Ooh, the wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’
I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’

The Year I was Born a house cost $22,000. My parents got the house I grew up in two years later for $17,500 with a 4.5 percent VA loan. It had been built three years prior and the family that bought it trashed it. My parents got a bargain.

The average income was $4,137. My dad made a lot more. Took decades for me to discover that as a financial statistician for Mobil Oil we were actually rich. But the Great Depression forced a mindset of preparing for the worst, so we lived several rungs in the ladder belong what we could have afforded.

A Ford car cost $1606-$2944. Thanks to a storage box of 35MM slides crashing to the floor, I discovered a photo of my mom’s Pontiac from 1951! When I get to Tennessee I’ll have those slides digitized.

I drink a lot of whole milk – not that 1 percent crap which the nutritionist told the late Martin Alexander Clifton while in hospital was the worst thing you can drink – was 92 cents for a gallon. I just put in an order for Walmart Curb Side Pick Up for a gallon and paid $3.79 online something my parents would have found inconceivable. Gas was only 23 cents a gallon – yesterday I paid $3.97 a gallon for unleaded regular and had to pump it myself. I grew up with gas station attendants who pumped the gas, checked your oil, cleaned your windshield, if traveling gave you the key to the bathroom, and gave you a map for your trip ahead!

Bread was only 18 cents and it tasted amazing! We only bought bread at a bakery which alas, went out of business in the 80s. Best bread I ever ate and never found anything like it in the years that have passed. This stamp was issued for 3 cents two days after I started screaming for the first time.

My parents LOVED T-bone sirloin steaks. Not sure if sirloin chops for $ .69 a pound is the same thing, but I can tell you that a petite boneless sirloin ON SALE is now $7.99 a pound. I had a coupon AND a senior citizen 10 percent discount so i was able to buy sirloin last week, but not this week. Hell no! I’m not paying $7.99!

Pot Roast was only 43 cents a pound! I looked in the butcher case last Wednesday and almost cried. No pot roast for Sunday anymore. And EGGS. OMG eggs were 61 cents a dozen. Remember the great Egg shortage of 2023? At least now they cost $3.89 a dozen.

I don’t drink coffee – never liked it never got addicted. It was 93 cents a pound when my parents were changing my diaper. Had they ever lived to see a Starbucks and the cost of a foo-foo, pretentious, $3.25 Caffè Americano Grande, they would have acted out and I would have had to drag them out of the mall before the Cancel Culture attacked them!

I remember peeling LOTS of potatoes and shelling pees and shucking corn on the back porch. Those potatoes cost my mom 53 cents for 10 pounds. Those potatoes were grown in Delaware and were like candy. A Russet costs 99 cents for ONE potato – just ONE and it’s tasteless compared to the ones in my childhood. A 6 ½ oz. can Starkist tuna cost a quarter! I stopped buying tuna cause it seems have too much sodium. A 5 ounce can of StarKist Tuna Chunk Light in Water this week at Albertsons is on sale for $1.29!

My dad grew up eating chocolate sandwich cookies. Oreos were first introduced in 1912, but he talked about a bag that came with vanilla ones mixed with what we recognize as an oreo. He’d eat all the chocolate ones and leave the vanillas for his sisters who were peeved. My dad was probably gorging on an 11¾ .oz package of oreos for 39 cents trying to get me to go to sleep or not. I was told I was an exceptionally well-behaved infant, toddler, child, teen, and then all hell broke loose.

I just clipped the JUST FOR U Albertsons coupon so I can pick up a 18.71 ounce FAMILY SIZE (pfff) bag of Oreo Double Stuf Chocolate Sandwich Cookies for $3.29. Without the online coupon some guy pulling off I-80 to shop will pay $5.49!

A pint of Potato Salad was 29 cents. I only buy that when someone is coming for lunch and I’m making sandwiches! A 24 package of Cracker Jack cost $1.49. I wouldn’t eat that crap now if you paid me. Plus it’s $2.49 an ounce! A ½ gallon of apple cider was 49 cents. I wanted to get some two weeks ago in Raleys and saw $6.49 on the label on the shelf and closed the refrigerator case door and walked off.

My mom used cloth diapers and we had a DIAPER service. I suddenly became self-aware in Two Guys on Route 22 in the aisle with these sparkling multi-colored toddler underpants. I wanted them and my mother said no way. I was in a diaper and the only way I could wear them was to potty train myself right there and then. I went home and that was the last time I crapped my pants until I got sick one day in my 40s! I also distinctly remember climbing out of my crib and going downstairs to announce I was all grown up and to get rid of that thing. I also went outside and announced I didn’t want the sandbox because it was baby stuff and I was all grown up. Oddly enough, except for a few moments of being a kid, I really did become a tiny adult overnight. I can also still see those underpants sparkling as if it were two or three years ago and not well a lifetime ago. I had a semi photographic memory – not the rare kind, but one that’s a pain when you want to forget painful moments.

I didn’t know that everyone didn’t dream in color. I had no idea most people didn’t lucid dream. And I had no idea others didn’t feel like the earth was a prison planet. I hated being in a body. HATED it. Hated gravity. Hated having to walk instead of levitating. Hated feeling hungry and needing to pee, etc. Hated getting sick. Hated not being able to summon objects with my mind the way Samantha was able to do in Bewitched.

I did love the beauty of the sky and nature and sunsets and sunrises and the ocean. I loved water. I absolutely LOVED turtles and flowers and animals. I never liked humans. I still don’t.

When Frank Sinatra sings about being 21, I think of how that was the year I graduated from college after 3 years and there wasn’t a job to be hand. Gerald Ford was president and he was TERRIBLE. When I was 35 I was back in graduate school working at the reference desk at the main reference desk at Rutgers having a blast. When I was 65 I bought myself a birthday card wishing me a happy 65th because that year I didn’t get a single card. My late abusive husband didn’t even mention it.

This song is probaby more apropos

This month as I near my 70th birthday my house is GIGANTIC mess. My bed has been moved into the room my late aunt slept in. The furniture is in the hall. The kitchen table and chairs are bunched away from the walls. One has been washed and is ready to be painted. The carpets are being ripped out and vinyl flooring laid. The garage has been turned into a carpentry workshop with sawdust everywhere I can’t find anything. Yard looks great except for a few things that need to be taken to the dump or sold.

The pets are trying not to freak out. There have been more people in this house in the past few months than in the entire time I’ve lived here. In the past year, I’ve met people with stories to tell about trauma and abuse and hardship and being in prison or jail or both than I ever would have imagined meeting.

I have met people with psychic abilities who have tried desperately to hide from them and to not let anyone know. I have no filter and no boundaries, so I’ve let them know they are broadcasting shit regardless so they might as well buck up and use their abilities to climb out of the gutter. We’re stuck in a human body until our time is up. It took me from the time I got potty trained until a few weeks ago to finally stop bitching about being in a human form and just coast along like this woman is doing: