Maybe there was a health advantage to being po' folk

Read a feature story yesterday concerning a 15-year-old kid who has recently been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.

He is a bright and articulate lad who, refreshingly, blames nobody but himself for having come down with an ailment that has absolutely skyrocketed amongst the young in recent years. It's a story that might, however, inspire others to mend their ways. In that I commend both the boy and his parents for going public.

He told his tale of eating massive amounts of junkfood – he’d skip breakfast and then head out to the golden arches during a class break mid-morning. He also spent most of his free time on his computer and virtually never took exercise of any kind.

I don’t remember any kids with Type 2 diabetes when I was growing up. In fact, I don’t believe diabetes had even been placed in sub-category at that time. People would mumble about somebody having borderline diabetes (there is no such thing) and it wouldn’t get any more attention than that.

In reading the story (and I wish the boy well in his quest to radically alter a lifestyle that has potentially lethal consequences) I came to the conclusion that, despite all the awful stresses it invokes, there may be one advantage to our current recessionary time. The advantage being that we will not have the money to waste on crap. And we will not have the money to hand out great big sums to our kids on a daily basis so that they can indulge themselves on dietary crud.

Actually, the tale left me with a kind of wistful nostalgia for an earlier time – my own childhood and youth.

And what sticks most prominently in my memories about those times was that we never had any money. I mean, my father was a relatively well-paid professional, but not of that aforementioned relatively good pay came in my direction. If I wanted money, I had to earn it somewhere. My friends were no different. Parents simply didn’t fork over cash. They didn’t have it to spare. Kids understood that.

I did get a paltry allowance when I was in elementary school. I got enough money on a weekly basis to buy a comic book (for a dime) and some penny candy. Or, as a special treat, a store near my elementary school sold nickel-bags of French fries. Little brown paper bags that would be dredged, prior to consumption, with malt vinegar and salt. It was a heavenly treat.

I recall an incident when I was a senior in high school in which three buddies and I were out cruising yet again on a Friday night – determined to end our chronic ‘no action’ status and, of course, being unsuccessful – when we ran out of gas. Happened a lot in those days. So, we pushed my pathetic excuse of a car to a service station. We pooled our resources. Between the four of us we were able to muster 76-cents. We bought 76-cents worth, which was enough to get us home. We found nothing odd about the situation.

This dearth of largesse continued right through high school and into university. In university I had a good four-month summer job in a mill, at which I received union wage. But, all the money went to tuition, board and eating for the ensuing term. Not a lot of mad money.

Something else struck me about the diabetic boy’s story. He spoke of heading out to the ‘Big M’ for crappola during a class break (he would buy more rubbish at lunchtime. We couldn’t have done that. Mainly because it was a stricter time in which we were not permitted to leave the school grounds without good reason. We resented the hell out of this but there wasn’t much we could do. Anyway, if we did leave and head out to the store what could we do? We were broke.

Our broke status was something our parents believed was “good for you.” The girl who lived across the street (my age) came from a filthy rich family. They lived in a kind of antebellum mansion, had a maid and groundskeeper, hunting dogs, horses, 17 cars, the whole array. Gayle (my friend) never had any more. Her parents didn’t believe in simply handing out money. In her teens she got a part-time job like the rest of us. Smart parents.

There was a final thing. The kid spoke of hanging out in his room all day on his computer. As if that would have happened when I was a kid. Well, OK, we didn’t have computers, but what we did have was a parent who would say, “What are you doing hanging around in your room on a beautiful day? Get outside and do something. You can run to the store for me, and then you can rake those leaves on the back lawn. You’re not an ornament around here.”

Maybe being poor and unindulged was just a lot healthier.