The Sad House Man
In her job cleaning houses for a maid service, the author differentiates the homes and offers insight into the inhabitants or owners by giving them description names. This decision also, of course, facilitates an easier point of reference for the reader while also protecting the actual identity of the individuals. At one point she engages metaphor while contemplating the cause of the illness which defines the owner of a place she calls The Sad House. She is very probably correct in her diagnosis:
“I’d checked the medications, wondering what his illness was. It felt more like a broken heart.”
Memories of Grandma
The author is recollecting some idiosyncratic characteristics of her grandmother. She takes pains to point out that her grandparents were never exactly flush with capital, but their home was always in an overabundant supply of love and warmth. And then the simile which paints figure immediately inside one’s head:
“my memories of my maternal grandparents were filled with love and warmth: Grandma stirring Campbell’s tomato soup on the stove, she’d have a soda in one hand and stand on one foot with the other tucked into her thigh like a flamingo”
The Crime of Being Poor
Overall, the primary directive of the book is to explore the difficulties of simply getting by in America on wages paid to the lowest levels of its workers. Economic disparity and inequity is the overarching story, but in the ever widening ideological divide which was entering the final stages of its evolution in the time period covered makes it inevitable that any talk of struggling while poor must eventually come around to the subject of crime even though the two issues are only tangentially connected:
“Being poor, living in poverty, seemed a lot like probation—the crime being a lack of means to survive.”
Stuff
One of legendary stand-up comedian George Carlin’s greatest routines was simply five minutes of riffing on how the meaning of life is really just about the process of accumulating stuff and then deciding how to get rid of it. Even our most important keepsake possessions—not to mention the ones that cost the most or can be sold for a premium on eBay—is always at risk for becoming just stuff like everything else we collect and dispose over the years. And it all comes down to just one thing: how much room we have to store our stuff. This is a hard lesson to learn that eventually comes to everyone who finds their lives downsizing for whatever reason, but only those who have been there before really get it:
“There wasn’t any way I could have verbalized any of that to Pam in that moment, but she seemed to understand intuitively as she stared at me. Maybe she’d once had the same dilemma as a single parent in compartmentalized space. Suddenly, her face got a kind of Mrs. Claus twinkle, and she told me to follow her.”
Who’s that Girl?
Who’s that girl using food stamps to buy groceries? It is someone who looks just like you? Or does an image pop into your head that is significantly unlike yourself? We all know the propaganda that has been fed into the political discourse that creates an imaginary answer to the question at hand, but some don’t way to say it out loud for fear of being though a racist while others don’t want to admit to it for fear that that people will start to think it actually has something to do with racism. But why, on a deeper level, is the girl with the food stamps not representative of the majority of Americans? The author has a theory:
“When people think of food stamps, they don’t envision someone like me: someone plain-faced and white. Someone like the girl they’d known in high school who’d been quiet but nice. Someone like a neighbor. Someone like them. Maybe that made them too nervous about their own situation. Maybe they saw in me the chance of their own fragile circumstances, that, with one lost job, one divorce, they’d be in the same place as I was."
