"We're on an austerity plan ...."

When I was a kid (in need of 6 cents for a Popsicle), my dad used to say this. Of course, I had no idea what austerity meant--though I had a pretty good idea: No Popsicle.*

We didn't have a lot of money in our family. My mom--early on--was a stay-at-home mom: three sons to deal with. We lived on Dad's salary as a professor at Enid, Oklahoma's Phillips University (RIP); he supplemented it with filling in on Sundays as a preacher here and there; he supplemented it a little more with what he earned in the Air Force Reserves (he was a chaplain at Enid's Vance AFB).

When I was in later elementary school, Mom went to work--teaching junior high school English at Enid's Emerson Junior High School. (Enid's other jhs was Longfellow!) But public school teachers then made very little. When I started teaching in the fall of 1966 in the Aurora Middle School (Aurora, Ohio), my salary was $5100--so you can imagine what it had been a dozen years earlier in Oklahoma.

Anyway, every now and then Dad would announce that we were on an "austerity plan"--and we knew there were no extra $$ available for anything. Just the essentials. Food. Gasoline. Utilities. Etc. That was about it until (how?) we crawled out of the Austerity Pit and could enjoy a Popsicle.

Let me hasten to say this: I never felt "deprived" or "poor" or whatever. We always had food. We lived in good housing. I didn't wear rags to school. But there just was never really a lot of extra cash lying around. My parents were very prudent (my mother's name was Prudence!), very careful about money, and it served them well later on when they went into a stages-of-care facility for their final years. They had the money for it.

When I became a teacher (as I mentioned), I had to practice the austere routines I'd learned as a kid. We got paid on the 1st and the 15th; my take-home was $168.42. I had to pay rent, food, car payment, utilities, etc. My sad checking account--by the end of the pay period--usually held only cents. When I married Joyce in December 1969, I had begun my fourth year of teaching. I had not a single penny in savings. Her wee stipend at Kent State (she was a grad assistant) brought in a few hundred a month, and I felt we'd found the rainbow jackpot.

Then our son was born (July 1972), and money began to flow out more quickly than it was coming in. Fortunately, we had no credit cards at the time (except for gasoline and Amex, which, then required full payment at the end of each month). We learned to be ... austere. To get by. I learned some of the habits of my parents without even realizing that I'd done so.

Yesterday, for some reason, the phrase austerity plan popped back into my head; I checked it out on the web and learned that it has been employed for a long, long time--and all over the world. It's controversial, too. Cutting government spending affects lots of people--and not usually in a good way. My parents had experienced a number of instances of it.

But--now--I'm glad I learned the word at such an early age. Learned the idea. No Popsicles has transformed, later on, into No unnecessary expenses--or, rather--Rare unnecessary expenses.

And so we've reached our Twilight Years (no--no sign of Edward Cullen and Bella yet) and are able to live just comfortably--and happily--on our retirement incomes. We are not Popsicle Rich, but we have each other, our families, our memories, our daily experiences with each other. And I can't think of a better, more affluent way to live.


*austerity = a way that is plainly simple or unadorned; giving little or no scope for pleasure or indulgence