Bringing It Home: Teaching, Trauma, Testimonial (on Elizabeth Stone's A Boy I Once Knew)

1 retired a few months ago, and since then I have found myself obsessively calculating how little I can, if necessary, live on. For years I've lived on a professor's salary, unconcerned about income because I was secure in the knowledge that the amount coming to me would increase in a way roughly proportionate to the cost of living. But now that my income is tied to the stock market, it can go up or down, and my new obsession seems to be a response to that new uncertainty. I don't worry: I know that it will take a genuine economic catastrophe affecting many millions of people for me to be reduced to dire straits. But the thought is with me; and I recognize in its presence the return of a sense of precariousness that I can only have picked up from my parents in the first decade of my life, during the Depression. They too were reasonably secure, although poorly paid. But they had experienced a payless payday or two and they saw the misery around them. I'm sure they never discussed their feelings with their children, but we weren't for that reason impervious to them. And here they are now, showing up a lifetime later in me. Protected as I was from the economic trauma of the 1930s, it returns