The Depression

The people in my family who survived the Great Depression have always struggled to throw anything away.
There seems to be a fear that some insignificant piece of something that has been tossed on the heap will be exactly the thing that is needed. But it will be gone.
The sadness, the guilt, the blame, the anger, the sense of loss? They are all that will remain.
But the need? It will still be there. Always.
My mother, my aunts, my uncles, all those survivors of the pre-war years....
They hesitated to let anything go.
Who wanted the responsibility to throw something away that may one day be needed?
Who could bear that weight?
It was a materialism of the broke and broken.
It manifested itself in the hoarding of chipped china, out-dated, out-worn, out-grown clothing, and things harvested from the curbs of the big houses in the Garden District.
My mother's father, Joseph, had his "route"....his regular rounds up and down St. Charles Avenue which he would haunt at night. Joseph carried around a strong sense of disapproval of the rich fools who gave his route an energy and purpose.
Memories of crying sick or hungry children who couldn't be treated or pacified.
Memories of those same children walking along the tracks picking up coal dropped from railroad cars.
Memories of chamber pots filled with urine-ice in freezing bedrooms.
Memories of children naked in their beds waiting for their only change of clothes to be washed.
And the rich? They were the fools whose trash was gold.

Even the rhymes that my grandfather taught me as a child were full of anger and bitterness...
"Tammy was a Welshman.
Tammy was a thief.
Tammy came to my house
And stole a leg of beef.
So I went to Tammy's house,
And he was laying in bed.
So I picked up the marrow bone,
And hit him over the head."

The Depression was a disease. Something my family had survived...but a cancer in remission that could rise up again and again. And the fear of it fed on my family and the way they lived.
I remember my people as loud, harsh, fierce and full of rage...and hungry.
They grabbed, they snatched, they wrestled. They survived.
And they held on to everything....especially the memories.