My
parents were not untalented people. My mother was a mathematical
genius, for one thing, and I do not use the word lightly. I once saw
her glance at a chalkboard that had been filled with numbers and
announce the sum of those numbers — a split second before the
mathematical genius on television gave the same answer. I never
forgot that.
But
despite her ability with numbers, neither she nor my father ever
learned how to balance a checkbook — or if they knew how to do
it, they chose not to. They entered the checks in the check
register, but they never subtracted them. And if you don’t
subtract the check amounts, the check register is pretty much
useless.
Because
of this, my childhood was financially unstable. The electricity in
our house might be turned on, or it might not. The same was true for
the telephone, and that was back in the dark ages when everyone’s
phone was attached to the wall of the house and nobody had a backup
cell phone.
I
remember a particularly bleak Thanksgiving when we planned to go to
my Aunt Vee’s for dinner, but she canceled because her family
was sick. It was just as well because I had double pneumonia at the
time, and as luck would have it, our power had been turned off.
Mother
was able to cook dinner because we had a gas range and oven, but we
did not have a way to heat the house and it was a rare freezing day
in Louisiana. I remember lying on the sofa in front of the fireplace
while the rest of the family went to some friends’ house to get
out of the cold.
I
awoke to a fire that had died out in a frigid and dark house. Happy
Thanksgiving, Kathy! Unable to get up and stagger to the nearest
telephone to summon help, I lay there for what seemed like
generations until the rest of the family finally returned home and
rescued me from freezing to death.
But
it wasn’t enough that my parents were fiscally inept. When she
was two, my younger sister Sandee got polio, and that took a whole
lot of surgery. In addition to the surgery, she was constantly being
fitted with braces and orthopedic shoes and other devices of torture,
all of which cost a whole boatload of money, and all of which she
grew out of almost as soon as she was fitted for them.
Probably
because of Sandee’s medical bills, Mother was a working mother
in the 1960s — during a time when nobody’s mother
worked. Daddy was a salesman — sometimes a traveling salesman.
I suspect he didn’t make a whole lot of money. I also suspect
my parents didn’t subtract their checkbook because they knew
that no matter how hard they worked, there was not going to be any
money in the checkbook.
Why
balance a checkbook that they knew full well was only going to be
overdrawn?
With
this background, you can see that sending me to Brigham Young
University was a financial catastrophe for my family. No, it was a
whole lot worse than that. My parents had already built their dream
home and lost it after only a couple of years. To say my parents had
no money to send three daughters to college was a gross
understatement.
So
when it came time for me to go to college, this could not have been a
happy time for my parents, especially considering that my mother
secretly had leukemia and had no idea how long her health was going
to hold out. (She died when Sandee and I were in college, and Susie
was still in high school. None of us, including my father, had even
known she was sick.)
So
my parents did the best they could. They paid for my tuition and for
the roof over my head. After that, they gave me five dollars per
week to pay for absolutely everything else — food,
clothing, medical, transportation, you name it. Pantyhose alone
could cost that much, leaving me no money left over for food. A run
in my pantyhose was a major disaster in my college years.
A
five-dollar budget meant that I had to make my food allotment stretch
until it screamed. I got creative at making cheap soups (chicken
necks, garlic, and celery) that would last through the week. Chicken
necks were five cents per pound, but the garlic that gave it any
flavor did not exactly make me a boy magnet on the BYU campus.
Despite
my best efforts, I would always be broke before the end of the week.
That was when the Wilkinson Center cafeteria became a Godsend. They
had a condiment station with stacks of tiny paper cups and push
dispensers for ketchup, blue cheese dressing, and other goodies.
Some
hot water and a few squirts of ketchup made an acceptable (but
somewhat thin) tomato soup. I did not discover this on my own, mind
you. I was told this by strangers. There were so many people in my
situation that we recognized one another. We passed information
along to one another the way that hoboes in the Depression used to
mark houses with a secret code where handouts were to be had.
I
tried the fake tomato soup once or twice, but I never got a taste for
it. For one thing, in order to be enjoyed it had to be eaten with
crackers. Even though crackers were also free, I never got to the
point that I was able to take crackers with a clear conscience if I
had not bought something else.
