CRYING OVER SPILLED MILK

My youngest son Andrew was over for Filipino breakfast. He enjoys rice and fried eggs with spam, corned beef or Chinese sausage. It's all high-cholesterol, but he only has it when he visits. He also likes Chocolate-e or Jasmine tea.

While eating breakfast, he said he told his friend Shariff about the time I spilled milk in San Francisco and cried. I've forgotten the thread of our conversation which led to his mentioning this. He likes to talk to me about family matters, my "past" if you will. Being the youngest of three boys, his childhood was different from the childhood of his oldest brother Chris. Perhaps Andrew finds this difference intriguing or amusing. His own childhood was more prosperous, unlike the childhood of Chris who had to put up with parents starting out.

His mention of spilled milk brought back the incident as if the years had not passed. I was 22 years old, a young mother, and my husband, infant child and I lived in the Mission District in San Francisco. We were poor - there is no other word to describe our condition. My husband had just finished law school and was studying for the bar; we had an infant son; we lived in a low-rent one-bedroom apartment right across the Levi Strauss factory in the Mission District. My husband worked in the post office at night, while he studied for the bar in the daytime. I worked for temporary agencies, doing secretarial, clerical jobs.

The thing is that even though we didn't have a lot of money, we actually didn't feel poor. It was (as I told Andrew) an adventure; it was temporary; it was not a dead end situation; we knew things would get better. I told Andrew it was actually fun to budget, to count money and not overspend for food - $25 a week was our grocery bill. Bread was only 18 cents a loaf; rent was $125 a month; I earned $425 a month - it sounds so long ago, now that I write this.

Before this "adventure" in San Francisco, I had been a UCLA student with money coming in from my mother, and I didn't think twice about shopping daily in Westwood Village for clothes, purses, shoes, whatever I wanted.

Obviously things changed when I married a law student and we had an infant son and had to make ends meet. The spilled milk incident happened one day after shopping in the supermarket and I got back to the apartment with several bags of groceries. As I was unlocking the main door to the apartment building, one of the bags fell, and down fell the carton of milk. The carton broke and milk ran all over the ground. I remembered staring at the white liquid trickling down the gutter. Suddenly it was all just too much - our poverty, the penny-pinching, and here was this milk wasted, wasted, wasted; and I just broke into tears.

I don't remember what happened afterward. I probably recovered, picked up the bags of groceries, brought them up to our apartment, and carried on. But the incident was remembered because of the saying, "Don't cry over spilled milk," which I did. At least for a short while, I did.