More TVs Than Rooms
Today's Daily Haiku is inspired by a visit to my father's mother when I was a kid. Her death later in my life had also a big influence in me.
The Daily Haiku for Feb 10. More TVs than rooms.
More TVs than rooms,
where do you keep your money
in that sad grey house?
As I mention in my book Less, I only visited my father's mother once. It does not sound natural for me to call her grandma. Anyway, I will never forget that house. The walls filled with pictures of Jesus Christ and a myriad of clocks ticking in an out of sync cacophony. A huge dog growling at my feet.
There were more TVs than rooms in the house. Two of them in the living room alone. Why would anybody need or even want two big TVs in the same room is a mystery to me.
I've always thought of my father's mother as an example of bad financial education and terrible financial decisions throughout her whole life. The house was in terrible condition, but filled with stuff from TV-commercials. She ended up selling her house to a vulture fund for a couple of grands, leaving her cognitively disabled son (my aunt), who lived with her, without a house or any money to survive in his old age.
That visit, and knowing about the different situations this person got into from my father, heavily influenced me from my late 30s. That's one of the reasons why I don't own a single TV (nothing wrong if you do, of course) and embraced minimalism.
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