Thursday, 12/31/98

Last night of the year. Pam and Luke are watching the ball on TV and I'm in here at the computer because I want to write the number down once, where I can't pretend I didn't see it.

$47,900. That's eight credit cards and what's left on six medical accounts. The minimum payments come to $1,140 a month, which is more than half of what I bring home. Pam's check from the school covers groceries and gas and not much else.

1998 was the year Pam got well and we went broke. I would make that trade every time. I just wish I didn't have to.

I don't have a resolution. I have a legal pad.

Sunday, 11/22/98

Pam's scan last week was clean. That's over a year now. Dr. Mahajan shook my hand this time, not just hers. I said, "What was that for?" He said, "For driving."

The shop is slow for the winter and Ron cut the Saturday overtime. He said sorry about four times. It's not his fault; it's catalogs. Everybody's putting their catalogs on the Internet. The overtime was the thing keeping the legal pad balanced, and now it won't balance. I sat with it Friday night and moved numbers around for two hours like a man rearranging deck chairs.

Thanksgiving Thursday. We have a lot to be thankful for. I mean that. I'll say it at the table and mean it.

Sunday, 10/4/98

I counted the credit card offers that came in the mail this week. Nine. Pre-approved, pre-screened, platinum, gold. Fixed rate for a year. They know exactly what we owe, they have to, and they keep sending more.

I opened card number eight to pay card number three. I know how that sounds. I knew it when I did it.

Pam wants to talk to somebody at the credit counseling place. I said let me try one more month.

Sunday, 8/30/98

Sold the boat yesterday. It was a fourteen-foot aluminum boat with a twenty-five-horse motor I bought used in 1988, and Luke and I took it to the reservoir most Saturdays in the summer. A young guy with a baby in a car seat paid me $1,800 cash and I put all of it on the Discover card the same afternoon, so the boat is now a slightly lower number.

Luke didn't say anything about it. He helped me hitch it up. After the guy drove off he said, "We can still fish off the bank, Dad." He's fourteen. I didn't deserve that.

Megan went back for her sophomore year last weekend. Student loans, plus she got a job as an aide at a nursing home near campus, weekends. She says it's good for nursing school. She also says the old men flirt with her, and one of them proposed.

Sunday, 7/12/98

Pam found the legal pad.

She was looking for a stamp in the desk drawer. I came in from mowing and she was sitting there with it in her lap. All seven cards, balances, due dates, the 0% ones and when they run out. The total at the bottom, circled: $38,600.

She wasn't mad about the money. That's what I didn't understand, standing there with grass on my shoes. She was mad I hid it. She said, "You carried me all last year. You carried me to the bathroom. Let me carry this."

We've been married twenty-two years and that's the biggest fight we ever had, and it lasted about five minutes, and she won it.

So now there are two of us at the kitchen table on the 1st and the 15th. She's better at it than me. She called two of the card companies and got the interest rate lowered on one of them just by asking. I never thought to ask. I didn't think people like us were allowed to ask.

Sunday, 5/24/98

Race day. We did what we always do: burgers on the grill and the 500 on the radio, since they don't show it live on TV here. Pam planted her impatiens along the front walk, all of them, three flats, on her knees in the dirt with a sun hat over her curls. A year ago this weekend she couldn't lift the flats.

I worked yesterday and I'll work next Saturday too. I'm glad for the overtime. I'm glad for a lot of things. The flowers are pink and white.

Sunday, 4/19/98

A year ago this month we sat in Dr. Mahajan's office and heard the word lymphoma. This month we heard a different word: remission. She had her spring scan and it's still clean.

We went out to eat at the steakhouse on the south side we go to on anniversaries, and I let her order the big one, and she ate half and took the rest home in a swan made of aluminum foil. I watched her eat and I didn't look at the prices, not once.

I'm not writing about money this week. This week is about the swan.

Sunday, 3/15/98

I have a system. I'll write it down because maybe it'll help somebody, or maybe somebody will write and tell me I'm an idiot.

Yellow legal pad. Seven cards down the left side. Across the top: balance, minimum, due date, interest rate, and the date the 0% runs out on the ones that have it. On the 1st and the 15th, when I get paid, I pay the minimums on whatever's due. When one card gets up close to its limit, I use the checks another card sends in the mail to pay it down, and start over.

It's like the man on Ed Sullivan who kept the plates spinning on sticks. You run back and forth. You don't stop. Every plate is fine as long as you don't stop.

Pam went back to the school full time last week. Right now she knows there's a legal pad. She doesn't know what's on it.

Sunday, 1/25/98

Megan says I should keep writing on here even though Pam's better, because people ask. So I'm keeping going. I changed the name at the top, since it isn't only Pam's news anymore. Pam says thank goodness, she's tired of being famous.

Super Bowl tonight. Denver won. Elway finally got one. Good for him; he waited long enough.

Money. The new year started and the insurance maximum started over, so the checkups are covered again, but the old bills are still the old bills. One of the card companies sent a letter: transfer your balances at 0% for six months. So I put $6,000 of the hospital on it. That's six months without interest on that part. When it runs out I'll move it somewhere else. The guys at work say that's what everybody does now.

I have to say, it felt good for about a day. Like I'd done something.