When we were young parents we lived in fear of financial difficulties, because our financial status was that of genteel poverty.  We had to continually balance expenses against the necessities that compelled us to carefully husband every penny that my husband, the sole wage-earner of our little family, brought home.  It was a balancing act fraught with constant anxiety.

Yet, for the time, we were comparatively well settled, as parents of three infants by the time we were both 26.  We had been married, by then, for eight years.  In that time, we had saved what we were able to, while renting a small upstairs flat of bedroom and kitchen in the home of another family, sharing the bathroom with another renter of a single room, and with the family who lived below.

That saving enabled us after having been married for just over two years, to place a modest down-payment on a modest attached bungalow located north of the city, which meant we both commuted daily to our respective places of employment, downtown.  Two years later we became parents for the first time, and two other babies succeeded in rounding out our little family.  My husband, at that time, earned $2,500 annually.

We somehow eked out enough to pay for a first and a second mortgage, clothing for the children, food for our table, with an emphasis on whole foods; convenience foods then as a consumer phenomenon was just in its infancy, expensive and as far as we were concerned, undesirable.  We had a regular dairy delivery to the house, with milk, eggs, butter and even bread deposited in a small doored receptacle at the side of the house.  If relatives gave the children a quarter when visiting, that money would be used to help pay the dairy bill, for we had no money to spare for anything.

All of that is history.  And it is in sharp contrast to the entitlements given at the present time to people that were absent in our day of raising a family.  Those on welfare, those considered to be poor, own coloured television sets, cellphones, computers and all manner of extraneous consumer items that society feels them to be entitled to, despite their poverty and dependence on the goodwill of society.

Yet we were extremely fortunate, and we felt fortunate for whatever we had and the manner in which we were enabled to manage however we could, despite the obvious deprivation we shared in many ways.  The quality of our lives, despite the difficulties, was good; we sought our entertainment in the natural environment, using the many municipal parks and developing conservation areas to fuel our recreational opportunities.  Museums, science and art galleries and picnic-and-park facilities were freely accessed.

Contrast that, what we might consider our economic penury with true economic deprivation so movingly and accurately described by Frank McCourt in his memoir, Angela's Ashes.  There, set out in tone-perfect prose is an accounting of an immigrant Irish family living in America during the Great Depression.  Helpless ignorance, poverty and human despair reigned equally.

Not everyone was helpless and ignorant, while being poor.  Descriptions abound in the book of those who helped themselves even during the times of high unemployment and human distress.  His family, however, had a mother who knew nothing of child nutrition and adequate care and cleanliness, let alone the most basic kind of conception treatments through which she might avoid yet another catastrophic pregnancy.  Ill-fed and -cared-for children were especially vulnerable to illness and death.

He describes a loving father closely emotionally attached to his children, but unable to discipline his love of liquor to maintain employment; a man who, despite his familial responsibilities would take his entire pay (when he had brief employment) and spend it in a night drinking at a local bar, leaving his helpless wife and their children to cope with hunger on their own.

The kind goodness of neighbours and shopkeepers helped keep them from utter starvation.  Which was more than could be said of their immediate families back in Ireland who, when they returned in desperation to the crucible of their memories, left them to flounder on their own; a mother unlearned in maternal skills, a father devoted to his drink.

That is poverty.  Poverty of the spirit above all.