As I leave for school, I look back at our house that my father built when he was only twenty-one years old. I’m amazed that he could do this at such an early age.
We may admit that most of us in Gorman Square are poor. If that’s the case, then we never knew it or, at least, we certainly would never have acknowledged it.
Nevertheless, there is always the exception like Billy Simmons who claims poor-mouth as he hyperbolizes and takes a mug with him and fills it with milk from neighbor O’Brien’s cow — surreptitiously, of course.
Pride, indeed, signifies we are not spiritually poor by all means. Besides, we’re never poor when we can bring food to the kitchen table:
dandelion greens from Thompson’s Field, blueberries for the Blueberry Pickin’ Hills, partridge berries from Southside Hills, wild rabbits snared in Horwood’s Forest, mud trout and salmon peel from Fourth Pond in The Goulds, and whatever else we can find that’s palatable to our taste and survival in our times.
We are the consummate believers and we are comforted by Divine Intervention. In other words, God is our reason for living as we are assuaged by his powerful words,
“The Lord maketh poor, and maketh rich: he bringeth low and lifteth up.
