p.31 When I was a child, going to see my grat-grandfather was an unavoidable part of my summer vacation. ... The trip was long and miserable, but I knew protesting was futile--in our family we did out duty, we met expectations.
p.84 (911) It has been almost 5 years since Dave died. I bought a house and a car and enjoy treating my friends to dinner. I am not ungrateful for the money, but in a way it's been as much of a burdenas a blessing. At some point, the tide of empathy about 9/11 shifted. and the media began portraying widows as out-of-control rich women spending money on fancy cars and breast implants. The sums we received were exaggerated and printed in local papers. I lent money to friends who asked, then felt confused when they quietly slipped out of my life as though embarrassed. I hired a man Dve knew to repair some things around my house and later heard he'd charged me double the market value. Most of the fire-fighters have stopped visiting altogether.
I've felt overwhelmed by managng the money I've been given. Scared I weould make mistakes or be taken advantage of by the dozens of financial advisers who solicited me after 9/11. ...
It's most difficult during the holidays. Not only do memories of Dave take my nreath away, but now that everyone knows I have money,. deciding what to buy them is daunting. Do I purchase a nice bowl for my sister, like I might have 5 years ago, or replace the TV that she has been complaining is on the fritz? .. When I finally cashed my checks, it took three sessions with my therapist to decide on an appropriate amount to give my mother-in-law and members of my family and how to go about setting up college funds for my nieces.
p.86 The following week I received a letter from her. Enclosed was a mortgage payment for her Winnebago, which she insisted she would have to sell if I did not give her the money. I felt emotionally blackmailed, angry that the neediness that had once frustrated Dave was now focused on me in a blatant showdown of loss. I considered telling her everything I felt, but I knew it was as fruitless as throwing a chair off a sinking ship, so I wrote a check instead. The hole that Dave has left in both our hearts is as wide as the ocean, and nothing can bring him back to us, not even a dollar a tear.
p.103 After hearing so many weepy tales about being sent back from the Hamptons in a cab after being flown out there in a helicopter, about having to read to Gran-Gran in her sickroom while sonny boy raced sailboats off the Cape, and about trembling outside some dashing congressman's office only to get a note from his top aid instructing the girl to abort "out little no-comment" and never return to the District of Columbia, I resolved that if Walter Kirn were ever rich enough to keep his lady in lovster salad, I woudln't make her feel feel greedy and contemptible.
p.119
The summer got hotter. The Cast Member refused to join me for refreshing days at my parents' summeer place, where a pool eased the debilitating effect of the heat. Instead, he spent much of his time sulking about his lack of auditions, stalking around his steam room of an apartment in a pair of jeans, the turquoise cross necklace that banged against his chest and a beer in his hand his only adornments. He called me Stella because I told him he was posing as Marlon Brando and suggested that maybe he should just install an air conditioner and throw on a shirt instead of bathing in his own sweat from June through September.
p.123 My dates with Mr. Wall Street ranged from evenings in chic restaurants to canoeing down the Delaware River. There was nothing we felt we couldn't do together, and we celebrated "the range of our game."
.... honeymoon..I told him he shoulod pay whatever he felt comfortable spending and I would pay the rest. He said he felt pressure to live beyond his comfort level, even though he earned a very substantial amount of money, and I told hin that I didn't want to be held back from living the way I could, so he should find a wayy to get comfortable with the idea that sometimes I would pay more for things than he did.
p.127 The Film Editor and I didn't make it in the long run. He didn't feel accepted by my friends, he told me.
... I understood, but I knew I couldn't spend my life with someone I never asw. I also can't spend my life with someone who shuts me down socially. I love my friends and need to be with someone who feels comfortable socializing with any group no matter which part of town they're from and no matter how much money they do or don't have.
p.129 "I don't have relationship dysfunction," I said, handing the card back. "I just have a healthy bank account."
There's no question: it would be great if I could meet a guy from a similar background with similar drive and interests. But I haven't met him. Instead, I've met whom I've met; I've learned what I've learned. And what I've learned is that you have to accept who you are and then find someone who also accepts who you are. You can't look away and say apologetically, "The Upper East Side," when someone asks you where you're from. You have to own ti, which not a lot of people feel comfortable doing.
p.130"Yes," I said, "I'm going to say that I'm moderately wealthy."
"Do you really want people to know that about you?" she asked, the worry and distaste clear on her face.
"I guess so," I said. "I guess so," I guess I'm going to come out of my walk-in closet."
....I do know this: somewhere out there is a man who doesn't care; who's both grounded and honest enough to talk with me about the specific stresses finances always cause; who will work with me to find solutions that don't break us apart. And if I end up with a man who has less money--or no money--I don't want to argue every time I go to a restaurant over who's going to pay the bill. And I don't want to be held back in my life from enjoying those things I can afford to enjoy.
As for Claudia and her host of worries, well, I understand them No one wants to see someone they care for get used. And no one wants to see someone they love choose a life of downward mobility. ...
p.158
Do you want to know what a $1200 bottle of wine tastes like? Of course you do. That's the first thing my literary agents wanted to know when I told her I was going to participate in an anthology about money by spending the fee on a bottle of wine and writing about iut. " i'll fly out," she said. A few years back, she almost died in a car accident, and she told me that as the car spun her around and around she thought to herself, "I'm glad I had all those delicious meals." "I'll fly out and drink it with you. What do you think it tastes like?"
