This week’s episodes are guest hosted by Diannely Antigua.

TRANSCRIPT

I’m Diannely Antigua, and this is The Slowdown.

As a child, no one ever had to tell me that I came from a low income family. I just knew. I knew every year when the donated box of toys arrived on our doorstep during the holiday season. I looked forward to that box, even though it meant someone, somewhere, had to first witness how little we had. A part of me felt ashamed, then another part felt something closer to relief.

I didn’t know what it meant to live with more, though I knew what it meant to live with less. To me, “the good life” was this — knowing my mother would go through the donated box of new toys and separate what she thought was meant for each of us kids. I never watched her do it, but I imagined her holding each toy for a moment before deciding. For my brother, a harmonica. For one sister, a Barbie doll. For my other sister, an arts and crafts box filled with yarn and bright beads.

And one year, there was a yellow Walkman waiting for me.

I can still feel the weight of it in my palm, its grey buttons, the yellow headphones. I’d tune into the FM radio and sing along to Mariah Carey or Boyz II Men. For me, my mother had chosen the gift of my own little voice. Maybe she knew the songs I’d write later would be called poems, and my voice their instrument.

Maybe my mother had experienced her own version of the “good life.” Maybe as she chose each of our gifts, she remembered her own childhood in the Dominican Republic: the dirt roads leading to her house. Making oatmeal in the coal pot every morning. Then sometimes an ice cream cone if she went into town with my grandmother.

The past has a way of folding into itself like that. Across an ocean and decades later, when my grandmother took us kids to the pharmacy, she’d let us pick one snack to share. We always picked raspberry and creme cookies. We’d take our time with them, taking little bites of the buttery shortbread and jammy filling, savoring each one. Sometimes I’ll buy those cookies just to remember how they once tasted like luxury.

It’s in these moments that I learned how love moves. It makes meaning out of what’s available, and insists on joy. It makes something out of nothing.

Today’s poem has that same alchemy of feeling. That even in scarcity, there can be longing, even a strange kind of tenderness.

The Good Life
by Tracy K. Smith

When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.

"The Good Life" by Tracy K. Smith from LIFE ON MARS © 2011 Tracy K. Smith. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press.