Looking back.

First, let me just say that my previous post was my 500th post.  Interesting.

Anyway.  I woke up this morning to some rough news on the radio.  Local stuff.  Sort of local anyway - almost an hour away in a very rural area.  Some people say you can lose yourself in the city and that is one reason there will always be some sort of appeal for me.  The downside ~ all those damn people.  But you really can't lose yourself in a town of, say, 1000, now, can you?  I do like the anonymity a city offers.  I've recently come to terms and accepted the fact that I've lived the majority of my life as if I were in the Witness Protection Program.  Moving frequently, rarely getting close to anyone, avoiding connections and making it a point to maintain privacy.  There was a reason, but the reason is gone now.  Part of it was due to hiding/running/staying elusive out of maintaining safety from a family member (basically being on the run), but some of it is because of what I'm referring to below.  Still, it is most likely how I will continue on; it is simply how I learned to be.

So.  I started thinking about something.  I'm not sure if I've talked about this before, but it just seemed to settle on me this morning and I have to speak.  When I was small, we lived in a very small coal-mining town.  The houses were basically depression era houses that were meant to support the miners and their families.  The little town was booming (before I was even born) but as the mining industry faded, so did the town.  The homes that were there, rented, were very basic.  It was like the property owners were slumlords before that became a common term.  The houses were two floors, some with an enclosed porch, and covered in drab, grainy shingles.  The windows were the old wood/single pane wavy glass that would literally accumulate 1/4" of ice on the inside in the winter.  The doors were such an ill fit that during the cold winters, we'd use a butter knife to stuff strips of rags to fill the gaps or you would feel the cold air blowing in.  Every time someone had to go out, you had to repeat the entire process. 

Part of the issue there is that about 20% of the houses did not have indoor toilets or showers.  If they did, it was due to a 'remodel' done by the person living there, not the owner.  The house my mother and I lived in for a couple of years had a regular bathroom but my grandmother's house, until she left in 1992, had no indoor bathroom or shower.  There was an outhouse and the shower was in the cellar.  Not a basement, a cellar.  The access was from outside only.  The floor was a crude cement slab with dirt walls.  Half of it contained the canning my grandparents did and the other half had a shower head, bar of soap, bottle of shampoo and a hook for your clothes, all partially sectioned off with an ugly yellow gold tarp so as not to invoke a mudslide under the house.  It was underground.  It was cold.  There were spiders.  (Nuff said there..) 

The big thing was always having a 'lookout'.  Someone would pound on the door after they heard the water shut off so you could slip out, hopefully unnoticed, before another car came up the street.  Same way with the outhouse.  You'd peer through an opening in the boards to make sure no one was coming.  See, most people still had their old outhouses, never bothering to knock them down, so it was a common thing to see.  It was not so common to have them in use.  You never wanted to be seen going there or returning.  In the winter, there was an actual chamber pot kept in a bedroom upstairs.  So even as late as 1992, in the morning, someone had to 'sneak' out and empty it in the outhouse and hopefully return before anyone saw you.  To this day I despise the scent of Pine-sol. 

We didn't have company.  How do you explain the lack of indoor plumbing?  The secrecy; shame.  Now, we always had plenty of food and my grandfather bought a new car every two years.  It wasn't that we were impoverished.  It was that they were fine living in the way they had for many years and never found reason to update things.  Living with them for many years, their ways became my ways.

So here I sit, at the age of 41, wondering why I have such a hard time spending money on a new winter coat.  The one I've got I bought on clearance probably 11 years ago.  The zipper broke about three or four years ago so it unzips from the bottom up, yet I can't find it in me to buy a new one.  Ok, in my defense, it IS an Eddie Bauer coat and can still probably kick almost any other coats ass.  Well, if coats had asses.  I do not own the things that most people own.  I have an mp3 player that was given to me.... just a little thing.  I've wanted to buy an iPod Touch, and now I've decided I'd prefer a tablet instead.  But let's think for a minute on how hard that is going to be for me to do.  I grew up patching doors and using a chamber pot; had spiders in my underground shower.  Some things you can't change.  I was brought up with the 'make do' mind set.

No mistake, I spend money.  But I tend to spend it on experiences, as I would call it.  Music, concerts, hockey games, travel.  Perhaps because I find more comfort in doing things as opposed to having things.  There is still some sort of guilt associated with having.  Experiences are things no one can take away from you.  Things can be lost, taken, broken.  But what you experience is with you forever.

Looking back,  I suppose that can go both ways, really.