Life is good: paid in full
✍🏾 “Any people stupid enough to promise to be responsible for a stranger’s debts deserve to have their own property held to guarantee payment.” 🤐
Her signature on the promissory note entangled the inherited property held as surety in reconciling a liability owed to a cigar-puffing pair of suspenders for a wad of cash 💸 in her hand. The dissipation of smoke half shut the glitter of avarice gleaming in his eye. It's a carnivorous world when the heart succumbs to a fiduciary legal kind of trust like that.
He seemed good enough when the plums fell to fallow ground, and the scent of the decaying harvest was still ripened just enough for her children to slip when sliding behind a tree for a game of hide and seek. The hands that harvest year ventured off without telling her the itinerary of heading to a better land for being free. She woke up one morning, and the fields told her all she needed to see. 🙆🏽♀️
Her signature and his cash got them through when the pandemic came and the smallest girl had crawled beneath the porch and found that stinging elixir that sent the Little Princess to sleep forever. Eleven saw her off to heaven that year, and two became my mother. The boys tended the farm as best they could and found their adolescent lives suspended for that rusted red tractor or until a greater war took some away for good. They coughed up more bills than the harvest could pay and a few more promises broke them until the smoking man came, thumbs in suspenders, and took it all away.
I wish I knew the details well enough to commiserate more for their pain. It is her story and came to me in the flotsam of memories resurfacing from the dinner table.
Somehow they made it—the two quarters for a pound of 🥓 bacon and a farm for a piece of paper. 📃
When the dust finally settled some decades later, she still had the rocking chair and single barrel shotgun and that fat bottle of Coca-Cola unopened on the mantelpiece when the coke in cola was real.
Once in a blue moon every year or so, I’ll catch a whiff of that barn full of chicken feed and the anamnesis of how my hand felt feeling through feathers for eggs. 🥚 Bubbling up to the surface come those professorial lectures blown off long ago for what must be remembered—the migration to northern climes of silk and money and jazz; the hustling canvas tents of Northern Africa for snake-eyed dice and hard cash 🎲 🎲 and a knife 🔪 for Panzernan; or that promissory note she exchanged long ago. They are lessons for posterity and better.
"I pay my credit card off each month."
I listened, recollecting the half million she owes for the imported Italian marble and hardwood floors of what used to be some physician's mansion before he, too, scribbled things to some puffing man for a signature. I remembered what I had heard somewhere before, perhaps driving through congested thoroughfares for getting home each day with talk radio. "Whomever you owe, they own you" is how I told him when he spoke of mortgages unpaid. It is an easy lesson for a weekend pew.
"The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender."
Life is good when the living is free.
Source: KJV Chapter 27: Verse 13
Source: Price of Food 1920s
https://www.thepeoplehistory.com/20sfood.html
Source: Sylvia Plath
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48999/daddy-56d22aafa45b2
Source: KJV Chapter 22: Verse 7
