The house my parents bought on Patterson Drive in Chalmette, Louisiana represented the very lowest rung on the ladder for the fledgling upwardly mobile middle class of the mid 1950s. The salad days for the neighborhood was when crawfish was 30 cents a pound, the big oil refinery in town could go a whole year without a major explosion, and the aluminum plant had built a huge smokestack that now sent its particulate pollution over the river to Algiers rather than letting it continue to rain down over Chalmette.

All the families featured fathers that went off to work in collared shirts and came home with paychecks that their wives could stretch from one pay period to the next with a good 10 cents to spare. My mother balanced the household budget never knowing that dollar amounts could be expressed with commas until she went to work for the local bank. But at home she was a wizard working with figures to the right of the decimal points.

I was too young to follow the robbing Peter to pay Paul machinations my mother went through to make 50 dollars a week behave like a hundred, but I could measure how we were doing between pay periods by the size and contents of the grocery lists she’d send me off on my bike to fulfill at the local food store. (A quick visual metric would be my father’s whiskey stash. On payday it would be Seagram’s V.O. As the days progressed, it would change to Seagram’s 7, then J.W. Dickel, winding up with Early Times or Old Crow in those dark times just before the next payday.)

“Inside the store my mother would fill two carts as if she were salvaging a merchant’s ship that had run aground, because her three sons consumed food like a plague of locusts.”

The real drill down story of the family finances was told on those little slips of paper my mother would have waiting for me when I’d come home from school.

•    Milk

•    Bread

•  . Steak

•    Pudding

•    Lunch meat

•    Cokes

•    Root beer

•    Cigs

This robust list meant the family coffers were flush. As the days proceeded through the pay period, the lists would grow leaner.

•    Milk

•    Bread

•    Bologna

•    Kool-aid

•    Cokes

•    Cigs

And leaner…

•    Milk

•    Bread

•    Cokes

•    Cigs

And then finally…

•    Cokes

•    Cigs

We never hit rock bottom where even my mother’s most basic needs of cokes and cigarettes couldn’t be met, but days of Carnation instant milk, lunches of bologna sandwiches with the ends of the bread loaf and homemade lemonade at least signaled the happy days of the next payday would soon be upon us.

Paydays were paydirt. My father would drop us three boys and mom at the big supermarket, while he repaired to a local bar to buy rounds for all the other men who were waiting out their own wives’ shopping spree.

Inside the store my mother would fill two carts as if she were salvaging a merchant’s ship that had run aground, because her three sons consumed food like a plague of locusts. “I just bought a whole bag of apples,” she would lament, after seeing the fruit bowl emptied 24 hours after filling it.

Putting food on the table was my father’s job. Keeping it in the house was my mother’s, and probably explains why my mother’s favorite Bible story was the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes.