As the Kitty Burns

I walk home, one knee high sagging around my ankle.

I'm thinking.

My cat needs her kidneys flushed. Something is wrong, but I have no idea what. The nice doctor explained it to me on the phone, but a combination of what I can only assume is medical-speak plus his heavy Indian accent turned the explanation to gibberish. I don't understand accents on the best of days because...well...I'm a terrible person (isn't this the sort of thing politically correct, caring, and sensitive white folk know how to do?), but it's even worse when the words are unfamiliar to me.

All I know is she needs them flushed. She needs an IV. She needs an extended vet stay, and in a couple days, she needs her blood tested. Oh, and antibiotics. We can never forget the fun of giving a kitty antibiotics.

And I'm seeing little cartoon dollar signs flitting around my head, making a pass or two before fluttering off into the wide blue sky. I have money. I can pay for this. But it'll hurt. And the solution they're giving...well the doctor isn't guaranteeing it's a solution. There could be more money, more tests if this doesn't work.

I'm thinking of my mom, a single mother in Florida--back when Florida was still something resembling sane--struggling to make ends meet.

We were the only white faces on the black side of town, but back then that didn't mean what it does now. The neighborhood was by no means safe, but crimes didn't happen in broad daylight. Neighbors still looked out for each other, even if it was just keeping a wary eye on what was going on around the homes next to them. My mother could go outside and walk down the street without fear of being raped. I could play in my yard--front or back, we had both--without fear of being kidnapped or harmed. In fact, we had more to fear from the boys who liked to drag race their cars down the street than any criminal danger.

And all those black faces around us were in exactly the same boat.

We adopted a dog when I was four or five and named her Lassie. She wasn't a collie. She was, in fact, probably the spawn of several generations of sleazy back-alley encounters between breeds looking to kink it up with members outside their genetically exclusive gene pool. She was a small, enthusiastic mop of nervous love, her big brown eyes hidden behind bangs so long my mother often clipped them.

She was a pound dog, and that meant something different then than it does now. Anything from a pound had a fifty-fifty chance of having contracted some sort of disease or ailment, usually from the close quarters with other dogs or the merely adequate hygienic conditions. They weren't checked, and pounds didn't apologize. It was simply known, like you knew the sun was going to rise, that you took your chances.

Lassie, when she came to us, had problems. She wasn't fixed, for one thing; that was on our dime. I remember looking at her stitches, mom trying to explain to me what they were for. I also know she was ill, but I was little and it's been years. Ask me to tell you with what and I couldn't answer. I know it was two or three things, probably ears, fur/skin, and some bacteria or virus she needed medicine for. The moment we got that dog we had a money pit.

But my mother stretched her budget and that lovely little dog lived with us for nearly twenty years.

Keep in mind, my mom was a single mother--that's difficult in any day and age. She had only a high school degree, so she wasn't exactly raking in the bucks. And yet, in many ways she was better off then than I am now.

We owned our own home. Sure, it was dirt cheap and on the wrong side of town, and sure we only afforded it because of a special program hosted by the city (lowering crime by making prices affordable for families who weren't criminals to move in--it worked), but hey, we owned it. How many people could do that now, even if offered similar help?

Mom owned her own car. Not making payments, owned. And when a wreck wiped it out, she bought a new one. Sure it was old and not very fancy, and sure it wasn't speedy or pretty or really anything desirable. But it was reliable, not a junker, and was bought with money she saved.

We got a dog, and while the budget was tight while we nursed her back to health, we managed it.
She had one job, one, and it paid all the bills plus some left over. Very little, but some.
And, I can't stress this enough, she was raising a child all on her own.

And my mother, then, made less than I do now, even adjusting for inflation.

Fast forward ten years.

After her divorce and after discovering that her ex had found a legal loophole through which he didn't have to pay his court mandated child support--ever--she was essentially a single mom again, but this time with two kids. Still, she was also senior in her field, having the know how and experience to have moved up considerably in rank, and now made more than she did when I was a preschooler.

My grandparents bought her a trailer on a tiny piece of land nearly an hour outside town--if they hadn't we'd have been homeless. My grandparents bought her a car--if they hadn't, mom would be jobless. And to keep us afloat my mother maxed every credit card she owned, worked long hours, and when that didn't cover it she took on so many odd jobs they essentially became a second job in their own right. Money was so tight we didn't even have a dollar to spare for a candy bar.

Fast forward again another fifteenish years, give or take.

I'm single and childless. I make more now than my mother ever did--even adjusted for inflation--but I own nothing permanent. No car. No college, because I can't afford it and my credit is too bad to get loans--education is apparently NOT an equal opportunity offer. No home; I rent with a roommate, in fact. I own nothing but my books, my clothes, and my cats. Most of my money goes to bills, and I mean basic bills. Aside from internet what I pay falls under necessary--phone, food, electricity, water, sewer, gas. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy some modest pastimes, like going to the movies or out with friends, but even these things are done pretty rarely.

And sudden disasters like my precious cat being sick? A nightmare.

Like most of my generation I live hand-to-mouth. I don't have credit cards (by choice) so I can't even pretend things are better than they are, that I am somehow wealthier than I really am.

And as I walk home, my knee high around my ankle, exhausted from too much work and too little sleep and hallucinating dollar signs hemorrhaging into the open sky, I wonder how we got here from where we started, not even a full lifetime ago.

I wonder if we'll ever have the energy to get mad or whether everyone else, like me, is so exhausted merely from the daily struggle to survive that they just can't rouse the energy to fight back. Or even to care.

And then I walk in the door.