My First Economics Lesson: A Memoir by Devon Pitlor PART ONE There comes a time in every person's life when you start developing a specific vision of your childhood and trying to match it with what you have become in adulthood, and, in doing so, we usually see a huge dissimilarity between what we once set out to be and what we eventually became. We see, as it were, pivotal moments when life could have gone either way and taken us to far different vistas than we now inhabit. For me, the story of how I came to the United States has always seemed as if it merited some degree of reader interest, if only because when it happened, it was the farthest thing from my mind, and now I have already made my life and home here for over a quarter of a century. But I will let that rest for the time being because I do not have access to any readily available wisdom to extract from the tale. What I think I will attempt to unveil in this brief autobiographical sketch is how I became a working economist and have succeeded in this sometimes cheerless business for nearly twenty-two years. No one is born with a fervid interest in economics. That is one thing you can count on. Nor is anyone born with any special sense of economics or a gene that predisposes one to the study of the often arcane firedances of wealth and capital. I was certainly no exception to this. Being an only child of an alcoholic and very blue collar father and a rather indifferent and often psychotically dreamy mother, I grew up in a crowded neighborhood of a midsized European city without any exceptional dispositions of any sort. My family was poor, but we didn't think of ourselves that way. There was always food on the table, and my early years were filled with the inestimable company of a band of kids like myself who relied on one another to fill the material vacuum of our home life. In short, we had no electronic devices, very little television if any, and indoor diversions simply did not exist. Our lives unrolled outdoors in the narrow streets and beside the gloomy industrial canals of my timeworn city. Our lives were intimately wrapped up in each of our separate personalities and in the bravado we exhibited as boys and, of course, in what daily trouble we could get into. Our parents existed only as guardian shadows who intervened only occasionally in our quotidian routines, and then only when they needed us to perform some minor task to help the household, which in my case was rare. I was, for example, called upon each Friday to take the train from my hometown of La Rochelle to about one hundred and seventy kilometers south to Bordeaux in order to retrieve my docker father from whatever alehouse he was haunting, bring him back to my mother in La Rochelle and make sure he was cleaned up and fed enough to re-embark on the Monday train to Bordeaux where he would resume his backbreaking task of unloading fish and produce from the holds of ships carrying goods into France from our far-flung economic client states in the Pacific, South America and Africa. Beyond this weekly task I had limitless hours of unsupervised free time to roam the streets and parks of my ancient city looking for whatever adventure I could either create or which naturally awaited gangs of innocently wayward boys with non-refundable hours on their hands. School in all of its manifestations was likewise only a perfunctory and emotionless task which inspired very little interest in me or in the majority of those I frequented. Unlike the goals of the American system, the schools of my country were designed not to make sure "no child was left behind," but rather that scores of children who did not pass the testing merit gradations each year were indeed siphoned out and redirected

into either labor or trades. Cerebral or professional careers were reserved only for the intellectually elite, the top of the education pinnacle, as it were, and I was incontestably not one of that cadre. My school grades throughout my childhood represented what was often termed "tepid mediocrity," and I was scholastically categorized as "hopelessly average." There was no promise of some shining tenth floor office waiting for me in anyone's spyglasses. Instead, it was going to be obligatory military service (which I did) and some menial position in a minor state function or small, insignificant enterprise. My only assets, therefore, by age fourteen in 1979---a pivotal year in my life, although I did not know it at the time---were in my physical prowess and the fact that I had, by no effort of my own, a face "that pleased young girls and old ladies alike." Or so they said. I was outgoing, curious and affable. Unlike my taciturn parents, I liked to socialize, smile, hear stories and be involved with others. Perennially in trouble at school, I often heard from teachers that I was going to make a great waiter in some caf or brasserie, and for a time I even decided that this was most likely going to be my life's calling. After all, in France, a waiter earns a decent living and no one looks down on the job. Being a waiter was about as professional as I planned to get. It was like a pre-determination or whatever. When somebody tells you what you are good for early in life, you start internalizing it and taking it seriously. Unlike the American children of our times, unlike my own children, neither I nor my comrades were ever encouraged to dream about larger things. Doing one's military service and settling into a mediocre but secure life was always the goal. There was no reason to argue with it. I suppose this simply embodies a different cultural posture than what we know today, especially in the U.S., where kids are encouraged in the better homes to get interested in something rewarding early in life and thereupon develop their latent skills. I was interested in very little at fourteen. Finding adventure, my "gang" and, of course, girls. An obsession with girls always punctuated my youth---but these were girls like us, of our social class, girls that would not require much maintenance, girls that would appreciate being wed to a well-placed waiter working in a lively downtown caf. Like everyone else in my neighborhood, I grew up not in a house per se, but rather in domestic quarters carved into the side of