Recently, for example, I overheard a conversation between a woman and two children, maybe 8 and 11 years old. The kids wanted something, and she juked like a congressman to avoid saying the only four words she needed: “We can’t afford it.”
When we moved, pre-offspring, to a small house in Verdi in 1979, it was so far out in the country that Wells Fargo balked at giving us a loan. “If you default,” a loan officer asked, “who’d want to live way out there?”Just you wait, I said.Sure enough, we got gentrified. In five years, we were surrounded by people who spent more on their Chihuahuas than I did on college.