UNWRAPPING YOUR CHILDHOOD

Ruth says, “I never knew you guys were rich until I grew up. As a child, I thought we didn’t have much money.”
I am stunned to uncharacteristic silence. What can she possibly mean? Number one, we are hardly rich, in the sense of capital R Rich! Surely she has only to look at the homes of her friends’ parents to see that ours, comfortable and lovely as it is, is not the quality of theirs. And, number two, how could she have thought us to be poor? Did we not take her twice to Disneyland and once to Disney World? “Rich people,” I declare with feeling, “don’t usually drive around in mini-vans.”
But Ruth is unyielding, not persuaded by anything I can say. She says she drew her conclusions not so much from what we did, as from what we said about ourselves. In this she probably has a point. We would hardly have gone about speaking of ourselves as rich, and no doubt we denied her a request or two on the grounds of insufficient funds.
“Of course we could have afforded to buy silver wrapping paper,” I tell her when she raises the subject of gift-wrap. “We just didn’t, because we were trying to help the environment by wrapping birthday gifts in brightly coloured newspaper comics. Weren’t you proud that we were saving the environment?”
“Not especially,” she says. “I was embarrassed.”
“Oh well,” I soothe, “you turned out very nicely anyway.”
Ruth is a generous person. She will gladly give you a ride in her car, but there are a lot of bottles and cans rattling around. She recycles them and uses the money to buy things for her classroom. A big load from our garage will bring her ten dollars, maybe fifteen. And somewhere in the back seat you can find her new cloth shopping bags.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree! And so goes the confusion when you start to sort out the memories of your childhood, what you knew versus what you thought to be true.