a streetside building which housed not only other families but bakeries, watchmakers, bars, and a fishmarket. The residents of my building and those that adjoined it along the seemingly endless and meandering streets of La Rochelle's old quarter came in all shapes and sizes and ages. Many were old and on pensions and had medals from service in the Maquis or in the Free French Army hanging from their chests at all hours of the day. Many seemed only to be warehoused in their quarters waiting for the final hour to thump. This was another reason that I and my cohorts spent so much time outside. To remain indoors during the daytime hours was considered odd and even perverted to the extreme. But one fine summer day as I was leaving the house (we always called our quarters "houses'), my mother stopped me with a washed-out paint can full of cheap ctes du Rhne wine. She asked me to step around the building to an apartment on the canal side and deliver this wine to an old lady whom I knew only as Madame Vartain, as aged adults did not have first names in those days. This was a rather typical task, especially in France where cheap red wine was considered a necessary component of any meal, a component which we drank with abandon from the earliest memories of childhood onward. Madame Vartain, who had as everyone knew lived through the worst hours of the Occupation and had done some services for the French Army during its absentia in England, was a craggy old relic who hobbled about her apartment with a prosthetic leg which was actually carved out of wood, as was the fashion in the days preceding the war, when the mutilated were as plentiful as sparrows and seemingly every old person, women included, had some limb or organ missing. Madame Vartain had never taken much interest in the kids of the neighborhood either, something that was not expected of old people and would have been an embarrassment for all concerned if they had. As it turned out, Madame Vartain was even older than I thought she was. Her missing leg was the result of some tramway accident following the War of 1914 when

chaos as usual reigned in French cities. Some overly eager young man had accidentally pushed her onto the trolley tracks---and her story ended there. I have always wished it didn't because today I look back on Madame Vartain as someone who must have been seductively veiled and mysteriously beautiful in her youth. Her leg could have been lost, therefore, in some fanciful and romantic manner. She could have at least given me that much. But, alas, she did not. Sometimes the truth is as dry as powdered fish liver on the tongue. So, I am jumping ahead. Yes, I did deliver the wine, and yes, I did allow myself, affable as I was, to engage in a conversation with Madame Vartain. Like all old people, she told me about the war, about the atrocities of the Nazis, about her two dead spouses. I liked stories, so I listened patiently. But in reality, Madame Vartain, who became so influential in my life without intending to be, had very little else to share. The intoxicating spirits of exaggeration had never reached her brain, and her stories always ended like the tramway at a brick barrier, which in her case was simply the last terminal of her recollection of the matters at hand. She had no lessons for the young either, something we often expected with garrulous old people. I suppose I found that aspect something of a relief. What Madame Vartain did have, however and somewhat characteristically, was a cat. It was as I remember it, a very large and unusual cat, having over-long legs and a strange heart-shaped head with enormous and patently sinister eyes that followed your every step around the room and seemed to ruminate on your intentions. In all, the cat was to say the least singular and markedly different enough for me to ask Madame Vartain what its breed was. Like so many other questions, she dismissed my query at once by telling me that Minou was just a cat...and that was all. So to this day I wonder about the cat, what it actually was, where it came from, what had engendered it. I wish I could say more about that cat because at my age today, I am sure that I have seen pictures of every sort of cat breed that exists on Earth, and Madame Vartain's cat was decidedly none of these. As this is autobiographic not fictional, the provenance of Madame Vartain's cat will of necessity need to remain one of the unresolved mysteries of my youth. I could have simply written: I knew an eccentric old lady with a wooden leg and a strange cat. But all tales and especially autobiographical ones are essentially about the teller--who is in this case me, and I want to develop a little imagery about the atmosphere of Madame Vartain and her cat. So I will continue a bit more with this line of narrative. In the first place, Madame Vartain had awarded her creepy cat with positively the most common name a cat in France during any era can have: Minou. The word itself means "kitty." Secondly, any reader who has made it this far needs to know a little about the maintenance of pets among lower class city dwellers in the Europe of my youth. There was no packaged pet food. Domestic animals in the city either were let outside to scavenge, as was Minou every day, or were fed scraps from the meals of their owners. Occasionally, butchers--especially the ubiquitous bouchers chevalins, whose shops dotted the urban landscape of France in those days---would offer some undesirable trimmings of horse flesh to kids or to families with a dog or a cat. And that is exactly what Madame Vartain wanted me to get for her cat. A few streets away from ours, there was the inevitable horse butchery with its characteristic wooden horsehead nailed over the entrance. All families in the France of my youth occasionally, or sometimes not so occasionally, ate horse meat, and so I knew the butcher and was able to ask him for some scraps of intestines or mouth parts that would not be sold. Several times I performed this task for Madame Vartain, and any French person chancing to read this will yawn no doubt and say "So what?" There was nothing more normal. A kid helping and old lady with her cat, getting the latter horsemeat scraps from a boucherie chevaline. Certainly no big deal. And it wasn't.

