Baring All Expense: Our Stories About Money—Or Lack Thereof

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Am I alone in my beliefs here? It’s hard to guess. Even though the Great and Terrible Oz called Wall Street has now been unveiled as a doddering swindler, few of us know much about one another’s financial lives. Even among friends, talking about how much each of us earns, owes, and saves is taboo.

Indeed, the highlight of CNBC’s Suze Orman Show is the segment “Can I Afford It?” in which callers ask Ms. Orman if, say, a vacation in Fiji is reasonable to contemplate. So great is our hunger for economic disclosure that Orman’s verdict is less enthralling than the numbers—income, savings, debt load—scrolling down the screen. “Ann from California has $600,000 in retirement? No kidding?”

Orman’s implicit message is “you are not alone.” But television is no substitute for conversation. Our stories about money, when they’re told without nostalgia or judgment, provide perspective. On the bleak day when I handed the piano teacher the last of my crumpled cash, I walked around my house and looked at everything. Nothing is allowed to break. And I paid a visit to Ruth, an 80-year-old potter.

Ruth listened to my story and then told me one of her own about the time her father was laid off from a New Jersey silk mill and her mother boiled chicken legs for dinner—the part that begins south of the drumstick and ends with claws. Here was the point: Her knowledge, as a child, that everyone else’s father was likewise unemployed, that everyone else’s mother was likewise turning poultry bits into gelatinous glop, was what made the Depression bearable. We were all in the same boat. It wasn’t private.

Last fall a manufacturing company contacted me about a writing project that involved analyzing environmental health risks. The budget for the project was “in the low six figures.” But as negotiations continued, it became clear that I would have to sign a confidentiality agreement regarding proprietary chemical processes. I’d have to keep secrets. I thought about Ruth’s chicken legs. I thought about what my own grandmother had told me: Silence is the sound of money talking. I said no.

Excerpted from Orion(March-April 2009), a magazine about environment, culture, and spirit; www.orionmagazine.org.

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