sufficient

when i grow up

When I was four, my friend Alex and I had built our future together. We were going to live on a mountain the middle of New York City. On one side of this mountain would be a farm and on the other side a ranch. We would run both together, and he would be a fireman and a doctor and I would be a fireman and a nurse. This was 1982 and somehow, at the age of 4, I knew that we were in a recession. I have this clear memory of us walking into a grocery store and dumping all of our change (in my mind, the pile it makes is at least 18 inches high) onto the conveyor belt, so that we could help NYC get out of its financial woes. (That's probably not the diction I used at 4.)

This semester, I'm participating in a professional development class with some colleagues that we put together- we're reading The Grapes of Wrath and looking at how to teach it along with the Great Depression, interdisciplinarily. Today, someone was sharing a lesson plan on economics and we were looking at trends in the stock market, GNP, numbers of farm and percentage of the population involved in farming-type things. In the midst of this, the presenter shared that in 1931, news of how terrible our depression was, to the point of people starving to death in NYC, had spread so far that the citizens of Cameroon sent a relief check to the mayor of New York in the amount of $3.77. (I'm very curious to know what that would be worth today.) I was quite skeptical of this and was hardly able to keep myself from laughing aloud as it immediately triggered this childhood memory. I was able to corroborate this random fact from a couple of sources, however.

Is it possible I had heard this story when I was four and incorporated it into my dreams for my future?

posted by CP @ 10:20 PM 0 thoughts