Nickels and Dimes

 NICKELS AND DIMES

I was talking about work with my wife’s 96 year-old dad Tony a couple of days ago.  He grew up in the Great Depression when jobs and money were scarce, and I asked him to tell me about the first job he ever had. He didn’t hesitate at all.  

He said, “I sold eggs when I was 8 years old.”

This surprised me because I knew he grew up in the heart of Brooklyn, NY, and I couldn’t imagine where you’d get eggs or how you’d sell them.  

When I asked him to tell me more, here’s what he said.  “My dad had a friend who lived on a farm in New Jersey. Once a week, we’d drive out there and pick up about 40 dozen eggs, and we’d bring them back to Brooklyn.  Sometimes we’d sell them at a flea market, and sometimes we’d just stand on a corner downtown and sell them to people passing by.  I liked selling them more than I liked gathering them together.  The chickens were always flapping their wings and yelling at us when we tried to gather the eggs.”

I asked him then how much he got paid at his first job.  He smiled and said, “A nickel a week.”

Talking to him got me thinking.  When I was a kid growing up in a Polish neighborhood in Chicago back in the 50s, a lot of my American friends got allowances: a quarter a week, sometimes 50 cents a week.  My Polish friends and I didn’t get allowances.  Back then, I didn’t think our parents understood the concept.  

I remember one time asking my mom for an allowance.  I said, “Mom, how about an allowance for sweeping up the stairs in our building? A quarter a week?” She gave me a hard look and told me that back in the old country, in Poland, kids slaughtered pigs on their own with wooden hammers and drained the black lumpy blood from the carcasses and made Polish sausage from the guts every day of the week for nothing, not even a quick thanks a lot in Polish.”

And then she said to me in Polish, “if you won’t do the chores unless I pay you, then don’t.” And right away, she grabbed my broom and went outside and stopped the first kid she saw on the street (a kid I hated from school) and she gave him a quarter just for sweeping the stairs that I would have swept for free.

And what did this teach me?  

The simple answer is not to ask my mom for an allowance.  But the greater answer is that this taught me that family is never about money.  It’s about loyalty and love and helping each other no matter what the cost.

—

This is a recent column I wrote for the Polish Daily News in Chicago, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.