DINA THE RECESSION AND ME

The start of the recession came with a lesson. One that didnt let me buy into the hype that we were gonna go through the most difficult time in our history. I still don't buy it. You see during the time when every news broadcast was moaning over how bad things were becoming, a little girl was gearing up to teach me a thing or two about what life had to offer if I was willing to pay attention.

The building I live in houses five apartments on each floor for a total of twenty on my side and another twenty across the courtyard. Im not telling you this for you to find where I live Im telling you so that you understand just how many people this little girl of no more than nine or ten was able to convince that there was no recession where her business is concerned!!!

Dina is the middle of three girls. Her older sister a more quiet and shy young girl was maybe two years older and the younger is now just turning two. Dina was always in trouble, even before her younger sister came along and it was constant! It seemed there was never anything that gave her, or her parents, or her and her parents peace at any given time (heck there still isn't but i digress).

I overheard a huge fight on my way in from work and Dina and her mother in and out the apartment were trying to come to an agreement. A few days later a sign was on the door. Now this sign was made on the same construction paper that we all used in elemantary school. Yeah, you know the one that came in all the colors and fade with the sun or the semester or in the back of the car or sometimes its seemed if you stared at it too hard!

Well it was on this paper that there was a primitive drawing and writing denoting "Dina's Flower Shop". Also included on this sign was the special 'touch' of the baby sister who seemed to have been set loose with the marker pen. On the floor in front of the apartment was a supermarket sized paperbag, a dish towel, a cardboard box top, that also said 'Dina's Flower Shop' and a list of the flowers all priced at 5 cents.
Everything was neatly off to the side but then I noticed that every evening she would kneel in front of the door with her little 'store'. Her little flower shop was opened for business when the height of the so-called recession was in full swing! Yes this little nine maybe ten year old opened a business February/March 2009!

The biggest companies in the country were closing doors and asking the government for help!Sarah knelt quietly every evening in front of that apartment door and hands folded in her lap waited for the business to come to her! Now I coming from wall street every evening is shaking my head in disbelief as day in day out I see her there! I start to assume this is just to keep her butt quiet because for one thing she was OUTside the apartment and if you heard them sometimes, you knew that suited them just fine. Yeah they love her but a child like that is a handful if you dont understand their personality.

Sorry I digress again.

Anyway it just so happened one Sunday, I'm doing my laundry and my husband comes down with me and I ask him if he has any change. Realizing the tenacity of this young lady at a time when everybody else was crying 'woe is me' I thought I would contribute to her business and to my own sense of keeping the hope alive. Lets face it, I probably needed it more than her to keep my own sense of what was going on at the time. Doom and gloom, car industry to go bankrupt,all of them, AIG, Madoff was just becoming headline news.

Well my husband had no change and so I decided I would just use the dollar and as I handed it to her I thought who (not me) is gonna ask a kid for change. She allowed me to have a selection of 5. Now remember folks, its 5 cents a flower and as I took from her collection I felt guilty taking more even though I was entitled to TWENTY. Yes, I was intimidated by this cute, little unassuming spitfire (is that an oxymoron), who happily took my dollar. Now we were both happy, well I was out some change but it was to a good cause right?!

You bet! The good cause was to teach me a lesson. You see as I took my flowers Dina pulled a little box from under her little make shift cardboard box counter top. She then took this box, opened it and POOF!!!!! Do you remember those snake in a can thing, you would unscrew the top and POOF a snakey like thing would POOF out?! Yeah folks, how about dollar bills. No 5 cent jingle in this girl's business it was all about silent money during the recession for her.

Now, Im not saying that things were not serious, that the failing banks, the mortgage crisis, the insurance foibles, and the auto industry crisis were not real issues confronting us. Indeed the news screamed such horrors who would have thought we would even be breathing a sigh of relief (however small) now. But it made me step back and think about what we believe to be and what actually is. Is it really as serious or are we so amped up by the information given to us we become repositories instead of thinkers. Do we allow our perception of a situation or a deemed crisis to overshadow our sense of hope or opportunity so that we see none.

In the media, we are given an inordinate amount of information of which we are to take in, sort out, make sense of, use what we need, discard the rest to be fed more before we have a chance to look up.

This media however is no longer the TV with 100 stations, its hundreds of stations and thousands when you realize everyone is now capable of having their own TV and radio station with a following. And here in lies the interesting dicotomy of when do we really seek out to make that intelligent decison for ourselves and not just rely on some pundit or media hog's idea of what a recession is as defined by them or as defined by litte Dina!