This is not my story. I am hearing it for the first time, just like you.
He is the one who tells it. He is old. He is in a wheelchair. He is carving a piece of basswood with a pocket knife. He speaks in a drawl so thick it’s poetry.
There are children around his feet. A few third graders, a fifth-grader, a fifteen-year-old, and one red headed writer who still watches Saturday morning cartoons. Occasionally.
The old man is telling stories. That’s what old men do. They are inherently good at this.
The man removes a five-dollar bill from his pocket.
“See this?” he says.
The kids nod.
The redhead nods.
Age has slowed his speech down. But not his mind.
“Why, I remember when five dollars was like a hundred bucks,” he goes on. “Back when times were hard.”
The Depression. A time when America was on the brink. He tells a story about the tail end of these lean years. He
was six. A rural towhead. He wore ragged clothes.
His shoes had given up the ghost and went barefoot most of the time—even to preaching.
“That’s what poor folks did,” he explains. “Our feet were always bare.”
It was December. Christmas was around the corner in the humid South. He found a five-dollar bill on the ground. And during his era, he might as well have won the Florida Powerball.
He ran home to give the money to his father.
“LOOK WHAT I FOUND, DADDY!” he shouted.
But his father didn’t want the money.
“Son,” his father told him. “It would be wrong for me to keep that money. Lotta folks need it worse than we do.”
But how could that be? They ate beans for supper. His brother worked labor jobs for chicken feed. His mother took in wash.…