Crackers,
you see, are food. I know there’s a fine line between ketchup
and crackers, but I couldn’t eat the soup without crackers, and
taking crackers would have been stealing.
It
doesn’t make sense, but who says Planet Kathy is a rational
place?
But
my favorite treat was the blue cheese dressing. I would sit down and
eat it with one finger, savoring each lick and making one little cup
last for thirty minutes.
Even
today I can take a chocolate candy and make it last for an hour. I
eat just a nibble at a time and savor each atom of goodness.
Unfortunately, I usually don’t have that luxury, because Fluffy
devours his candy in 15 seconds and then eyes mine longingly. But
this is a trick I learned in those blue cheese dressing days.
I
never ate at Condiment City alone. I always had friends who were
paying customers. They would eat their hamburgers or other meals as
I ate my blue cheese dressing. On extremely rare occasions, one of
them would buy something for me, but this almost never happened. I
didn’t expect it, and they didn’t offer. I ate my blue
cheese dressing, and they ate what they ate. That’s the way
things were.
Back
in Old Testament times, poor people like Ruth were allowed to glean
from the fields. But the Wilkinson Center Cafeteria (known now as
the Cougareat) was not a charitable institution, and gleaners were
frowned upon even when they were in the company of paying customers.
Apparently
other poor students had discovered the free blue cheese dressing, and
that was not something the bean counters at the cafeteria could
overlook. One day a sign appeared — “Blue Cheese
Dressing: 5 ¢.”
You
may think that charging a nickel for a tiny carton of blue cheese
dressing is chickenfeed. Back in those days, it was highway robbery.
Let me give you a little comparison of what a person could get for
those prices, thanks to a handy website, 1970’s
Food and Grocery Prices:
A four-pack of toilet paper, 13 ¢
A pound of bananas, 12 ¢
A can of Campbell’s tomato soup, 10 ¢
A whole jar of grape jelly, 25 ¢
A whole bottle of Heinz ketchup, 19 ¢
A dozen eggs, 25 ¢
A TV dinner (Morton brand, which was top of the line), 33 ¢
Sliced bread, 16 ¢ per loaf
Let’s
just say that the day they started charging for blue cheese dressing
was the day I stopped going to the cafeteria for lunch. It was not a
protest or a religious fast, but an act of necessity. I just started
going without food.
Eating
my daily lunch at Condiment City was not that bad. It made me a
better cook, a better financial planner, and more appreciative of the
good times when I could buy and eat whatever I wanted.
Kathryn H. Kidd has been writing fiction, nonfiction, and "anything for money" longer than
most of her readers have even been alive. She has something to say on every topic, and the
possibility that her opinions may be dead wrong has never stopped her from expressing them at
every opportunity.
A native of New Orleans, Kathy grew up in Mandeville, Louisiana. She attended Brigham
Young University as a generic Protestant, having left the Episcopal Church when she was eight
because that church didn't believe what she did. She joined The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints as a BYU junior, finally overcoming her natural stubbornness because she
wanted a patriarchal blessing and couldn't get one unless she was a member of the Church. She
was baptized on a Saturday and received her patriarchal blessing two days later.
She married Clark L. Kidd, who appears in her columns as "Fluffy," more than thirty-five
years ago. They are the authors of numerous LDS-related books, the most popular of which is A
Convert's Guide to Mormon Life.
A former managing editor for Meridian Magazine, Kathy moderated a weekly column ("Circle of Sisters") for Meridian until she was derailed by illness in December of 2012. However, her biggest claim to fame is that she co-authored
Lovelock with Orson Scott Card. Lovelock has been translated into Spanish and Polish, which
would be a little more gratifying than it actually is if Kathy had been referred to by her real name
and not "Kathryn Kerr" on the cover of the Polish version.
Kathy has her own website, www.planetkathy.com, where she hopes to get back to writing a weekday blog once she recovers from being dysfunctional. Her entries recount her adventures and misadventures with Fluffy, who heroically
allows himself to be used as fodder for her columns at every possible opportunity.
Kathy spent seven years as a teacher of the Young Women in her ward, until she was recently released. She has not yet gotten used to interacting with the adults, and suspects it may take another seven years. A long-time home teacher with her husband, Clark, they have home taught the same family since 1988. The two of them have been temple workers since 1995, serving in the Washington D.C. Temple.