A thread over in General about how people came to be interested in knives put me in an introspective mood, when the realization hit me. I have always been rich. Rich is a state of mind, not a financial condition.
I grew up with two cotton mill hands as parents, and money was hard to come by. Both of them were children of the great depression who had to drop out of school to work to help feed their families. My dad went through life with an eighth grade education. My mother got her GED at age 72, a very proud day for her. We lived just far enough out of our small town to be considered rural. We were the last family I knew of to own a tv, and the first indoor toilet we had I helped install at age 15. (I was in an interview with a company psychologist which was mandatory for candidates for a higher managerial job. He asked how well off financially I considered myself to be. I answered that I remembered when I thought that anyone with an indoor toilet was wealthy, and now I had three of them so I supposed I was doing well. The prick didn't see the humor in it and I didn't get the job. Two years later the job was eliminated, so I guess I won after all.) The one luxury we had that most of my friends didn't was a house full of books.
So why are my knives and guns so essential to my sense of well-being? As long as I can remember when I was a kid, I had a gun and a knife. The gun was an old Iver Johnson single shot 12 gauge inherited from my grandfather. My first knife was a birthday gift at age 4. My dad spoiled me in the only way he had available to him, with the knowledge and freedom and trust in me to let me roam the woods at will. (The importance of that trust cannot be overestimated, and I would have rather lost an arm than to do something to let that man down. ) I mastered the art of recycling. If you had a knife you could reopen and reuse fishing sinkers indefinitely, and make a dozen hooks last a long time. The first good rod and reel I had was purchased at age 14 with the proceeds of a summer of picking cotton at $2/100 pounds. That rod and reel represented a ton of cotton. The reel finally wore out and the parts are still in a bucket in my basement. I still use the rod.
So where does the rich part come in? I never had a sense that I was poor. If I had a few fish hooks and sinkers or could scrape enough shotgun shells together for a Saturday of squirrel hunting, and had a good book at home, I was on top of the world. I could get by with eight shells (the limit being eight squirrels) but felt better if I had twelve.
When people want to know the rationale for having so many Busses or more guns than I can keep fed, this is way too extensive an explanation and most of them wouldn't understand it anyway. But it is indeed the reason. People fret about the resale value of their Busses. If their resale value went to cents on the pound tomorrow it wouldn't matter to me a lot, as they would continue to be worth every penny they cost me.
I grew up with two cotton mill hands as parents, and money was hard to come by. Both of them were children of the great depression who had to drop out of school to work to help feed their families. My dad went through life with an eighth grade education. My mother got her GED at age 72, a very proud day for her. We lived just far enough out of our small town to be considered rural. We were the last family I knew of to own a tv, and the first indoor toilet we had I helped install at age 15. (I was in an interview with a company psychologist which was mandatory for candidates for a higher managerial job. He asked how well off financially I considered myself to be. I answered that I remembered when I thought that anyone with an indoor toilet was wealthy, and now I had three of them so I supposed I was doing well. The prick didn't see the humor in it and I didn't get the job. Two years later the job was eliminated, so I guess I won after all.) The one luxury we had that most of my friends didn't was a house full of books.
So why are my knives and guns so essential to my sense of well-being? As long as I can remember when I was a kid, I had a gun and a knife. The gun was an old Iver Johnson single shot 12 gauge inherited from my grandfather. My first knife was a birthday gift at age 4. My dad spoiled me in the only way he had available to him, with the knowledge and freedom and trust in me to let me roam the woods at will. (The importance of that trust cannot be overestimated, and I would have rather lost an arm than to do something to let that man down. ) I mastered the art of recycling. If you had a knife you could reopen and reuse fishing sinkers indefinitely, and make a dozen hooks last a long time. The first good rod and reel I had was purchased at age 14 with the proceeds of a summer of picking cotton at $2/100 pounds. That rod and reel represented a ton of cotton. The reel finally wore out and the parts are still in a bucket in my basement. I still use the rod.
So where does the rich part come in? I never had a sense that I was poor. If I had a few fish hooks and sinkers or could scrape enough shotgun shells together for a Saturday of squirrel hunting, and had a good book at home, I was on top of the world. I could get by with eight shells (the limit being eight squirrels) but felt better if I had twelve.
When people want to know the rationale for having so many Busses or more guns than I can keep fed, this is way too extensive an explanation and most of them wouldn't understand it anyway. But it is indeed the reason. People fret about the resale value of their Busses. If their resale value went to cents on the pound tomorrow it wouldn't matter to me a lot, as they would continue to be worth every penny they cost me.
:thumbup:
