Coming Into Money

Over two years of harness-free euphoria

This is a continuation of my story, Jobs, Unemployment and Ice Cream Cones. That story was about employment, unemployment and self-employment and the roller coaster ride my life has been between those life situations. The reader may come away from that story with the idea that I am a lazy slacker who hates to work and whose poverty is self-inflicted and well deserved. While there may be a modicum of truth to that, it is not the whole story. I left out a very important chunk of that story and I will now endeavor to fill in that huge, gaping blank.

No, I have certainly not been poor my whole life. Far from it. For one thing, during most of those 15 years of self-employment my income was substantially greater than that derived from any of the seemingly hundreds of low-paying jobs I’ve had. I got to experience being middle-class, with my 3-person family, two cars in the driveway, money in the bank, and all the perks associated with a middle-class existence in America. But that is not what I am talking about. That is not the blank that I am trying to fill in.

You see, once upon a time I actually struck it rich!

‘Rich,’ of course, is a relative term. Some of your relatives might be richer than others. But to me I truly felt like I struck it rich.