What is wealth?

Wealth
Five boys came to the door this evening, four accompanying one who was selling candy for his mom’s daycare center so she could raise money to get another place to take in more kids, or maybe just to care for them in a bigger, better way. One of the boys, our next door neighbor, came to the door with the kid selling candy, and the other three stood back at the foot of the front steps, cautious. One of them asked, ‘Are you rich?’ This was followed by nervous laughter from his friends. The neighbor kid, Josh, knows me from the time he was born and is not intimidated by the big house and garden. He turns to his insolent friend and I look up and ask who said that and the other kids point with their eyes and I answer, ‘Not really, I work a lot.’ I wake up thinking of this scene and all the other things I could have said, like ‘I’ve lived here 30 years. Every year we do a little more to the house and gardens, and they grow, like you’ll grow, and mature, and like the garden, if you’re lucky and take care of yourself, you’ll be what others might call rich, but rich is relative.” Or, I could have said, “Rich is elusive. No I’m not rich. I just live here. This is temporary. What you see is not what you get. It’s what I have, my burden, what I carry, what I take with me, what I cannot leave behind until I am too old and weak to carry it, and then it will pass to someone else who will have to shoulder the burden and it will be up to them to carry it. If I had it to do over, I might stay light and fast, like you.”
Or, again, “Understand, all this you see is a liability, the balancing of the books at the end of the day. There are assets, there are liabilities. Do you see what I mean?”

I would like to have seen the looks on their faces as I shared my wealth with them, but at that point I was as poor as I’d ever been and said nothing more than, “No, I’m not. I just work hard.” I handed the kid selling candy a dollar, picked out a chocolate bar with almonds, and when they went away and their voices faded around the corner, I closed the door, softly, and made sure to lock it.