Not everyone in America has 100 billion dollars, I promise
June 28th, 2005 |
Husband stands over my shoulder and says, “You managed to get the kitchen cabinet doors shut.” And I tell him no I did not, that the distortion in the image, caused by the slightly wide angle lens, just makes it looks like they are. See, for some reason the landlord, when installing the cabinet above the sink (which must be like 30 years old at least, see the orange which signals no porcelain left in the bottom) for some reason, well, it’s hard to describe, but the cabinet tilts out from the wall, about an inch between the cabinet and the wall up top with a slat screwed inbetween. Don’t know why it was done that way but it means the cabinet doors are always open. As are the lower cabinet doors always open, because the floor slants a bit.
The cutting board is the size of our microwave and that is the only working surface in the kitchen. I wanted to get a full shot of our only working surface but I was jammed against the back door and it was impossible.
Immediately on the right is the refrigerator and stove, kind of shoved in there, the refrigerator blocking off one of the two doors that used to open into the area. And that’s our kitchen. All of it. Got no extra space hiding behind secret elfen doors.
Behind the faucet is an old postcard, blown-up, of riot police bearing down on a middle-aged woman at a civil rights protest in the 60s. She is carrying a cup with straw, purse hung over her arm, her head is turned toward the police and she is yelling in alarm as the police advance looking very redneck hostile. She bears a remarkable resemblance to my husband’s mother.
The apartment is early 1920s and the walls are rock hard plaster. Everything looks larger than it is in the photo. The sink is fairly shallow and the faucet is fixed, doesn’t move. A couple of plates and bowls fit in there and when you cut on the water it sprays everywhere. There is no washing anything without one’s shirt being drenched, which is a fun surprise for guests.
Anyway, people normally post pics of nice kitchens, and not everyone in America has a nice kitchen. In fact, the kitchen in most every place we’ve ever lived in has been about this small. So I know there must be a fair share of people with closet kitchens who aren’t posting pictures of them.
A favorite story about Sam Walton’s wife is that she, daughter of the banker who financed his son-in-law’s first business, always retained the plucky working class, do-it-for-yourself ethic to boil grits at 6:30 AM for her guests.
If Sam Walton’s 20 billion dollar wife showed up at our door and went into our kitchen to make us a pot of grits at 6:30 one morning, I still wouldn’t think she was a nice, humble woman. Quite a showperson, yeah, a hustler, just like her husband was. I’d say, “Look at that hustler in there boiling grits and trying to make us think she doesn’t care about her family’s 100 billion dollar empire built on slave labor wages abroad and working homeless wages here.”
You don’t build a 100 billion dollar empire without being fully, richly aware you’ve buried a lot of people in the process.
Well, I don’t have a picture of the kitchen of the shack we once lived in on Onion Creek, but the kitchen was very small, but unlike yours did not have strong plaster walls, hence mice could get in, and did. We discovered their presence after they chewed a hole in the insulation of the stove andmade a nest in it, via the unforgettable smell of heated mouse urine, when we turned on the stove.
I doubt if Miz Walton would actually care to live the lives or genuine poor people.
On the other hand, and WRT your previous post, we Buddhists think that one of the main causes of human unhappiness is being consumed by greed and grasping. The paradox of accumulating vast wealth is that, psychologically speaking, it does not guarantee that you’ll be happier than someone who has a closet kitchen. Maybe the opposite.
At its core our economic system seems to me to be profoundly irrational, based on a struggle to accumulate something that does not really help anyone live a happy life.
Although it’s nice not to have mice in your kitchen.
We have those big Norwegian sewer rats strolling about the alleys but we’ve fortunately not had any rodent problems.
I agree that wealth doesn’t equal happiness, but certain securities (health care etc) and opportunities that money alone makes available in our no-barter society are, well, nice to have. The line of “Money doesn’t make you happy, in fact you can be happier without” is handed out often enough by the rich and strikes me as a deflector against complaints from the masses about distribution inequalities, unfair laws etc. And when the line is tossed around by the poor, it seems often enough a product of having drunk the kool-aid.
I just this afternoon thoroughly mucked up, with one careless click of the mouse, a database of months and months of work and am doing things like waxing the floor, anything to not think about what I’ve done, while trying to think of what I can do to salvage the situation and not start raging.
If Sam Walton’s 20 billion dollar wife showed up at our door and went into our kitchen to make us a pot of grits at 6:30 one morning, I still wouldn’t think she was a nice, humble woman. Quite a showperson, yeah, a hustler, just like her husband was. I’d say, “Look at that hustler in there boiling grits and trying to make us think she doesn’t care about her family’s 100 billion dollar empire built on slave labor wages abroad and working homeless wages here.”
HA! I love this!
Having worked amont The Very Wealthy at one point in my life, I have met women like this (and men). They think they are oh, so very homey, when they are really just grandstanding to make it look like they’re down home.
I’d rather know a rich person who had his/her well-paid great Southern cook come over to make my grits than have some busy-body grandstander poking around my place….
which is only marginally larger than yours. and, because it is a third floor walk-up, has slanted ceilings. Good thing the ceiling’s high, or else I’d be a hunchbacked bat.