Why did so many women vote for Trump?

Although I haven't read it yet, First Things has an article "How Trump won over women voters."  How Trump Won Over Women Voters | Rachel Bovard | First Things I'll give my own opinion and read it later--usually you can read that excellent religion and culture journal free for one or two times.

 
My take. Although highly paid and over-educated women as a group do lean to the left and are easily led because they are too busy with career and kids to carefully research the issues of the day, most women care about their budget, their children's education, their neighborhood, the safety of their families and community, and they love being women. They may love men, but don't want to compete with them for restroom facilities or athletic scholarships. Also, they don't like wimpy, childish men. Really.

 
That would sum up a Trump voter, or at least a voter who realized Harris didn't align with their values no matter who was running against her. Women voters knew, because Harris said so, that she was the last person in the room when Joe signed off on the Afghanistan bug out, when he showed the world how weak and feckless he was throwing us into 2 wars with no vote from Congress, and how she went along with the country lock down mandates, how the churches closed without a whimper from fear, and how children were unnecessarily forced to get the jab or be locked out of their schools and athletic events. Women voters saw other women being cancelled for speaking out or deciding not to run for school board or city council out of fear of retaliation. Women voters saw their own grocery bills and housing costs soar while illegals were being housed and fed in hotels. https://nypost.com/.../nyc-now-using-14-hotels-to-house.../

"In the real world, where the vast majority of American women actually live, this shift was inevitable. Most American women are turning to the right because the elite left has turned against most American women.

According to exit polls, women voters’ top concerns in 2024 were the economy and “threats to our democracy.” By contrast, Democrats’ top campaign messages were “abortion-on-demand” and “Orange Man Bad.” 

Maybe their marching song instead of "I am woman hear me roar" (1972) became "I am woman respect my body and my vote" (2024).

Pew Report January 2020 on incomes and prosperity

It must have hurt to have to say good things about the Trump economy or the nation in general in this Pew (left of center) Report, which came out in Jan 2020 before Trump halted some travel from China in an attempt to stop the spread of the virus. (In hindsight lab leaked viruses laughed at those regulations, just like Pelosi did.) The report does take the long view going back decades to find slow growth and little change. But I did notice that the report noted the shrinking middle class--because people were moving up, not down.

"The unemployment rate in November 2019 was 3.5%, a level not seen since the 1960s."
". . . household incomes, which have rebounded in recent years."

"In 2018, the median income of U.S. households stood at $74,600. This was 49% higher than its level in 1970, when the median income was $50,200." (Incomes are expressed in 2018 dollars.)

"On balance, there was more movement up the income ladder than down the income ladder. [since 1970]"

"Since 1980, incomes have increased faster for the most affluent families – those in the top 5% – than for families in the income strata below them." (If you look at the inflation adjusted charts, this doesn't seem to be so, but if wealth creates wealth and there's been a huge increase in dual income families in the last 40 years, I would agree. In the long run, wealth transfers from the government from the middle class to the lower class may help consumption, but it doesn't build wealth to be passed along by generations.)

Several paragraphs in the report note the rising incomes of the upper income, without noting the disparity in marriage rates. Obviously a three person household of a single mother and two children, is going to be less than a three person household of a married mother, father and child. Income gaps between white and Asian households can usually be adjusted for marriage and number of family members. Childhood poverty can almost all be explained by the difference in marriage rates.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/?

How Black, Hispanic, Asian, White households compare in wealth | Pew Research Center

Finding fun together as a family

 Our niece Joan lives in Indianapolis.  I often see on Facebook places she's taken her class (she's a teacher) or her grandchildren, or her friends for a day of adventure, fun or crafts. Sometimes it's a farm, or a park with forest and a fishing hole, a historic site, or a craft assembly.  Here's a photo of Joan, her sister, her two daughters-in-law, and her son's girlfriend.  They all made items out of wood and painted them.  Bonding and fun! We probably have businesses like this in Columbus, but I don't know where they are.

Why did Ezra tell the Jews to send away their foreign wives and children?

The command by Ezra to divorce the foreign wives certainly sounds cruel and not inclusive by our modern values.  We're reading Ezra today in our Women's Bible Study at the Lakeside Women's Club.  I'm not sure I ever read it, but it was very interesting.  I even did some deep diving into Bible commentaries on the internet.  Would you believe there are some Christian authors who treat Ezra-Nehemiah as leadership guides or building programs for churches!  Whoa. But to our modern values, separating families sounds very harsh. Read what this commentator on the Hebrew Bible has to say:  https://elwynshebrewbiblepage.weebly.com/the-inter-marriage-crisis-in-ezra-and-nehemiah.html

"Ezra 9 blames the intermingling of the races as the cause for his people’s woe, and why it should be forbidden[2]. This “intermarriage crisis”, as Ezit is commonly referred to, is therefore very important. For Ezra, the problem with foreigners and other non-returnees is that they were associated with “abominations and uncleanliness”, and intermarrying with them threatened Israel’s stability and its prosperity, as represented by land ownership, since God required the people to be clean and free of abominations in order to possess it.

A code in Ezra specifies who could marry who. A Jew could only marry another Jew who had experienced the Exile. Those who had remained in the land during the Exile were unacceptable. Ezra provided a genealogy distinguishing between those who were considered acceptable and those who were not, but it is suspect. Those who had married “other” women were commanded to divorce them. This was motivated by a fear of pollution of the Holy Seed and uncleanliness.

A Holiness code is also described in Ezra Ch 17, holiness being the antithesis of impurity. Ezra’s command was not to mix the Holy Seed. This was a means of consolidating a new identity. On the other hand, Nehemiah offered other, potentially more concrete, reasons for the denunciation of mixed marriages: such marriages produced children who could not speak the Judean language (Neh.13:24), and Solomon’s experience showed that foreign wives can cause a man to sin (Neh. 13:26). Solomon tolerated the worship of gods other than Yahweh, and did so because his foreign wives gave him the opportunity to do so (1 Kings 11).

Related factors include concern about the influence women have on their families. Children would likely learn the language of a foreign mother, and within the household a woman’s religious practices could influence the beliefs and practices of her children and her husband. The culture and religion of the father and the family’s feelings of connection and deference to them could conceivably then be threatened. Marriage also affected property ownership and inheritance, geared as they were in order to protect land tenure. If the wife or the children had strong connections to a community other than that of the husband/father, the land could effectively leave the community’s sphere of influence. In certain circumstances, Jewish women could possess and inherit land[3] and this may also have been the case in Judah. During the post-Exilic period, there was an attempt to reconstitute a new tradition: that the land has been polluted by the intermarriage of those who stayed behind during the exile, so the returnees had to distance ourselves from that.

The consequence was that the local residents - Samaritans who thought of themselves as the direct descendants of the original Northern Kingdom - were without any right to the land, and those who had been deported and gone into Exile, or rather their descendants, those of pure blood, came back with the message that the land belongs to us and we are going to seize it and settle there[4]."

How have environmental rule and regs worsened our housing for low income and middle class?

Because our AC died on the hottest day of the summer (95) and current EPA laws on R-22 prevent it being fixed (will have to replace) I was trying to research to what extent our energy and environmental laws have contributed to homelessness or even pricing low income out of real estate wealth or the competition for a good rental. It's only common sense that the constant drum beat of climate change on the building trades and the corresponding greater concern for mother earth than a mother in America has to hit the more fragile in the wallet. Zip, nada, zilch in the research, especially EPA and Energy Star articles. So I'll just continue to know in my gut that saving the environment is throwing a lot of people out of work and out of their homes. Soon, you may be seeing a lot of cars up on blocks as the bidenflation roars ahead.

But my eyes landed on an interesting fact sheet about homelessness in Washington DC. It decreased significantly under the Trump booming economy, but was still higher than most big cities. The January 2018 count (a point in time) showed 3,761 single adults, and 924 families (3,134 people), and 9 minors alone. So I took a closer look at the singles: 51% were chronically homeless, but only 19% of the adults in the families were chronically homeless. I think that was my big takeaway. 50% of the singles had formerly been institutionalized--from jail or hospital to the streets; 19% of the singles had a history of domestic violence, much lower than the family rate; 30% of the singles had chronic substance abuse and 32.7% had a history of mental illness; 24.6% of single homeless adults were chronically ill and 18% were disabled. Median age for the singles was 51 and for family adults 29.

 
I was a librarian not a social worker, so I won't suggest a solution, but I do know that saving families is a big part of the solution of homelessness, and housing is probably the smallest part. Families are a social safety net, and many of our government policies can't answer that need.
https://www.legalclinic.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Fact-Sheet-on-Homelessness-and-Housing-Instability-in-DC.pdf

Black households under Trump

How did black Americans fare under that mean, racist, Republican tweeting president?

"Black median household income in 2019 increased 7.9%, the largest on record and, per American Enterprise Institute economist Mark Perry, “almost nine times the average annual increase of 0.90% over the last half-century.”

 
Moreover, in 2019, 29.4% of black households had income of $75,000 or more, compared with 28.7% of black households that had income of $25,000 or less. This was the first time, ever, that the percentage of high-income black households exceeded the percentage of low-income black households."

You can see why the academics and leftist politicians are frantically trying to convince the nation through CRT in the schools, their lap dog woke corporations and the planned rioting of BLM that there is no hope for black America unless whites are demeaned and destroyed. They must make black Americans perpetual victims, hopeless and helpless without the protection of a "benign" Democrat controlled government. Yet who is it who gave them the KKK, Jim Crow, and fatherless homes from the War on Poverty? The Democrats in government.

You won't convince your Democrat friends with emotion or yelling. Try some facts. Money isn't everything, but since they want to portray blacks as po' folk trapped in the ghetto, let's check it out. 

https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/06/10/the-state-of-black-america-black-households/?

Remembering our “golden” past of the 1950s

It’s interesting that even liberals who see everything in the 21^st century as dark, racist and the fault of the GOP, can think of the 50s-60s in Mt Morris, Illinois (or Oregon, or Polo, or Columbus, Ohio) as a time of a golden era. I read a lot of blogs, and that misty, foggy view is common among 70-80 year olds. My husband whose high school was larger in acres and people than Mt. Morris, thinks the same thing. Of course, it’s not true; go through your high school annuals and you’ll see people who were white, but were marginalized because they were fat, or ugly, or low intelligence or unathletic or who never got the help they needed or who dropped out of school after 7^th or 8^th grade at age 16 or 17.

(I think this is 1954, confirmation class Trinity Lutheran for 1957 graduates) 

The U.S. in 2020 is so much less racist, less unfair, with more opportunity and ladders to success for the poor than we enlightened folk of the 50s could have ever imagined. We had devoted, but poorly paid teachers, and today the average hourly wage for a public school teacher is over $67/hour—far more than accountants, architects, librarians, farmers, and muffler repairmen. And statistically, there are far fewer poor and marginalized all over the world. Unfortunately, there’s something about being human – enough is never enough. We’re greedy and ungrateful to God for all he supplies. Slavery is also a bigger trade in the 21^st century than it was in the 18^th yet, U.S. and Europe are expected to take the blame for what happened 300 years ago. Life will never be fair. Some things at the micro-level are better, but the macro tells a more ominous story. And people still use the specter of slavery to grab power as well as to build your smart phone.

The U.S. federal social statistics are difficult to read because they always move the goal, but in 1959, families in poverty in the U.S. were 20.8%, and families headed by women were 49.4% (that was a much smaller numerical figure then). In 2018, the last year for compiled stats, poverty for families was 9.7% and for families head by women 26.8%. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-poverty-people.html The federal government aid has done a lot to dismantle the economic model of the family, but a lot of economic aid is poured into that mistake, and the female headed households are not the victims they used to be, despite the gap. And as I’ve noted before, I still remember the first time I saw a black man in a TV series (Bill Cosby, I Spy) and the first time I saw a black man as a retail clerk in a major chain (Penney’s, Champaign, IL, early 1960s).

So let’s keep some perspective. And watch for the power grabs of today, much of it happening very quickly in the fog of the pandemic.

She's finally put her family together

This is my high school classmate Ebba, and her family—in a puzzle which she has put together. She’s in the front row between grandchildren in a red sweater. [Facebook photo]

Wouldn’t it be nice if it were this easy!

 

Ebba's Jan. 6, 1964 wedding.  Jerry died in 2004. 

