A Fear From My Childhood

This morning as I looked in a refrigerator packed for most of two shelves with tangelos and oranges, I realized that at age 69 I was trying to satisfy an irrational need I've had since childhood.

When I was a boy, there were times when our refrigerator was largely empty. But more important was the fear that money was scarce and that refrigerator could at any time become empty.

This was because my parents, my father living elsewhere, often fought over money with the ongoing threat there wouldn't be any for my two younger sisters and me.

I did all I could to protect my sisters, but as a child, I couldn't make money other than by collecting bottles from apartment trash cans and turning them in to collect their deposits. This produced pocket money but not much money for food.

As the years passed and I became an adult I was blessed to have substantial earning capacity.

But those long ago days of my childhood haunt me and the proof was in my refrigerator this morning. Those tangelos and oranges will be eaten but there was no need for me to have purchased so many, other than to try to satisfy a hole in my heart.

Now that I'm more conscious of this problem, I will work to solve it. But it helps me understand why so many people who grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930's carry the fears they do from memories that haunt them.

Dick