Friday, August 12, 2011

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

LILY MAY

It was when I was a teenager, going to Stevens High School in Claremont and living on Pine Grove Street with my grandmother who used to take in 'boarders/roomers' one at a time so that she could make ends meet on the small amount of social security,etc. she had after my grandfather had died of a heart attack on the floor in the kitchen of that same house,that I met Lily May who was an elderly lady who had come over frm a nearby town to stay with us. The people with whom she had been staying, supposedly some sort of 'relatives' far distant, drove up in a truck with her belongings which they placed in the garage. Heer beautiful and heavy wood desk was placed in our living room and she slept on a couch there also. She had a sharp mind and also a sharp tonque simply because she was slightly deaf and also somewhat set in her ways...perhaps living a bit in the past.....we had conversations about different things and also she had me get some books out the trunks for her and I was able to read some of them. She had come from Missoula, Montana or had lived there and when she married, she and her husband, Charles, who had been dead for some years when I knew her, had taken their honeymoon tripthrough the Panama Canal and we discussed this canal and also looked at some pictures and a book on it, if I recall correctly....I mention this because they had been quite wealthy and as she told me,'We went to bed one night with money and wealth and so on, and woke up the next morning with NOTHING AT ALL' or something similar to convey the sober fact of the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the DEPRESSION that struck the country....... I mention this here because the trends that were in place during the first twenty five years of the 20th Century are the same ones in place in this 21st Century and also in the 19th Century......However, some persons, despite the trends and depression became wealthy and rich, based perhaps on the misery and desperation of others and the majority, just as during the 'Potato Famine' in Ireland the English/British Landlords still received their rents and food from their tenants in Ireland and let them starve. It shows that some economic systems based on 'land tenure' and monopolies lead to poverty despite progress... While great progress is being made in medicine, technology, space travel,etc. and other things, great poverty is increasing even in these 'advanced' countries....the same trends that happened before and after the Civil War,the bloodiest this nation has ever had....also a contest over land,freedom, and poverty......the rich versus the poor....in some respects, the usual battle...that now is being increased on US soil again.....'the rich get richer and poor get poorer' is the popular description and sometimes explanation of what is happening and why it happens...the rich have money to spend and the poor have little or nor money to spend and even if the poor receive funds and money to spend, the rich obtain it back from the things they control and sometimes sell....all with the help of government and law and similar institutions....it would seem....