Shocking Facts from the book, Don't Divorce by Diane Medved

Don’t Divorce: Powerful Arguments for Saving and Revitalizing Your Marriage
By Diane Medved, Ph.D.

Statistics show that 30 percent of first marriages, 69 percent of second marriages and 73 percent of third marriages end in divorce.

Forty percent of marriages in 2013 included a remarrying partner (in 20 percent it was one of the parties, and in 20 percent it was both).

A survey of thirty-one thousand persons on “office sex and romance,” found that 62 percent have admitted to at least one office affair—and 41 percent had sex on the job, with 16 percent using a boss’s office to do so.

According to a study from McGill University, divorced people had a 30 percent higher chance of dying (from all causes) than their married or single counterparts.

A 2015 study from Duke University reveals that once-divorced women had a 24 percent higher risk of heart of attack than the never-divorced. And twice-divorced women had a 77 percent higher risk of heart attack than the continuously married. Men divorced once had the same risk as their married counterparts, but with a second divorce, their risk was 30 percent greater.

The vast majority of divorces (two-thirds) dissolve “low-conflict” marriages, in which children usually don’t even realize there’s a problem. Children from low-conflict homes are actually more at risk of serious problems than even those who escaped high-conflict situations.

Almost two-thirds of children of divorce who stay in contact with both parents say they felt like they grew up in two families, not one.

Highly religious Americans are happier and more involved with family

Pew Research has determined this--but also says highly religious Americans are also no more likely to exercise and eat right or recycle than the not so religious.  Well, go for what's important and work on the less important stuff.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (April 12, 2016) – A new Pew Research Center study of the ways religion influences the daily lives of Americans finds that people who are highly religious are more engaged with their extended families, more likely to volunteer, more involved in their communities and generally happier with the way things are going in their lives.

For example, 47% of highly religious Americans – defined as those who say they pray every day and attend religious services each week – gather with extended family at least once or twice a month. By comparison, just 30% of Americans who are less religious gather as frequently with their extended families. Roughly two-thirds of highly religious adults (65%) say they have donated money, time or goods to help the poor in the past week, compared with 41% who are less religious. And 40% of highly religious U.S. adults describe themselves as “very happy,” compared with 29% of those who are less religious.

However, in several other areas of day-to-day life – including interpersonal interactions, attention to health and fitness, and social and environmental consciousness – Pew Research Center surveys find that people who pray every day and regularly attend religious services appear to be very similar to those who are not as religious.

For instance, highly religious people are about as likely as other Americans to say they lost their temper recently, and they are only marginally less likely to say they told a white lie in the past week. When it comes to diet and exercise, highly religious Americans are no less likely to have overeaten in the past week, and they are no more likely to say they exercise regularly. Highly religious people also are no more likely than other Americans to recycle. And when making decisions about what goods and services to buy, highly religious Americans are no more inclined to consider the manufacturers’ environmental records or whether companies pay employees a fair wage.

Additional key findings in the report include:

Three-quarters of adults – including 96% of members of historically black Protestant churches and 93% of evangelical Protestants – say they thanked God for something in the past week. And two-thirds, including 91% of those in the historically black Protestant tradition and 87% of evangelicals, say they asked God for help during the past week. One-third of religiously unaffiliated Americans say they thanked God for something in the past week, and one-in-four have asked God for help in the past week.

Nearly half of Americans (46%) say they talk with their immediate families about religion at least once or twice a month. About a quarter (27%) say they talk about religion at least once a month with their extended families, and 33% say they discuss religion as often with people outside their families. Having regular conversations about religion is most common among evangelicals and people who belong to churches in the historically black Protestant tradition. By contrast, relatively few religious “nones” say they discuss religion with any regularity.

One-third of American adults (33%) say they volunteered in the past week. This includes 10% who say they volunteered mainly through a church or religious organization and 22% who say their volunteering was not done through a religious organization.

Three-in-ten adults say they meditated in the past week to help cope with stress. Regularly using meditation to cope with stress is more common among highly religious people than among those who are less religious (42% vs. 26%).

Nine-in-ten adults say the quality of a product is a “major factor” they take into account when making purchasing decisions, and three-quarters focus on the price. Far fewer – only about one-quarter of adults – say a company’s environmental responsibility (26%) or whether it pays employees a fair wage (26%) are major factors in their purchasing decisions. Highly religious adults are no more or less likely than those who are less religious to say they consider a company’s environmental record and fair wage practices in making purchasing decisions.