The next day she called me again. "I don't think you should write this essay," she said. "Twelve hundred dollars on a bottle of wine? It's immoral. People are going to attack you. People are going to call you an immoral person."
p. 160 There were times when I felt like jumping out the window of my apartment, but I could only afford to live on the second floor, and I would just have landed on on eof the loud, laughing people lined up outside, cocktails in their hands, for an unaffordable steak house.
p.163 This is the thing with money, right here, the simultaneous thrill of what it can buy and shame of knowing it ought not to buy such things, and knowing that no matter how much you give away--and in an earlier draft I had a paragraph here about how much money I give away, only to cut it out as it had no bearing on the subject at hand--it cannot mitigate money's imoral circumstances, and drinking the expensive stuff anyway, becuase it tastes better. Everyone know money cannot buy happiness, but it is very wasy to be unhappy in a crummy apartment overlooking the laughing immoral rich people drinking and waiting for steak. I found it so wasy I did it several times a day. It is more difficult to be unhappy in a resort where someone unloads you car while you're checking in, and someone else parks it in the lot down the road.....
p.168 My wife and I have lived in crummy apartments, and we could do it again if we had to. But we don't have to. We don't have to , and we are happier, no doubt about it, for not having to. There is something wrong with this, I know there is, but I can't quite delineate the thing that is wrong with it, and this is the thing with money.
Mad Money -- Andy Behrman
It's the height of the 1980s in Manhattan. Hidden in my freezer, behind two huge bottles of Absoult vodka and a few pints of Haagen-Dazs ice cream, are staks of $100 bills, the proceeds from my art-counterfeiting efforts in Europe and Hapan. My "cold cash," as my friends and I refer to it, is organized in neat rubber-banded piles of $10000. There's probably about $200000 in all.
This Way Out -- Hill McCorkle
p.238 Most unhappily married people who choose to stay together do so because of money and all that it represents: the neighborhood, the trips, the security that a major plumbing or car problem won't force you to go broke. If I had ever had the luxury of writing full-time without any financial worries, would I have felt differently" Maybe, or even if I hadn't felt differently, it would have made for a comfortable nest that might have been difficult to leave. By then I was so aware of our differences. I wan't right verus wrong or good versus evil. It was two different people on different tracks who happened to share a primary focus, which was our children.
What I had become during my years in white-bread suburbia was disillusioned and tired of working more than one job when all I really wanted to do--all I had ever wanted to do--was write. I had become a watered-down version of everything I hadwanted to be--tired of compromise, tired of second choices, tired of feeling homesick. It sounds so ridiculous to name those trite diferences, and yet there you have it: You have lake people and you have ocean peopl. Those who loves dogs and those who don't. Those who celebrate holidays big and those wo don't.
p.239 This is the story of money and what happens when you divorce. I have enormous sympathy for those who are fenuinely trapped. I've been told that women usually go down a rank in income and men go up. ... I am fortunate to have the earning potential I do, because I know that our system is not a perfect one and that there are women who have never worked outside the home terrified at the prospect, especially at a more advanced age. And there are men who feed and stoke those fears.
... Without the kind of hopelessness that sets in when you know you're in the wrong place?
p.240 Why is it so hard to believe that two good and decent humans could look up and not recognize the place they inhabbit? That one wants to go voer there and ride the Ferris wheel, look at the lights, ponder the fate of the universe, and the other one wants to spin on the Til-A Whirl till he pulkes and then go right back for more. I split in desire like that can't be rectified. It is infuriating and is the kind of difference that can throw a divorce into motion. You feel anger and sadness; you cycle through the whole grief process again and again until you come clean enough to put your children first, which means a vicilized relationship respectful of their other parent.
p. 241 But good and easy exit scenes don't come cheap. They are well rehearsed and expensive. Stella! Rosebud! I'm ready for my close-up. Frankly , my dear, I don't give a damn. Pick you favorite. A good ending is hard to find.
Do you want dramatic?
Afterall, tomorrow is another day.
Sarcastic?
Don't go away mad, just go away!
Enlightened?
Que sera, sera.
And of course this is (in my opinion) the best choice: Let it go.
p.242 The desire to stay in and fight can become a series of warped and false exit signs. It might be right to hang in there and duke it out for some, but it wasn't right for me. I have a sign over my desk that says, WHEN THE HORSE IS DEAD, GET OFF IT. It is a sentiment for stories gone awry--deand-end ideas and half-baked characters. But there are many times in life when I think quitting is the right, best, and only thing to do. There are many who hav told me I should have done better, could have done better, and maybe that's true. I have debts that, if I really allow myself to think about it, I shoudln't have. And yet I also have closure, which is worth a lot. I have to factor in there the price of emotional health (not to mention leagal bills) and what dragging it all out another year or so would have meant. For me it was time to leave the fair and not look back.
p.248 That final day in court I kept thinking of a band of boys I had admired when I was growing up. They had a signature sign-off that I used to love. When leaving a conflict of some nature, they would just say, "Adios, motherfuckers!" Even now I can see them, the freedom in their legs pumping the pedals of their banana seat bikes, bushy sun-bleached hair blown from their tan young faces. There was something in those jaunty swings onto their bikes, handlebars gripped securely in a way that said confidence, liberation, freedom. They had a couple of bucks in their pockets, and that's all they needed. Enough for candy and a Coke, maybe a pack of cigarettes from the machine at the Holiday Inn where we all hung out that sumer, snaking into the pool and taking ice for free. They were twelve-year-old boys with a whole world ahead of the,.. Open road, clear-eyed, not taking crap from anybody if they could help it. I loved the power of that look. I wanted to feel like that. They were out of there. And when I finally left that courtroom, I was, too.
Stash -- Claire Dederer
p,260 Money is neither morally good nor morally bad. It just is, and when you're lucky enough to have some, you ought to have the grace to be grateful. It took me a year of my lifeto learn this, a year when I lived with a stash in the bank. The money sat there untouched, like an ogre in a dungeon or a maiden in a tower. It might sit there still. It might not. No one knows except me.
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