Musings - on the editor's mind

Timothy Eagan wrote a book titled “The Worst Hard Time.” I have been thinking of my mother’s journey and the hard times that shaped her.

My mom, born in 1920, would have been 100 in May. She was nine in 1929 and a child of the Great Depression and, at 20, not old enough to vote for Roosevelt in the 1940 election.

But more than that, she was 100 percent Lithuanian. All four of her grandparents were born in Lithuania. My mom grew up in the ghetto in Brooklyn and didn’t speak English until she started school.

All of that, more than I know or can surmise, went into making her my mother. She went into the grocery store with an envelope full of coupons she clipped and saved. We only bought clothes from the sales rack. Best were the clearance sale bargains, as if she won the lottery.

She bought not only toilet paper but tissues and all soaps: bar, dish and laundry detergent, on sale. We had stockpiles before stockpiles were needed or fashionable.

My mom saved cottage cheese and yogurt containers once technology made them plastic. She saved egg cartons long after her five children were out of school and her parent volunteering days were past. This was before anyone conceived of a food bank, where eggs come in by the caseload, and poverty was more hidden.

I have always, for decades now, defined myself as a child of a child of the Depression. As every parent and household does, my parents shaped my world view in ways large and small but always based on the experiences they encountered in their world.

So, alas, I shop based on sales and price. I have trouble throwing things away, as anyone who has been to my office knows. I am a fanatical recycler and love to compost.

My mom’s formative years were fundamentally different, foreign, from mine and our lives today. She grew up in a time of want. We live in the midst of plenty. Hard scrabble existence was widespread, shared and understood by all. Today we don’t know what hard scrabble means and too many of us don’t believe, much less know, that they are in the 99 percent, among the great unwashed.

Common as clay I am, as was my mom.

Her world shaped me. It shapes my view of my world today.

I thus share one more memory:

My mom always praised Eleanor Roosevelt, with a smile and her eyes shining. She saw the president as a leader but she loved his wife as a hero.

I remember her saying “There were people who would walk across the street to spit on the Roosevelts’ name.” Her point: some hated the two of them for their focus and efforts. Damn socialists, though of course he saved capitalism.