politics

My Father’s View of Poverty

By Nicholas Maes

My father came to Canada from Holland in the early 1950s at the age of twenty-three. His origins were lower middle class (at a time when class mattered to the Dutch), and Europe was still recovering from the war. Not surprisingly, his pockets were empty when he stepped onto Canadian soil.

His first years as an immigrant were tough. He worked at various jobs – baker’s assistant, milkman, stock-boy — and was barely able to make ends meet. He was fortunate that his neighbours refused to eat an animal’s soft parts, because butchers at that time would sell the liver and kidneys for next to nothing. My father lived in a claustrophobic room, walked to work to save himself the bus-fare, and treated himself to a movie once a month. And always, unfailingly, he set a dollar aside from his salary each week.

“You were poor,” I told him, when he regaled me with these stories from his past. This was fifteen years later, when he was working as a well-paid accountant. His response amazed me.

“I was never poor,” he insisted, “I was broke, that’s all. Being broke is one thing; poverty is much more difficult.”

When I pressed him to explain the difference, he told me that ‘broke’ people have the resources to recover from their bad luck – they have tangible skills, education and, most important, the belief that if their former prosperity has eluded them, it can be retrieved. The poor, he went on, have not been granted such blessings. True poverty has no visible exit, no skills that the world is willing to reward, and no self-image that a population will respect or admire. Worse, it provides no vision of happier days when the necessities of life, as well as its pleasures, were there for the asking.

He almost trembled when he launched this explanation, as if poverty were one of the worst afflictions he could think of, as if it were a chronic state of ‘brokeness’ impervious to cheerful thoughts and the hardest of efforts.

“That’s why I set aside a dollar from my salary each week,” he concluded.

“To save up for the future?” I asked.

“No,” he replied, giving me a look that suggested I had missed his point, “To provide for people who were genuinely poor.”

Nicholas Maes is a high-school history teacher and teaches classics at the University of Waterloo. His adult novel Dead Man’s Float was published in 2006, and he has published several short stories and reviews in a variety of journals. He lives with his wife, three children, and a rabbit in Toronto.

© 2008 Defining Canada.