Time passed and my continued questions about Minou eventually evaporated into the stone wall of silence with which they were met. I spent a tiny fraction of each week helping Madame Vartain, who borrowed small quantities of salt, pepper and oregano from my mother, and that was that. It did not interfere with the adventurous troublemaking I enjoyed with my friends. In fact, it was nothing. Nothing really to write about. Until one day---and inexplicably I might add---Minou dropped over dead in Madame Vartain's parlor. This was unusual only in that Minou had always struck me as a more than able animal and not one of any appreciable age at all. In fact, I had often thought of Minou as capable of inflicting harm on humans if he had so desired. But now he was suddenly dead. So there she was one morning, Madame Vartain, on her tiny balcony waiting to signal me from the street. She wanted me to bury Minou. Once again, there was seemingly nothing unusual about this, other than the ordinary way of disposing of dead animals in French cities like La Rochelle was to summarily toss their carcasses into one of the canals leading to the port. Dead dogs and cats were recurrently floating on the dark, oily canal waters, and no one thought anything of it. Just another thing about yesterday that was different from today. Etcetera. I went accordingly up to Madame Vartain's apartment and picked up Minou by one of his ultra-long hind legs. He seemed as scary in death as he had in life. His eyes were open and glazed over and his mouth was cracked apart enough to reveal what I always thought was inside it: namely rows of dagger-like teeth and a strikingly thick, orange tongue. He must of have weighed at least eleven kilos too, about twenty-four pounds. Minou was a big cat. Madame Vartain asked me if I would bury her cat in the miniscule flower plot she maintained in the interior courtyard of our building. Unlike the other residents who raised shallots, cabbages and carrots, Madame Vartain grew only flowers, lillies and roses, in her plot. Some of these would have to be moved to dig a hole for Minou, but not being afraid of touching dead cats or any other dead thing for that matter, I took a small shovel out and made a grave for Minou. I covered it over and replaced some of the lillies that had been displaced. Then what happened was exactly this: My relationship, flimsy as it was, with Madame Vartain abruptly ended. Her anomalous cat being dead and buried, she thanked me and said wistfully that "All things have to die" and that she undoubtedly would not be long after Minou. That was, as I recall, in late September of 1979. School had already started back. I was as middling and bored as ever. My trajectory into mediocrity had quietly and predictably resumed. PART TWO I hope that no reader who is familiar with my stories will expect anything bizarre to occur at this point. Remember this is an autobiographical essay, not a work of fiction. Minou will not arise from the grave and terrorize the vieux quartier of La Rochelle. Madame Vartain will not turn out to be a sorceress and mix a potion that will change my life. No, in fact, she did nothing of the kind. She died. And Minou stayed under the dead roses. The next holder of the garden plot would probably never know that an eerie cat was buried beneath the dark black soil. One day in late December of that year, the pompiers-sapeurs of the town simply arrived with a hearse and

took Madame Vartain's remains away and to where I do not to this day know. Funerals are more or less free in France, as are interments, and I heard nothing about the final disposal of what was left of Madame Vartain. All I saw were new residents moving in. And I turned away without much of a thought about the old, peg-legged lady I had spent so many months helping. At fourteen it is easy to turn one's back on death, especially the death of very old people who kept most of their early lives to themselves. I remember noting that Madame Vartain had never paid me for any of my meager services, nor had money ever been discussed or expected. Then one day in January, as powdery snow dusted over the frozen Charente canals and the entire world appeared be as lifeless as Madame Vartain and her cat, the postman knocked at our door and presented my mother with a brown, thus official, envelope from the postal caisse d'pargne, the only bank of choice for poor people. I was indoors at the time, as a veritable hail storm raged in from the Atlantic and all of La Rochelle seemed to have sequestered itself from the ravages of nature. But the mail still went through, and postmen did not deliver just any mail by hand. This had to be something important. My first thought was that my father was dead. As it turned out, the news was even more shocking than that. My father had his entire life been on a collision course with death, which eventually overtook him at an early age, so his death---although sad-would have not been as recondite as the contents of the envelope. Madame Flicit Vartain, esteemed veteran of the Occupation and the Free Citizens' Force of the Dpartement de Charente-Maritime had through her last testament willed me, Dvon Pitlor age 14, the sum of NF 2,500---or about $500 US by today's exchange. In 1980, this was an incredible sum!! French law did not give either property or money rights to minors under sixteen, so it was up to my mother to claim the money for me or as they said then "in my name." Here is a point in my story where I have to make a rather unusual observation about both of my parents. Unlike so many others, my parents were genuinely unconcerned about money. In effect, they had all they wanted or aspired to. After calling our family "poor" for so long, I might shock the reader with this