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Mini Money Posting Date: Apr 5 2009 11:59PM Ever wonder what the World Bank does? They don’t have ATM’s. No one buys groceries with their World Bank MasterCard. The World Bank does not hold my mortgage. I don’t think you can walk into the local World Bank branch and buy one of those Christmas fruitcakes from the Rotary Club for $8.
As far as I can tell, however, the World Bank does do calculations that come up with numbers like $1.25. That’s American dollars – about a buck eighty Canadian.
That figure, according to the World Bank, is the poverty line. If you live on the purchasing power equivalent of $1.25 US a day or less, you are, according to the World Bank, one of the world’s 1.4 billion abject poor.
Just to put it into perspective, 1.4 billion is the same number you would get if you added up all the men, women, children, cats, dogs, squirrels, beavers, moose, pigeons and pine trees in Canada. It’s a big number. $1.25 is a small number. It’s the change you get if you buy a bottle of Coke and a Jos. Louis with a five dollar bill. It’s the tax on a purchase of $9.60.
When I was a kid, $1.25 was a lot of money. I could live on $1.25 a day. I could walk to Becker’s and drop sixty cents on a chocolate milk and a Vachon Half Moon. That would leave me with sixty-five big ones to get through the rest of the day. Clearly, I was a young boy with options. With big bucks still in my wallet – actually in my sock because that’s where I stashed my bank roll until, well, pretty much until I went to university – the world was my oyster. The top option was walking over to the Evel Pavilion at the hospital and buying a chocolate milk and two packaged doughnuts for fifty cents. That would leave me fifteen big ones, which I would probably use to finance a little scrounging operation in the hope that I would turn up another dime so I could go back and buy myself another chocolate milk.
If I wasn’t in the mood for the doughnut combo at the Evel, I would take my sixty-five cents up to Westcliffe Mall. There, I would enter the magic kingdom of the Hobby House. The Hobby House was the only thing resembling a toy store within walking distance. It was, looking back, a ramshackle, cramped store in a fifth-rate mall. Its signature retail offering was a whole wall of models – fighter jets, race cars, battleships and stuff. Of course, you couldn’t get anything like that for a mere sixty-five cents. I would snag something else with my green, something like cards, probably three packages of Star Wars cards, which would probably be worth about $13 today on ebay.
Sometimes, I was moved to put my spare sixty-five cents back in my sock and take it home and put it in my safe, which was really just a piggy bank in the shape of a safe. After a couple of weeks’ worth of stockpiling, I would open the safe – making sure no one was watching over my shoulder to sneak a peek at my combination which, if I remember correctly, was 3, 6, 2 – scoop out something in order of $2.80 and, feeling like Andrew Carnegie or the bastard son of a Rockefeller, I would head back to the Hobby House and its wall of models. I would pass by the hot rods and the Formula 1 race cars. I would ignore the battleships and corvettes (the war ships, not the cars). I would head straight for the fighter planes – Russian MiG’s, American F-16’s, Canadian airplanes that never went into production – and pick the coolest looking one I could find … for under three bucks.
I would drop down all of my hard-saved cash and walk out like I was on air. Then I would get home and make the model in such a way that it bore no resemblance whatsoever to the picture on the box and starting the next day, I would fill myself to the gills with chocolate milk and doughnuts leaving absolutely no surplus cash for any purpose other than junk food.
I probably should have just given it away. |
