The Original Spends2Much!

Last week, the Boy Friend's Aunt Peggy died. She was 93. In the 40s she had been a researcher and reporter for the Chicago Daily News Washington bureau. Later in life she married some big shot at the World Bank, and ended up a widow living in Delaware, not too far from the ocean. I never met her, but she sounded like a cool old broad.

The BF drove his mom to Delaware for the funeral, so he got to spend about 16 hours, round trip, in a car with a woman who talks more than I do. He got some good stories out of her, though. Apparently his mom, let's call her Bunny, back when she was a single gal in the 50s, would travel from Cornwall, Ontario to New York City to buy her clothes. And that's not the best part- her biggest purchase was a coat, for $500, when she was earning $20 a week. WOW. The lady spent 6 months wages on a coat! To wear around a hick town in Canada! I have barely managed to spend $500 on a coat, and it was 55 years after Bunny did it. I am impressed.

I have seen old home movies of Bunny, from the 50s and 60s, and she was a Mad Men dream. Red hair, slender, perfectly tailored. She'd wear a cinched-waisted suit and pearls to run errands, where now, we wear yoga pants and a t-shirt. Bunny's style hasn't changed much. This is not an old lady who buys stretchy pants from Wal-Mart. Still looks impeccable when she hangs out at the golf club drinking gin and tonics. No wonder she thinks I'm a peasant- to her, I must look like I've dropped by to clean the gutters.