Pennaless.

I know that's not how you spell it.

But Dad said it that way often after my maternal grandfather passed away.

My grandfather and my Dad never liked each other. 

"He died pennaless, " Dad said with great relish. As often as possible.

It wasn't actually true, either. I'll get to that in a bit.

This is an  excerpt from a post about 9 years ago.

"His current do-my-best-to-piss-off-everyone-in-a-5-mile-radius schtick is Alzheimer's. He says something or is reminded of something by someone and pretends he has no idea what they're talking about. "Heh heh heh, that's the Alzheimer's kicking in. Heh Heh heh."

It's particularly cruel to my mother, who doesn't find dementia in elderly people the least bit humorous. Her mother, my grandmother, was confined in a care home for more than 16 years with dementia. Little bits of her kept slipping away until all that was left was an incredibly healthy exterior. It was awful, but my dad, who's been jealous of my grandparents one day and gloating about how 'they died pennaless*' the next thinks joking about dementia is the height of wit.

Yeah, wasn't funny then.

Isn't actually funny now, either, although there's a part of me that sees some karma. He thought it was so funny to say that shit to my mom, even though she asked him several times to stop. He thought it was hilarious to keep saying it over and over and over and over until everyone TOLD him to stop. Then he acted like we were being unreasonable and 'trying to control' him. Persecuting him, to be exact.

Yeah, asshole, your wife is in tears because you're laughing at the horrible thing that happened to her mother and you're the one being picked on.

So here's how finances went in our family.

Every month, my parents had a huge fight over where all the money went.

It went on late into the night. He threw a tantrum like a little kid. He stomped around. He slammed doors. He got this high pitched tone to his voice. And the more placating my mom did, the more angry he got. As if it was her fault we were broke every damn month.

There was never any extra.
Other teacher families had a nice car, a house and nice clothes.
Not our family, though

Why? Because every month, Dad took a huge percentage of his paycheck and deposited for his retirement. He took the maximum amount out, but he also had other savings he was contributing to. I don't think it's wrong to save for retirement if you can, but when your family is barely scraping by because of it, you're selfish.

He called US selfish, though. If we had the nerve to ask for anything 'extra'. Like a pair of gloves for winter. We wore socks on our hands. Sometimes we didn't get a winter coat until December even though we couldn't wear the one from the year before. He got mad at Mom if she tried to suggest new shoes or a coat.

"What's wrong with the one we bought last year?"

Mom would tell him we'd outgrown them. He made us go get our coats and try them on in front of him and prove they didn't fit.

I remember one occasion where my wrists and part of my forearm were sticking out from the sleeve and the coat stopped about waist-length and he said, "What's wrong with this coat? It looks fine to me!"

He had charge accounts all over the place, too. So every month those bills had to be paid. I know from experience how hard that is. People look at credit all wrong. "I can afford 50 bucks a month" and then the interest starts adding up and you can't pay your bills and you  have to charge more to keep getting by.

We were short every month. After groceries, rent, (my parents didn't own a home until 1979 and they actually didn't own that one, either...) charge account payments and not much else, there wasn't anything left.  Let's not forget the Sunday Jesus show, either. My parents made a big production of dropping a check into the offering plate every week.

We might have to drink powdered milk and wear socks with holes in them, but they were good Sunday Christians, by god.

Mom worked, too. She worked a lot harder than he did, for awhile drove a school bus, then worked as a police dispatcher, but also ran the house. Did all the laundry and the cleaning and cooking and grocery shopping and made sure we got to school and did our homework and all the things.

And every month, after their money big fight and my dad had left for work, my crying mother would call her parents and ask to 'borrow' money. She knew, and they knew, that it wasn't a loan.
They never said no, though.
They just sent a check.

When Jim needed braces, my grandparents paid for them.
When Steve needed braces, my grandparents paid for them.
When I needed braces, my dad decided I 'looked fine' and I didn't get them.
My lower teeth are crammed in and crooked and I had one hell of a time with the wisdom teeth... but whatever. He didn't care.

Every month, my grandparents sent my mom a check. Sometimes more than once a month.
Birthdays?  My grandparents sent a check to Mom for us until we got a little older, then the checks were sent to us directly.