revelation. Certainly the money could have been used to buy some luxuries for the family, but, no, my parents were just not that way. I can almost go as far as to say they didn't care. My father had his drinks and his tobacco. My mother had her spices, red wine and a tidy kitchen. That was all they wanted. At fourteen, the money, all 2,500 nouveaux francs of it, was mine. It was left to me by a murky old woman with an opaque past whom I hardly knew. Later that week after the weather cleared, my mother, taking one of her rare departures from the house, accompanied me on the tram to the local postal bank, opened a free account in my name, undersigned her own, shrugged her shoulders and said "It's yours." Both of my parents were so blithely unintrusive in my life that neither ever as much as asked me what I planned to do with the money. Likewise, my friends. It is hard to describe, but money just didn't seem that important then. The decision of how to spend, or even whether to spend, the money was mine and mine alone. I believe that there are many details in any autobiographical account that need to be either passed over quickly or skipped altogether, so I will dispense with the many schemes I concocted in my head for the disposal of my sudden fortune. I was basically a non-materialist, so the thought of buying things just did not loom that largely in my mind. Clothes, for example, meant nothing in the La Rochelle of my youth. You could impress no one with clothes, especially new clothes. Really cool kids, like I fancied myself to be, wore old and torn clothes. Again, something which is much different, I suppose, than today.

Likewise a new bike or even motor scooter did not tempt me. Even at fourteen I had a nostalgic connection with the old Bcane I had ridden since age ten. Spending money on my friends for trivial things was only something that would have at the time driven a wedge between me and them. I would be showing off, and nothing was more hated among us boys than a frimeur or show-off. In fact, I needed to discuss my money as little as possible with my friends out of fear of losing them. In short, the 2,500 NF remained in the postal savings bank without interest (as was the policy of French savings banks) until just before my fifteenth birthday in April. Adventures, fun times, girls and all the grandeur of early teen-agerie surrounded me. Behind it all loomed the inescapable fact that I had a magot of available cash in a nearby bank. Hard as it may be to understand, I even dreaded going by the bank because the money forced on me a kind of obligation to think and be imaginative, and when it came to spending, I simply had no imagination or knowledge of what to do. As I write this, I realize how stupid it may sound today. I should have bought something...maybe something for my family. But that just didn't cross my radar. I can't explain it any better than that. In time, I even came to resent the existence of the money. Of course many things were suggested to me, and I won't go into all of them here. One girl at school, for example, told me that the money was willed by the dead cat Minou who was actually a sorceress in feline disguise and that I should give it immediately to a charity. Another friend of mine told me that I should offer it to one of the relief foundations in France which were coping with the burden of the thousands of penniless pieds-noirs who had lost everything when Algeria gained its independence and they were forced to flee their homeland with only the rags on their backs. Still another told me that I should run away to Monte Carlo and try to gamble in the famous casino under a false name and disguise. All of it was stupid. One day in April just before my birthday, I was passing down the Avenue des Remparts and chanced to walk by the local branch of Crdit Agricole, one of France's largest banks. An absolutely stunning female employee was placing a sign in the window which announced a possible---note possible---annual interest return of ten percent on market share bonds of NF 2,500 or more. 2,500, I remembered, was exactly what I had, and I had already learned in school how to calculate percentages. It was, unfortunately, all that I had learned. The Bourse de Paris, the national stock market, was a total mystery to me, but the pretty woman and the astounding ten percent stuck in my mind. My thought was that I needed to get rid of my money more than exercise any noble notions about saving. And so, accompanied by my mother, I rid myself of the loathsome cash and bought a mixed portfolio of stocks on deposit in the sort of huge bank that intimidated people of my own social class. The filthy lucre was gone in my opinion. Put away until much, much later when I could decide what to do with it. The banker who took my cash assured me via my mother that I had made a wise decision...in fact much wiser than any lad of fourteen he had ever seen. To me it was a kind of cop out for my lack of imagination. Money willed to me for burying a cat. Money willed to me for no good reason at all by someone I didn't even know. The final episode of this story is that, while I walked out of the lobby of Crdit Agricole with a feeling of relief in that I was no longer any richer or any better than my comrades, things were soon to change. I was soon to change. By the time I reached age sixteen in 1981, my outlook on life and money had drastically changed. I wanted a motorcycle, which is quite normal for French kids, and I wanted it then and there. There was as usual a girl involved. For the first time in over a year, my thoughts turned to the cash legacy of Madame Vartain, squatting needlessly in some dusty bond holdings that I didn't even understand. I needed my money at once. I needed a Vespa at once.

