Tight money
Here is an extract from Margaret Atwood's Payback, Debt and the shadow side of wealth (Bloomsbury, London 2008):
When my brother was born, in mid- February 1937 - in the depths of the Great Depression - there was a special Valentine's Day excursion price on the train from Nova Scotia to Montreal. It cost ten dollars. My aunt and a girlfriend scraped together the ten dollars each and went to Montreal to help out my mother with her new-born baby. When they got there, my mother was still in the hospital, because my father hadn't received his monthly paycheque and thus couldn't pay the bill and bail her out, hospitals at that time having a lot in common with debtors' prisons. My father was finally able to spring my mother, but paying the hospital bill - ninety nine dollars - used up all of the paycheque.
My parents didn't have a bean at that time, so my father had no cash reserves, and he pawned his fountain pen in order to take my aunt out for a thank-you lunch....When my aunt and her friend took the train back to Nova Scotia, they were also given two valuable going-away presents: a bunch of grapes and a small box of Laura Secord chocolates - and this is all they had to eat during the train ride. They had no berths, so they had to sit up the whole time, and this was uncomfortable; but a man was renting pillows for twenty-five cents each. Alas, they had only forty-eight cents between the two of them, but they offered the forty-eight cents and two of the chocolates - fluttering their eyelashes, said my aunt - and their offer was accepted. Thus they slept in comfort.
Atwood wants to emphasize the delicate give-and-take in close relations. This is a very important point. You upset the balance and fall out of favour rapidly.
The book is the written form of The Massey Lectures given by her on CBC Radio in November 2008. This lecture series asked major contemporary thinkers to address important issues of our times. There is a lot in favour of this idea of getting non-specialists to talk on important matters. They bring a fresh and basic perspective to the problems. This perspective is often lost when specialists huddle together to discuss matters in their jargon, with a lot of mathematical formulae and modelling thrown in.
