I am confused with today’s prices. And can you blame me? While I may have had a grocery budget of $10.00 a week when I was first married almost sixty years ago, my first home which was bought in 1970 had an interest rate of 81/2 %. I watched in horror as the rate climbed to somewhere near 17% and felt grateful for my own low percentage rate. And while I cannot seem to walk out of a grocery store for less than twenty dollars, the specter of a 6% mortgage interest does not look as frightening as it seems to others.
And bear in mind while I was shopping for groceries the next year at an increased budget of $15.00 a week, I worked as a sixth-grade teacher for $200 a month. Not a week, but a month. For this I spent the day in the classroom, took one recess a day, ate lunch with the students (it was only bad on boiled bologna and grits days when my northern soul rebelled) and went home with papers to grade. However, I did get Confederate Memorial Day off and had a greatly reduced class size when it was time for the students to help their parents pick the tobacco crop.
I admit that my first home cost was what a down payment on today’s starter homes might be, and that I never thought I would see tuna fish rise above twenty-five cents a can. Yet, I remember a wife getting her husband a hand-held calculator, which he prized, for a breath-taking $400. The same one that eventually was sold in the local drug store for ten dollars or less. So, I take a deep breath as I approach price tags, and realize that in the 80 years that have passed things have changed as much as I have. Afterall, I can remember when the cartoon character Dick Tracy had an imaginary two-way radio on this wrist. That imaginary watch has morphed into a real one that can run one’s entire life. And no ……I don’t have one.