Wednesday, March 22, 2006

"Receipts"

For some reason, receipts are a fixation for Mother.
I am usually careful to rip up and dispose of receipts. If Mother finds a receipt, it is carefully scrutinized to determine what and how much it's for. If it isn't recognised, she pores over it, again and again. Since her eyesight is bad and with the added problem of some sort of loss of judgement makes it increasingly difficult to understand something that she is reading, even when it is clearly written, she cannot "read" the receipt. Her complaint is usually that "the stores are deliberately making the receipts hard to read". It is usually very clear when I look at it.
I often come out to the car to find her painstakingly trying to make head or tail out of a receipt for 30 cents and trying to remember what she would have spent 30 cents on. The fact that, in the scale of things, 30 cents doesn't really matter, doesn't strike her. The fact that she orders hundreds of dollars worth of useless and unneeded items from Publishers Clearinghouse is a big deal.... Loaning $5000 to a relative who already owes you $30,000 is a big deal. A 30 cent purchase from the dollar store isn't.
To Mom, however, that 30 cents represents some something I can't quite understand. To her, it represents a roof over her head or living on the street.

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