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What Do People With Enough Money Worry About?
I think I’d like to find out first hand
“She’s worth $140 million.” My old friend and I were talking as she drove back to the city from New Jersey.
She was talking about the wife of a client she’d been working with out there. That would be the client who purchased a collapsing 18th-century farmhouse and has spent the past fifteen years rebuilding it. The client who has subsequently bought and planted some twenty full-grown trees to surround his showcase 18th-century farmhouse.
Yeah, this guy’s no slouch in the amassing wealth category himself.
To be clear right up front, I’ve never lived in abject poverty and I’ve never gone hungry. Somehow, the rent has always gotten paid and whenever the gas or electricity or phone got cut off for non-payment in the bad old days, money was scrounged up from somewhere to get them turned back on. Eventually.
But it feels like I’ve spent my entire life with that kind of poverty, that go-to-bed-hungry level of being poor, nipping at my heels.
Both of my parents came of age during the Great Depression. Their scars became ours. No light was left on after anyone left a room. Four girls? Two baths…
