by Tom Braden
And I say to myself, “Well, I do save money on Coca-Cola, which I long ago barred from the house along with ginger ale, root beer, Fresca and all the other money-eaters which children love. I barred them, not so much because I object to them per se, but because it was impossible to keep them. A case of Coca-Cola on a Saturday was gone on the same Saturday. There would be a faintly surprised glance at me: “Where’d you get the Coke, Dad?” And the next time I looked, the case was gone.
So, I try to ignore the milk bill. I mean, I try to forget that it’s bigger than it ought to be and I concentrate instead on the food bill, which is more susceptible to change. Mostly upward, I agree. But there is one thing which can be done about it. It came to me the summer of 1973, when lamb chops were selling at eighty cents each. I remember the price of lamb chops because I was standing in front of the meat counter at an A&P market when suddenly an old man standing next to me turned and fixed me with a glittering eye that would have done credit to the Ancient Mariner. “Sixty-eight years,” he said in a kind of wail, “man and boy I’ve lived in this town and in all that time I never seen anything like this.”
He continued berating the Nixon administration, the grain deal with Russia, the middlemen and the food markets, addressing himself exclusively to me, and his voice rose, so that it was embarrassing and I turned aside somewhere between soap and kitchen utensils. There, lying neatly stacked on a bottom shelf, I saw something I had not thought about for many years—package upon package of dried white beans.
A long-forgotten image came to mind—Grandmother’s kitchen on a Thursday afternoon when I came to mow her lawn. Those white beans soaking in a huge pot to be ready for Saturday night supper. If Grandmother could do it, why not I?
It was thus I learned about a minor weapon against inflation and also about the approbation of daughters which every father seeks. As a group, if fathers can be so called, two goals are paramount. First, to provide: fathers actually enjoy seeing their children eat. Second, the admiration of daughters. Sons are not admirers. After the age of puberty, if a son has not rebelled, a father begins to wonder why. But to call a daughter on the long distance telephone, and to hear her say, “Is this my father?” in a joyous and excited surprise—this is what fathers live for.
To bring home a sack of dried beans fulfills the need to provide, but, of course, it will get you no cheers. If you follow my recommendation, you will go further.
There was a recipe for Boston baked beans in the kitchen cookbook and another on the back of the cellophane wrapper. One called for dark beer, the other for tomato juice. One called for molasses, the other for maple syrup. One recommended boiling the beans, the other warned against it. But both were in agreement on soaking the beans overnight, cooking them in hot water until soft, adding the tomato juice-beer, the molasses-maple syrup, mustard and salt before baking six to eight hours at 250 degrees.
It made a marvelous meal for a family of ten, at a cost of less than the price of two lamb chops. I have repeated the experiment once a week ever since and always with success. The fact that the meal has historical interest (Great-grandmother is a good topic of conversation in any family), that the process takes a couple of days, thus permitting trepidation and suspense (before baking, the beans always look as though something had gone wrong), that the consumption can be viewed as a thrust at inflation and vengeance against those responsible—all this helps to make a father feel worthy and actually does cut down a little bit on the grocery bill.
I wish I knew equally good ways to cut the expense of equally important things. Clothes, for example. But we have been very lucky about clothes. The only one in the family who spends too much on clothes is Joan, and she pays for them out of her own salary.
The children, growing up on a beach, didn’t care very much what they put on their backs and what they put on their backs didn’t cost much. Not until we moved from California back to Maryland did any of them wear shoes except under protest, and I saved a lot of money by not protesting very much. The change was more expensive than it should have been because the smaller children, having formed the habit of going barefoot, tended to lose their shoes in Maryland. But, after the first winter, they grew accustomed to the new climate and the bills went down.
And then about the time they got to be teen-agers, they adopted the uniform of their generation. Blue jeans and nothing but blue jeans. I made some mild protests, particularly to the girls. “Blue jeans,” I said, “are boring. Why don’t you put on a dress?” But secretly, I told myself I was saving money. What if the styles of the late sixties and early seventies had been different? What if five girls wanted to wear five dresses? What if they wanted to wear different dresses each day? Thank God for blue jeans.
I think of other occasions and items on which, over the years, great outlays have been made. It seems to me that I have bought enough bicycles to equip an army and enough Christmas presents to make a mockery of religion. I can remember one Christmas in California when there were so many presents under the tree and around the tree and sprawled out into the far corners of a room that even the children were sickened by it, and halfway through the ceremony of opening them, the younger ones began to cry out of sheer fatigue. I remember Tommy saying, “I don’t want to open any more presents.” That was the last Christmas that was anything like that. Joan and I had made a mistake, and we knew it and the children knew it, and we never made the mistake again. I think of the mistake, even now, with revulsion.