Three-quarters of Catholics say they look to their own conscience “a great deal” for guidance on difficult moral questions. Far fewer Catholics say they look a great deal to the Catholic Church’s teachings (21%), the Bible (15%) or the pope (11%) for guidance on difficult moral questions.

When asked to describe, in their own words, what being a “moral person” means to them, 23% of religious “nones” cite the golden rule or being kind to others, 15% mention being a good person and 12% mention being tolerant and respectful of others.

These are among the latest findings of Pew Research Center’s U.S. Religious Landscape Study. Two previous reports on the Landscape Study, based on a 2014 telephone survey of more than 35,000 adults, examined the changing religious composition of the U.S. public and described the religious beliefs, practices and experiences of Americans. This new report also draws on the national telephone survey but is based primarily on a supplemental survey among 3,278 participants in the Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel, a nationally representative group of randomly selected U.S. adults surveyed online and by mail. The supplemental survey was designed to go beyond traditional measures of religious behavior – such as worship service attendance, prayer and belief in God – to examine the ways people exhibit (or do not exhibit) their religious beliefs, values and connections in their day-to-day lives.

The day after the birthday party

We spent the night at Joan's home, and Deb was at Jean's. On Sunday we all went to Cornerstone Baptist Church where Jean and Joan's families are members, then headed back to Jean and Bob's home for more family time and lunch.  There were lots of left overs from the birthday party.  Hamburgers, hot dogs, French Fries, cute cupcakes.  We left about 3 p.m. for Columbus.

The party food fed our Sunday crowd

Caleb's twins, Joan's granddaughters

The siblings enjoy time together at Jean's home

Our party favors, 2 Coke glasses

Robert Putnam speaks at Lakeside

Robert D. Putnam was our program at Lakeside last night--he’s an entertaining, engaging speaker, about my age, married 55 years, a Harvard graduate and college professor.  Even with charts and graphs that show the widening income and behavior gap between upper class (which is growing) and lower class (also growing) and middle class (shrinking) he can hold a large audience‘s attention. He clearly laid out the reasons (particularly for near-by Port Clinton, Ohio, his home town), but his solutions are what one would expect from an academic--more money for education. Twenty years ago his “Bowling alone” book showed how Americans were not pulling together in the communities, clubs, churches and fraternal societies working for the larger good as they had been in the first half of the 20th century.  And that was before the me-phone.

I was shocked to learn that in 1990 Port Clinton’s out of wedlock birth rate was 9% (below the national average) and today just 25 years later is about 40% just a little less than Columbus and above Ohio’s rate. This is not Chicago or Cleveland, but little Port Clinton (ca. 6,000 population, 93% white).  So guess which children are doing better in all measures? Which children are attending church and leaving Port Clinton to go to college?  Children living with married parents who provide economically, spiritually, and socially for them.

And yet he wants education and government to solve this. My belief is that government has contributed to the problem with 128 transfer programs taking money from the middle class to give to the poor that would make a woman think twice or thrice before marrying a guy who cares more about cars and sports than his children, causing her to lose health and housing benefits. Marriage and responsibility help young men become grown ups; the government helps them remain adolescents until they can collect Medicare.

He noted that at the turn of the 20th century Americans decided tax supported high school was important and it made a huge difference in the lives of the poor.  But for some reason I think he’s believing compulsory, government pre-schools and free college will do the same.  Well, not without marriage, and not without jobs—but it will be more jobs for academics and government bureaucracies.

http://robertdputnam.com/about-our-kids/ 

http://robertdputnam.com/about-our-kids/press-release/

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/books/review/our-kids-by-robert-d-putnam.html?_r=0

Friday family photo—the siblings

On Thursday we drove to Indianapolis so we could see Bob’s brother, Rick, who was there for an Elk’s national convention.  He is the Exalted Ruler of Lodge 1959 in Huntington Beach, CA, and has many responsibilities. So we all met at their sister’s home and this included the 8 grandchildren of our niece who had been with us in Lakeside just 2 weeks previously.

