The last dollar.

Back in the sixties when I was in college, I didn’t have a lot of money, and I was not very responsible with what I did have. However, although it was not yet the heyday of plastic money, I did have some credit cards. I knew a man named Lloyd Harrison who was the father of a close friend. He was born about 1920 and had a clear memory of the Great Depression. He was very responsible with money. He told me about a time in the thirties when he was out with some of his family in a car and they had a flat. They changed the tire and went on into town and left the tire to have the flat fixed. He said that they used their last dollar to pay for fixing the flat. It was clear that that was a very significant fact to him. Perhaps it was because a dollar was so hard to get or because they didn’t know where the next one was coming from. For some reason I couldn’t turn loose of that expression, “the last dollar”, and his reaction to it. I finally came to the conclusion that there was no way that I could ever understand – in the same sense that he did – what that meant. I could understand it intellectually but it would never carry the same meaning for me that it did for him. He didn’t know that I had taken note of it. He’s gone now. I wish I had told him.