A man can do something—however slight—about the food bill; he can be lucky about the clothing bill; he can shake himself about ways his family is spending money unnecessarily. But there is one expense about which, as far as I know, he can do nothing at all. It is the biggest expense; the one for which he vainly saves and for which he might even consider stealing. There is no way of avoiding this expense. He can say to his children, “I can’t do it,” but there is no way he can say that without suffering the knowledge that whatever he has done for his children, it was not enough to do. I refer, of course, to college, without which no child can ever expect to earn very much money. College is not essential to success. Success is doing well at something and knowing in your own heart that you did well. College is a help to success but it is essential only to earning money.
I wish the figures did not prove that statement to be so true. In 1973, the mean income of all men in the United States twenty-five years or over was $10,943. For those who had been to college one to three years, it was $12,515; for those who had graduated from college, $15,974; for those who had five or more years of college and graduate school, it was $18,555.
Is it crass of me to want to give my children the opportunity to earn more than the mean? Then so be it. I should feel guilty unless I tried. And so they are going to college, or at least all but one of those who are of college age are going, along with twenty-five percent of their peers. The drain on their father is great, so great as to be almost indescribable. And as each child comes of college age, it grows harder and harder to share with them the boundless joy which comes from the notices of admissions officers.
“Dad, I’ve been admitted.” The voice is a pealing bell. But for me, the words are laden with foreboding. They translate as follows: “Dad, next year you will have to find five thousand more.” Or make it four, or three. College charges are almost nowhere less than that and they are going up, like everything else, only faster.
I don’t think private colleges are giving sufficient thought to the fact that they are rapidly becoming institutions for the very rich and the very poor. Many of them won’t even admit it. And state institutions are on the same path. Their tuitions are going up too, although from a lower base. If they follow the lead of the private colleges and the wisdom of the educational establishment, they will shortly be beyond the means of their principal constituency, that is, the great American middle class.
College officials answer the charge that they are turning aside the middle class by pointing to government i
nsured loans. I can’t believe any college official ever tried to get one. What they will discover, if they do, is that the child of anyone who earns more than $15,000 per year is extremely unlikely to be eligible for such a loan. Anyone who earns more than $20,000 can forget about applying. Oh, I know that if you have more than one child to put through college, adjustments are in order. College officials are supposed to add up your gross income, make deductions according to the number of children in the family, and then determine whether your child is eligible for scholarship aid.
Put yourself in the position of one of those college officials. Here is an applicant from a family which earns less than $10,000 annually. Here is another applicant from a family which earns $30,000 annually. Which family would you want to help?
My own way out has been to borrow from life insurance, from banks, from friends—anybody I can borrow from.
The children work—as I worked when I went to college. But when I went to college, tuition was four hundred dollars per year. Today it’s four thousand. Working your way through college is no longer possible.
I wish tuition and board and room were the total bill. My daughter Joannie says her classmates constantly ask her, “Why don’t you have any money?”
Their attitude is realistic. “You’re here,” they seem to be saying, “if you’re here, you must have money. So why can’t you afford to go to the movies?”
I went up to Dartmouth recently to a trustees’ meeting. Susan was at Dartmouth, and Joannie came over from Bennington, to which she had transferred when she couldn’t stand sex education at Antioch. We had breakfast together for two days running, and in between meetings, we took long walks and had fun. We were all leaving—Susan for classes, Joannie to catch the bus for Bennington and I to catch the airplane home—when the girls mentioned money. I opened my wallet and I found a five-dollar bill and four ones. So I took out the four ones and I handed them each two.
There were reverberations. My friend Charles McLane who teaches government at Dartmouth had talked to my daughters, and when I appeared for the next meeting of the trustees, he talked to me.
“Braden,” he said, “I think you’re being a little old-fashioned. You exalt the value of self-dependence, but forget about inflation. A couple of dollars when you and I were at Dartmouth was spending money. Three dollars bought a whole case of beer. Today it hardly pays the price of a movie.”
Charley explained the facts of life. “I should think thirty-five dollars a week would be about right,” he advised, “for spending money.”
I did not quarrel with my old friend, whom I greatly admire. He wouldn’t believe the truth. The truth is that after tuition and board and room and books and travel, I don’t have thirty-five dollars for any child. They’re lucky when I have two.
The Good Life
You have this idea in your head all your life that you will have a house which will be pleasant and serene and roomy enough to accommodate friends, and with a place outside large enough for the children to play.
And you hope the children will bring other children. It is satisfying to think that they have friends; they’re out there playing baseball or they’re in the living room, squatting on the floor, playing that game you bought one of them last Christmas.
Can Tommy’s friend stay all night? Of course he can stay all night, his mother willing. A certain pleasure swells the chest. Being host, or watching your children be host is a substantial, solid pleasure. It’s the good life.
And then somewhere along the line—is it the age of fifteen? Sixteen? Seventeen?—it is no good any more. The pride is gone; the hospitality is gone; you are no longer a host; you are being used and so is your hospitality and your liquor and your furniture and your reputation.
It has all been seized by a gang, consisting of your own child or children plus boys or girls whose parents you know, whom you knew as younger girls and boys, and knew as nice girls and boys.
