I wasn’t always a tightwad. I didn’t
always stoop to pick up pennies, straighten bent paper clips or shop in
thrift stores. As a kid my grandparents gave me ten Carson City silver
dollars every Christmas and birthday and if I had all those coins now I
might be in the Forbes 400, but I had to go and waste them on baseballs
and bubble gum.
I mowed lawns,
delivered papers, dusted furniture in my Grandpa’s furniture store and
did anything to make a buck. The funny thing was, the more money I made,
the more tightfisted I became. The deeper my pockets got the shorter my
arms grew. I’m sure economists have a name for this phenomena.
I’ve
always lived in fear of being broke. This was because my father, who
was one of those Okies who migrated to California during the depression,
reminded us all the time what it felt like to not know where your next
meal was coming from. To hear him tell it the Joads in the Grapes of
Wrath were zillionaires compared to his family. I never got to the point
where I didn’t know where my next meal was coming from but a lot of
those meals consisted of a can of chili beans. My college years were
especially gaseous.
When
my wife and I lived in Australia we lived in a caravan (house trailer)
without cooking or bathroom facilities for $40 a week and we budgeted
another $40 for all other costs. Once a month we’d treat ourselves to a
movie at the cinema even though all they showed were Barbara Streisand
movies. When we got back to the states I vowed to never see another
Barbara Streisand movie. And I haven’t.
By
the time I attained my goal of becoming a rancher we were back to
living in a trailer house in a cow pasture we leased. Naturally my
tightfisted ways carried over into ranching. I bought my bulls in the
slaughter run and the only cows we could afford had no teeth. At one
sale the auctioneer thought he was being real funny when instead of
naming me as the buyer he said the purchaser was The Toothless Cattle
Company. Ha, ha.
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