But the times had changed. Of course, it may be hard to explain this in America, but 1981 marked a drastic change in French politics. For the first time in history, France was about to elect a Socialist president in the person of Franois Mitterand, who would replace the ultra conservative Valry Giscard d'Estaing, and cause a temporary panic among investors and financiers all around the country. Mitterand, much to the delight of my Communist parents and neighbors, would even invite members of the International Communist Party into his government---something that was greatly feared in all financial circles. But none of this meant anything to me at sixteen. I had a totally Socialist background (and remain Socialist to this day) so the forthcoming election of Mitterand was a supposedly joyful event. Except in the banks. Mitterand would end up nationalizing multiple industries---and finally, all in all, France would emerge stronger and better for his long and troubled presidency. But that is another story. What happened to me was that in early May of 1981, now a legal adult, I strode with cocky confidence into my neighborhood branch of Crdit Agricole ready to extract my NF2,500 plus the ten percent ("possible"...remember?) interest that it had to have gained by this time. But due to the social crisis and the fear of both Communists and Socialists coming into the government, bond and stock rates had dramatically fallen all over Europe. I stood at a dreary zinc counter at the back of the bank as a dour-faced lady showed me that not only had I not gained the (unpromised) ten percent, but that my holdings had dropped over twenty percent in face value. How could such a thing be true? I was dumbfounded. "Fluctuations in the market," the woman said mechanically. "Didn't anyone explain that to you? Your portfolio is worth today exactly 1910 nouveaux francs. It may rise again tomorrow, but I doubt it. The Socialists are taking over..." I didn't give a damn about the Socialists. I wanted my money. I had no idea that the value of stocks could drop in such a short time or because of drab political events which I felt hardly touched my life. "Young man," the woman continued, "you need to stay better informed. Check your money every day. Explore your stock options. Look at what is actually in your portfolio." It was, of course, the first time that any such notions ever dawned on me. I believe that readers can now see where this is going. I became aware of a whole world of finance and fiduciary manipulation that I was blithely ignorant of previously. I even started, albeit slowly, to study investments and the grander movements of world money. I learned that great fortunes were made and lost on the Bourse and on all stock exchanges around the world every day and indeed every hour. In effect, I became conscious of economics. I learned that money is indeed a responsibility, something to be watched and studied and moved if necessary. Nothing came from inactivity. Nothing came from ignorance. In fact, poverty, true poverty was almost always born of ignorance, comfortable as that ignorance may be---and to a selfabsorbed teenager as I was then, the ignorance was indeed sluggishly comfortable. And finally... Anger aside, I began reading portfolio value quotes on my tiny holdings every week. Sometimes I even read them every day. I saw what all investors see: the daily rise and fall of monetary value. And by January of 1982, when my initial anger at my losses finally resolved itself into a calm determination to study the provenance and destiny of money, I noted that Mitterand and his Socialists hadn't done so bad after all. France was well on the way to fiscal healing, and, above all, my stock values had risen far beyond ten percent.

And so I look back after years of working in economics and money exchange and see that crestfallen sixteen year old boy that I once was standing alone in abject shock in the lobby of a huge bank surrounded by adults who didn't know and didn't care about my pain, a boy that just wanted to buy a motorcycle to impress a girl, a boy in worn-out pants and shaggy hair who had just learned one of life's harshest realities in the hardest way possible, which is to say alone and without guidance of any sort. I realized then that I would have to be my own guide in life and I have tried to be ever since. And just as on that day, there have been peaks and troughs to any wealth or non-wealth I may have accumulated. The way of all money. And often I peer back farther through the cloudy window of my memories and see a fourteen year old boy in a tiny flower garden burying a scary, dead cat. Who would have known where and how far that act of commonplace kindness would have taken me? Devon Pitlor -- June, 2012 */*/*/