"What do insanely poor people buy that ordinary people know nothing about?"

[forest444]

12. You are a BRAVE soul, Liberal in LA

Others have contributed their tales of woe, so here's mine:

Some three decades ago, my father was a T.A. working toward his PhD. His Doctorate Program Adviser (euphemism for academic feudal lord, as anyone who's gone through graduate school can attest) "liked" my father because his talent as a mathematician -and his habit of making him ghost-write papers for him- had yielded the fat bastard a million-dollar-a-year federal grant.

One day my father had enough, and submitted a paper under his own name. Well, we certainly paid for it: when he received his next monthly pay stub, it said simply: WAGES THIS PAY PERIOD.......0.00.

Keep in mind he earned $13,000 a year (1986 dollars, but still), and that his Graduate School tuition was coming out of that paycheck. Since our family was not helping us, we had, as you might expect, no savings to speak of.

Fortunately, it was just four of us: parents and two small kids. My sister and I were receiving free lunches at school (during which I developed my enduring taste for hush puppies), and my mom could - and still can - make practically anything from scratch; I can still taste the fritters and turnovers.

We were lucky. We lived in low-rent, but decent graduate student housing (since demolished), so that just left my father's tuition - which, thank goodness, was paid for by a professor from a different department that barely knew my father, but had heard of our plight.

They do say angels walk among us. May we always have at least one.