Remittance Man

If your eyes find these words, please know that I do not expect readers, though I am happy if your eyes do hover over them awhile. I write these things to keep to keep in practice until I begin my next novel. A blog gives me at least the possibility of readers, however few, and keeps me mindful that I write for others.

You're nearing sixty. You should be finished, or nearly finished with a fine career, looking forward to a wonderful retirement, full of travel, adorable grandchildren, and financial security . . . right? This is not, will not be, the case for the majority of my generation, and this was decidedly not the experience of the vast majority of our ancestors. This expectation is a mid-to-latter 20th century one, at least for the "middle class," of which I have been an indifferent member since birth. Happily for them, both sets of my grandparents enjoyed this kind of retirement in the 1950s and 1960s, as did my own parents when my father retired. But that was not the experience of their grandparents, not even close.

One set of great grandparents were hardscrabble poor folk in Ft. Worth Texas, another great grandfather was a "remittance man" sent over from Sheffield England to get him out of his family's hair. He married another immigrant, a tiny woman from Lyon, France. I think he was an alcoholic, and/or mentally ill. He died young and penniless. His wife struggled to support her two daughters, and my grandmother and her sister were in and out of orphanages for most of their childhood. But they both married well, and eventually enjoyed upper-middle class lives in St. Louis. My grandmother married the son of the hardscrabble Ft. Worth family. He became the chairman of the board of the American Automobile Insurance Company, which was eventually purchased by American Express, becoming their insurance arm. Another great grandfather, on my mother's side, was a country doctor in Versailles, Indiana, the kind who accepted chickens and vegetables for his fee. He retired poor and blind. My grandfather supported him in old age. And that particular grandfather, Walter Lathrop Jones, as dear a grandparent as you could wish to have, spent nearly his whole working life as a salesman for the Crescent Paper Company of Indianapolis, Indiana. Unhappy early on, he was tempted to quit that job, changing his mind only after hearing a fiery speech on the value of persistence, delivered by William Jennings Bryant on a whistle stop tour. He didn't retire until he was 79, logging millions of miles on Midwestern roads and, before cars, the rails. He was their perennial top salesman. He enjoyed 20 years of retirement, dying just before his 100th birthday. The Crescent Paper Company awarded him a paltry pension of $100.00 a month. He was disappointed, but even so, I'm sure they didn't expect to be paying it out for 20 years. It didn't matter much anyway. He had been clever with his money. It seems to me that people generally handled their finances much better then, aware how gossamer was the veil between their parents' poverty and their own comfort.

This brings me to my own career, such as it has been. I once had overinflated ideas about myself. I'm embarrassed to admit that I once fancied myself a better man than my father was. I'm glad I came to my senses before he died. Now I wish I'd been half the man he was, or his father was. Oh, I may yet make my fortune--I'm not counting that out entirely--not that this is the measure of any man or woman. I have some irons in some various dimming fires, like that hardscrabble Ft. Worth great grandfather. He moved his family to Denver in the 1880s and prospected for gold in the mountains, boasting once that he'd found enough to fill one or two teeth. He traveled around, wrote, worked at various jobs, and eventually settled in Ft. Worth where he worked, I think, for a lumber company that provided ties to the railroads. I have a short story his daughter wrote called "The Banshee." She was by all accounts an eccentric sort. It was her brother who left home at 16 and ended up the insurance executive in St. Louis. Like her, I have written some strange things, and I have earned enough money to fill one or two teeth. And I may well retire in some small comfort, thanks to his son, my grandfather, who arranged things such that his grandchildren would benefit a little from his success. In a way, this will enable me to continue writing strange things; and I may yet strike gold yet if I manage to stay out of earshot of the banshee's wail.