Christmas, my mom told our grandparents what we would like and they bought it and sent it to us. The year of the arm-sticking-out coat, my grandparents bought me a nice coat for Christmas.

They sent checks. Other relatives did, too. My great grandfather sent my dad a check to go to college when I was in 3rd grade, too. He paid for all of it. Tuition, books, miscellaneous expenses.

My parents had a charge account at Hub City Foods in La Grande, Oregon. (A charge account at a grocery store???! Hey, it was a long time ago). Dad graduated and we moved, but they were paying off that grocery bill from 1971 to 1978. So that was another monthly 'hit'.

But nothing was more important to my dad than his retirement. We sure heard about it often enough.

Sometimes my parents went 'on a diet'. They'd stock up on special food for themselves and not allow us to have it. They went through weird food phases. Instant breakfast, milk and a banana for breakfast, all blended up. Not powdered milk which is what we were drinking, though. Nope, only the best for them. We were told, "NO! That food is for my DIET!" so many times over the years. There weren't enough bananas for us to have them, though. Only enough to last through the week for their blended morning drink.

They had weird phases. Ate only white food for awhile. Then only green food.

They bought AYDS candies and had those with black coffee to start their day.
(Here, eat this sugar. It will suppress your appetite. Really! Would we lie to you?)

The wheat germ and yogurt diet was cheap enough that we were allowed to have some yogurt now and then.

Granola made an appearance in the diet rotation, too.

A big jar of soy nuts for when they wanted something to munch.

Did they offer the green vegetables to us? No. They'd make a pressure cooker full of them for their own dinner and we got a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese or a can of Campbell's soup. To split between three kids.

They did weird food shit for years, too.
It was always something weird and faddish.

It wasn't important to Dad to make sure we had more than a couple things to wear, either.
This is copied from a post from 2011.

As a young teen, I had very little to wear. At a time in life where it was super important to me to fit in, to be like other people... I had two shirts and two pairs of jeans. Three pairs of underwear. Two bras.

There were some colossal arguments with my dad about clothing. This one is relatively mild.

My mom ordered me two dresses from the Sears sale catalog. Without consulting me. Without even mentioning it. The dresses arrived one day while I was at school, and I found them waiting for me on my bed when I came home.

WTF?? I didn't even WEAR dresses! Hadn't in years!

Please believe me when I say I would rather have gone to school with missing teeth, part of my ass hanging out, greasy hair... ANYTHING but wearing one of those ass-ugly plaid dresses. One was a peachy colored tiny plaid with little turquoise stripes and god-awful ruffles down the front. I was 15 years old for fuck's sake! The other one was brown plaid, in the same exact style. Both were too long, made from thin material that you could see through, and I was appalled when I saw them. Hung them in my closet with great shame.

And when school was about ready to start up in the fall, and I had NO new clothing... (usually never did... went to school in the same stuff all the time) and precious little old clothing, my mom said something to my dad about it. And he stomped angrily into my room and went through my closet. Took about 40 seconds. I really had nothing. And then he hit the fucking roof over those dresses. I was 'an ungrateful and selfish bitch' because I had not worn 'those perfectly good brand new dresses', and he'd 'be goddamned if he was going to waste more money on clothes.'

Those dresses had been on sale for $2.50.

The other kids made fun of me. Girls (and more than a few boys) laughed at me and suggested I was dirty because I wore the same clothes all the time. I overheard a conversation once between a couple boys who were horrified at the idea of asking me out. "She's gross. She wears the same clothes all the time. I'll bet she never takes a bath."

So I have some issues about clothes. Ha, it's surprising my issues with clothing aren't much, much bigger.

So I left home on the advice of a guy at the mental health center. He was absolutely right. I'm glad I did it. It was very hard, though.

I moved in with my grandparents, they put me to work in their greenhouse/flower shop and for the first time in my entire life, I was earning money.

Due to the complete lack of pretty much everything I needed, forget what I wanted, I was GIDDY with the possibilities of the huge amount of money I was making.

I made 2 dollars an hour working part time.