With Rick and Kate on Thursday before we all went out to eat at O’Charley’s on East Washington.  It rained most of Friday, but in late afternoon the sun came out and the children could play outside.  Whew!

Kate and I were dressed for the coolish July weather, but not the AC.

The Bruce siblings are so pale you need a colorful background for them to show up on photos.

With the exception of the two adults holding children, these are Joan’s grandchildren, Jean’s great-grandchildren.

Childlessness decreasing, family size increasing

“Among women in the United States, postgraduate education and motherhood are increasingly going hand-in-hand. The share of highly educated women who are remaining childless into their mid-40s has fallen significantly over the past two decades. Today, about one-in-five women ages 40 to 44 with a master’s degree or higher (22%) have no children – down from 30% in 1994, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly released Census Bureau data.”

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2015/05/2015-05-07_children-ever-born_FINAL.pdf

Are we being lied to about race and income by the media and politicians?

Today I was looking at the U.S. Census.  Now, to answer a question, you can’t always get a table of Honey Crisp apples.  Sometimes it’s apples and oranges in a box.    For instance, I looked at the Family Income by race—but the table didn’t define “family.” That’s not necessarily mom, dad and kids.  I suppose for census purposes it’s any group of related people living in a household, but I don’t actually know.  Anyway, it’s Table 695. Money Income of Families—Number and Distribution by Race and Hispanic Origin: 2009. U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2012   Based on that table, the percent of white families earning over $100,000 is 27%; the percent of black families earning over $100,000 is 12.1%; the percent of Hispanic families earning over $100,000 is 12.4% and the percent of Asian families earning over $100,000 is 37.7%.  So if whites are 77.7% of the population and blacks are 13.2%,  and Asians are 5.3%, if something needs to be investigated, if something isn’t “fair,” if the president wants to address a wealth gap, wouldn’t it be the fault of the Asian families?  What are they doing to “deserve” such a big slice of the pie?  Marriage?  Education?  Values? Entrepreneurship? Have you ever heard the president chastise Asians for their education, intelligence, hard work?  Their median family income is $75,027, black family income is $38,409.

Worse economic analysis out there--today

Derek Thompson seems to think that married couples have children because of tax deductions. I've heard of welfare mothers having more babies because of the welfare check, the food stamps and housing allowance, but a deduction is hardly an inducement to go through 9 months of pregnancy and 20 years of dependency. Right now the tax code is quite anti-family--Thompson needs a lesson in history. You can tell Thompson is a Democrat--well, demographics tell us that, with 90% of reporters and journalists in bed with the party--but also, because the only way he can think to help the poor to to take more tax money from someone else, skim it for the politicians and government employees, and then look at a pie chart and feel good.

Atlantic opinion

Lewison family faith

Listening to the local Catholic radio I hear many things that are unfamiliar, or I think were settled in the 16th century reformation--at least for those who began following the teachings of Luther and Calvin. Purgatory; Worship of Mary and the saints (and please don't tell me it's not "worship" because they are praying to them--I hear them); Obligations; Miracles at shrines; Indulgences. And so forth.

That said, it would seem that proper theology doesn't mean much. I heard this morning an amazing story of faith on Women of Grace hosted by Johnnette Benkovic, and whether it is Jesus, Mary, the saints or all combined, it is undergirding this family.

A woman, Mary Lewison, called the show I was listening to earlier in the year--February possibly--to discuss the death of her 18 year old son who was killed when his truck was hit by a train. The moderater had also lost a son, so the two had had a long talk on the air. This week the woman sent the moderator an article about the family to catch up, which Johnnette then read on the show this morning.

After the death of her 18 year old, 4 of the 5 surviving children in the family were in two different automobile accidents, 2 serious enough to be hospitalized. Then the woman's husband had a heart attack when he was in a different state, and got to the ER within minutes of death--the doctor called it a "widow-maker," and she became his care-giver; when she thought nothing else could happen to her family, the woman was fired from her job for missing so much work during her husband's 4 month recovery!

She has not lost her faith in Jesus. Broadcast is here for December 21, 2011.

A holy experience

"It killed my Dad that he worked the dirt to pay the taxes to pay the checks of teachers who told his kids that working the dirt wasn’t worthy work."

