way would be a great thing for us to do as a species.
I’ll put that out there.
Somewhere it can be seen.
I’ll trip up over it sometime.
Like kicking over one of Dad’s tea mugs.
Getting the cloth from under the sink and watching the tannins soak into the mesh. Staining it.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey