Noting Matt’s successes as a businessman and artist, a reader asks whether Matt was ever poor, and if so, whether there is anything he misses about being poor.

Matt responds:

I was born in Bridgeport, Illinois, back of the yards, one of the so-called tough neighborhoods of Chicago, in 1932.  Nobody had a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.

I remember friends of ours going over to one of the houses or apartments asking their father for a nickel, and with great reluctance he gave it to him so that the five of us could go to the movies.  His nickel fell down the cracks of a sidewalk, and you would have thought that the Empire State Building had fallen down.  The men of the neighborhood came out with tools to pry open the sidewalk and find that nickel, and then they meticulously put the sidewalk back together again.

That’s the kind of community we had.  We never knew whether we were rich or poor.  There was always food on the table, although not a lot of it would be meat.

My father was the local undertaker.  Many of the homes we went into for wakes had no electricity or furniture.  We had immensely long extension cords, and we’d go through the neighborhoods to see if people would let the family down the block use the electricity for the wake.

Many times my mother would bring in furniture and we’d stage the house.

I’ve always had those thoughts with me.

It’s good to have financial wealth, but we can see how fragile and impermanent it is.  I believe we should count our true wealth in our family, our blessings, and what we’re going to leave behind.

I never saw a memorial card about someone who died that listed a balance sheet of how much money they had.  It was always about their accomplishments.  It was always about “Is the world better because this person lived, or are we all heaving a great sigh of relief, saying, ‘Thank God the old son-of-a-bitch is dead!’”  I never heard that said at a funeral, but I think it’s probably going through a lot of people’s heads instead of “Ave Maria.”

A great priest friend of mine used to say, “There are no pockets on the caskets.”

You go into the grave alone, you bring only your integrity and your good deeds with you.  Your bad deeds have already gone ahead of you to kick you in the ass when you get there.  So much for wealth.

I’ve been poor, and I’ve been well-off.  Would I rather be well-off?  Absolutely.

Would I be sad if I was poor?  No, as long as I had a scrap of paper, a pencil, a good bottle of milk, a loaf of bread, and a small piece of meat.

The only thing I miss about being poor is probably that we never knew we were poor.  We were rich in friends.  The grocer would put the groceries on the tab.  We were never wanting for food.  It was a completely different philosophy.  We were all in the same boat.

I don’t think we even thought about the rich, because it was so far beyond where we were.  There wasn’t a role model, there wasn’t “Ooh, ah, I wish I was J.P. Morgan!”  We had fun, there wasn’t a lot of “Woe is me...”

There was always a joint, common purpose about it, and if somebody didn’t have a lot of food, or was out of work, or couldn’t get the medicine, everybody seemed to take care of everybody else.  Maybe I miss that whole atmosphere and culture.  It was not the culture of “Me me me me me me me...”; it was the culture of “us.”

Matt