A beautiful love story.

In defense of food. You'll love this.

Monday Memories--Clyde

This memory piece was written about 15-20 years ago and I found it undated in long-hand on yellow lined paper, apparently written specifically for a class, although never used. There are several layers of memory here--mine, my neighbor's, his deceased siblings, and his father's. We all hear family stories--write them down! I think the reason I caught this one is it reminded me so much of a similar story my father told about his grandfather's trip by train from Tennessee to resettle in northern Illinois in the early 20th century, with his wife and 6 or 7 children.

Sadly, a few years after Clyde told me this story, he began to show signs of Alzheimer's and then the library really did burn down--everything he'd known was gone and he no longer recognized us or even his family who continued to bring him back to Lakeside for many years. Yes, write down those stories!

---------------

Our Lakeside neighbor, Clyde, doesn’t let “grass grow under his feet”--literally. His side yard is gravel so he doesn’t worry about grass, and he’s so busy, you just know he’s the kind of guy who fits that expression. At 77 he is a tireless worker.

The youngest of nine children, Clyde is now an “orphan” and has outlived all his siblings. Two brothers and a sister died this past year and Clyde pauses before he runs up the ladder long enough to comment on the loneliness of being a survivor.

Surviving is a tradition in Clyde’s family. He claims to not have the family stories that his oldest brother carried in his memory. The older brother was known to pump the aunts, uncles and cousins for family stories, and he enjoyed telling them at family get togethers, but no one recorded them. Clyde says sadly, “When he died it was like burning a library. I just don’t have those stories.”

Then as if to call himself a liar, he launches into a family story. The recent deaths of his siblings reminds him that back about 75 years ago three of his father’s friends were killed in a mining accident in southeast Ohio. His father packed up his family--wife and nine children--and rode the train to Cleveland to begin a new life away from the mines.

His father knew one person in Cleveland and recalled only that he worked for the railroad. The family camped out in the Cleveland train station for three days waiting for his father’s friend, who only came to the station every few days.

The children slept on the benches and swept floors and ran errands to earn a little money. When his father's friend arrived and learned of their plight he helped the family resettle. Within a few days Clyde’s father had a job, a rented house and within a year he bought a home.

------------------

That's all I wrote--don't know if I had planned an ending, but I'll just add that I see Clyde's great-grandchildren at his summer cottage each summer and have watched them growing up, after seeing their parents when they were just little kids. The photo is from 1994 when we were at Lakeside in the fall raking leaves.

Wealth For Life Principles

These were found at Black Enterprise. I was reading an on-line article on how to survive on one income for a formerly 2-income household, although I'm not sure these 10 were part of that article.

1. I Will Live Within My Means
2. I Will Maximize My Income Potential Through Education and Training
3. I Will Effectively Manage My Budget, Credit, Debt, and Tax Obligations
4. I Will Save At Least 10% of My Income
5. I Will Use Homeownership as a Foundation For Building Wealth
6. I Will Devise An Investment Plan For My Retirement Needs And Childrens’ Education
7. I Will Ensure That My Entire Family Adheres To Sensible Money Management Principles
8. I Will Support the Creation and Growth of Minority-Owned Businesses
9. I Will Guarantee My Wealth Is Passed On To Future Generations Through Proper Insurance And Estate Planning
10. I Will Strengthen My Community Through Philanthropy.

I think it is an excellent list, although most of them we didn't follow (especially #8--even most hair products and hiphop music are white controlled). We were in our upper 40s by the time we even thought about saving for retirement (there weren't as many tax shelters back in the old days for the ordinary citizen). That's when I went back to work and joined a tax deferred savings plan. Before we became DINKS, everything that didn't go for the kids went to the house. We learned in our 30s about tithing our income (loosely #10), and I think that's a tremendous advantage to start at a young age. Just take it off the top, from the gross, not the net. I have my personal doubts that home ownership (#5) builds wealth. . . although its better than owning a boat. Owning income property and renting does create an investment, however. It's a huge hassle and one I wouldn't recommend for the faint of heart, but that crummy duplex we bought in 1962 put us on the road, not to wealth, but to better housing and income growth for us. For the first 25 years of our marriage our savings (#4) was "put and take" certainly nothing for the long run.