And what are they doing now? They are sitting in your living room, staring at one another, and once in a while chortling to each other, and they are waiting for you to go.
And when you have gone, they intend to drink your liquor; they intend to investigate your bathroom to see whether you have left a pill or two they can swallow; they intend, at the very least, to raid the icebox, and they will leave the kitchen a mess, put their muddy feet up on the newly upholstered chairs, light a fire in the fireplace and spray sparks on the rug, insert a knife blade into a locked door, and open it, just to see what you have locked up; they intend to take a book from your shelf if it happens to interest them and they are making no mental notes to bring it back; they intend to take your car and go for a ride, and if they dent a fender they will lie about it; they will leave your house a mess; and they will do all this because they resent your house and your hospitality and, most of all, they resent you.
It took me a long time to know that this was true. I couldn’t believe it. I kept thinking each time it happened, that each time it happened was an aberration; that some unwanted and intruding stranger had disrupted a gathering of good and upright friends, or that it was an accident; somebody who is normally gentle had been seized by too much alcohol and had behaved in a fashion so shameful that I could count on its never happening again.
But it isn’t so. There is a time in the life of a man and a woman, between childhood and adulthood, between dependence and responsibility, between desire and the ability to cope with it, between wanting something and deciding to earn it, when the human being, physically grown and emotionally childish, is a very dangerous animal.
Naturally, the animal snarls at larger, more secure and more peaceful animals. It resents them. “Unconsciously” is perhaps a little strong. I like to think it’s unconscious because experience proves that a few years bring a change, and that the change is complete. But I’m not so sure that it’s truly unconscious. That stare which greets you when you enter a room of seventeen-year-olds is truly hostile, out of a sense of danger perhaps, for the discovery of some secret or the jeopardy of some plan, out of jealousy perhaps, at the possible departure of the car; but nonetheless, and quite clearly, hostile.
When I discovered that it was true, I tried camaraderie; I tried offering a drink; I tried discussion—topics of the day, sports, politics, style. It helps a little but is by no means an insurance policy. When I can’t sleep at three in the morning, and walk down to the kitchen to get a glass of milk, I face, despite the camaraderie, a distinct possibility of witnessing chaos. It is also possible—why didn’t I put the key in my pocket?—that the car is gone.
For the last couple of years I have been examining those who belong to Nancy’s gang. I have learned the following: First, their hostility is both tribal and generational. It is not individual. In the army we used to say of a certain type of man, “He is a shirt-giver.” It was the highest praise one could bestow, and it meant just what it said—that in a pinch, such a man would give you his shirt.
The members of Nancy’s gang, I have learned, are often shirt-givers to each other, protecting each other, doing each other kindnesses, walking the last mile for each other.
Nor, I think, does each individual member of Nancy’s gang feel individual hostility toward me. It is only as a group that the hostility asserts itself. For example, Nancy’s friend, Phillip, is, as a member of the gang, a menace to both peace and property. One day last summer, having learned from Nancy that Phillip was interested in movies, I mentioned a recent film I had enjoyed and tried to talk to him about a review which I had read and with which I disagreed.
It was a mistake, or so I thought at the time. For I had approached Phillip as he was sitting among the gang in the living room, silent and waiting for me to leave. In response to my overture, he murmured something or other, both unintelligible and final. I walked away, rebuffed.
But last Christmas vacation when the gang were again reoccupying their summer’s lair, Phillip came over one evening quite alone. Seeking me out, he produced, em
barrassedly, and looking off to the side as he spoke, “a book on the film which I thought might interest you.” He disappeared, almost before I could recover sufficiently to express my thanks, and the next time I saw him, there he was again in the living room, surrounded by his fellows, glaring at me with suspicion.
It is not I, then; not I, as a person, whom Phillip resents but I as a member of a generation, a member of an older, bigger, more prosperous and powerful gang.
Phillip’s behavior points toward a truth which mitigates the harsh truth about the mysteriously allotted time span during which children are animals. This truth is that the animals will change into human beings again. It is beginning to happen to Nancy’s friend Phillip. I have watched it happen to David and Mary and Susan and Joannie. It happens almost literally overnight. One day they make me grind my teeth at night. (The dentist says teeth grinding at night is quite common among parents of teen-age children.) The next day they are suddenly neat, clean, responsible, and with their hair combed.
I have thought long and hard about what causes a child to change from an animal into a human being, and what causes him to change so rapidly. I have discussed the problem with those who have had animals in their care—with college presidents, for example, and with Ethel Kennedy, who must run a kind of animal farm.
They have recognized the phenomenon too but they have given me advice and explanation either incapable of proof or too general to be worthwhile. Ethel says you have to talk constantly with the animals, develop understanding and mutual trust. That’s kind—as Ethel is. But I know it doesn’t always work for her or for me.
I have a different theory. I think it’s the money supply. I mean just that. What changes or at least helps to change an animal into a human being is the money supply. If I had it to do all over again, I would not have permitted the following:
