If bound and published, the stories of the early part of my parents’ marriage might be titled “Tales of the Great Depression.” Like the dreams of most people, theirs were thrown to the wind when the economy fell apart.

The crash of 1929 cost my mother her scholarship to a Chicago conservatory, and she went home to Alabama a year short of graduation. “If I hadn’t met your daddy, I’d have starved to death,” she liked to say. She had been living in a boarding house and wringing out a living teaching piano lessons when someone fixed her up with a young pharmacist from Georgia.

Not that pharmacy was his first choice. Daddy had dreamed of a career in professional baseball, and he would have much preferred the outfield to standing behind the counter in his father’s store. But the economy dictated a practical profession, one to which he turned out to be well-suited.

Follow up:

They, of course, were extraordinarily fortunate. My mother, who weighed 89 pounds and was sick from pneumonia when she married, recovered. Until they could afford their own home, my folks were able to live with my grandfather and my aunt, who had a secure if meager income as a public school teacher. And, importantly, they were white in the Jim Crow South, which bestowed very real but largely invisible benefits.

Nature determined that their children came late. So secure was my post-World War II childhood that I saw the depression as a fantastic, extraordinary adventure that my resourceful parents survived. Mother assured me that it would never happen again because of what President Roosevelt had done, but Daddy always said that, inevitably, it would.

The depression’s influence lived on in our house in carefully washed and saved mayonnaise jars, tattered textiles used every day while the “good” ones lay in the closet, tightly wound balls of spare twine and rubber bands, and parents who got angry if the lights were left on in an empty room. Occasionally, my parents indulged in their old depression supper of cornbread crumbled into large glasses of buttermilk; my brother and I thought them odd. Still, we learned that as guests in someone else’s home, we should always eat whatever was offered. No matter how humble, hospitality was not to be refused.

Fast forward to 1980. A Georgian, President Jimmy Carter, is running for re-election, my father has been diagnosed with cancer, and I am a young mother living in New York City. Enlightened by the civil rights movement and made cocky by the woman’s movement, I joust over politics with Daddy by telephone as we have for years.

“Reagan’s the only one who makes any sense,” he says.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I shout into the receiver that tethers me to the kitchen wall while I do some chore.

“We can’t keep raising taxes. The government can’t do everything for people,” he responds. We go on like this for a while until Daddy says, “I’ll turn you over to your mother.”

“You’ve got to stop,” she says emphatically. “He’s not up to it any more.”

That was our last argument. By the time Ronald Reagan was inaugurated on January 20, 1981, Daddy was dead.

Listening to our new president, Barack Obama, give his somber inaugural address last week, I thought how astounded my parents would be. How did a black man get elected to the highest office in the land?

I can imagine telling Daddy that we owe it to the failed politics that serve a limited, almost exclusively white, elite; to our foolish judgment that lowering taxes on them and unfettering the markets would lead to unending prosperity, morning in America, as Reagan would have it. And to another president, privileged and protected from the consequences of a lifetime of screw-ups, who thought he could become a hero by starting a war with an already failing dictator.

This set the stage for the election of an engaging young man of enormous self-discipline and a willingness to listen to others while holding onto his own high ideals. I wonder if I could convince Daddy how good this is for our country. There is still plenty of racial prejudice, I would tell him, but it’s less pervasive than it once was, and less able to override our self-interest.

President Obama is right to remind us that his election is only a beginning. It is a very different morning to which we wake than when Reagan took office, but it’s not yet as bad as in 1933 when Franklin D. Roosevelt took the oath for the first time.

No longer do we have the still, haunting images of photographers like Walker Evans. Electronic media make it possible to see and hear the ongoing shock of our new financial reality from those who experience it.

This reality was reflected in two programs I watched last week. One, on PBS’s NOW dealt with the precarious financial situation of people over 50 years old in the retirement economy of South Carolina. The other, on CBS’s Sixty Minutes, dealt with Wilmington, Ohio, a town devastated by the closing of its dominant industry. [I’ve had some difficulty posting the links but both shows have websites you can visit.]

Among the people interviewed were

*a father who lost his son in a helicopter mishap over Iraq and who is now losing the job that supported his extended family,

*a retired teacher and coach who with her disabled daughter got stuck with a sub-prime loan that the bank will not renegotiate or tolerate any late payment,

*a couple in their seventies who have gone back to work at a shipyard rather than loose their home. They got into difficulty after each of them underwent treatment for cancer,

* a woman, losing her job, who has already had to ask her son to withdraw from college,

*two sisters who with their husbands share a home in retirement after huge losses in the stock market. Their adult children are struggling economically, and one couple hasn’t sold its old home as planned because a daughter, a son and a grandchild need a place to live.

NOW reported that one in four bankruptcies belong to people over 55 (compared to 1 in 12 in 1991). This is particularly troubling since people in this group have little opportunity to replace lost jobs and savings. Once again African Americans suffer disproportionately. Even when they qualify for prime rates, they’re twice as likely as white people to have been given a sub-prime mortgage. Some cities are chockablock with “payday” loan operations that charge exorbitant fees to people on limited fixed incomes.

Given the opportunity, I’d thank my dad for his perpetual warning about the dangers of debt. It’s beginning to look as though he was correct that there’d be another depression. But, like so many people, he was wrong about what would cause it. This time, at least, the man in the White House proposes bold action in the face of bad news.

If he and his team get it right, the stimulus package that passed the House yesterday will pass the Senate without too much damage, and we’ll dig out way out of this without destroying the dreams of several generations. But if they can’t, January 20, 2009, will be a day that history will remember as the one when we headed into the storm.