When you grow up poor, it’s odd to not be that way anymore. To be able to go on a road and around-the-world trip for a year. To just buy something if you want it. It doesn’t seem real sometimes, like someone let you into a club that you really shouldn’t be in.

But I still remember my parents having their crappy car involuntarily-repossessed. Looking for change in the couch. How empty the refrigerator was.

If my dad had not been a mechanic and able to trade his time and labor for things we needed, I don’t know how we would’ve made it when I was very young.

A few weeks ago my partner I were driving past a car dealership where sits a gorgeous blue Aston Martin. I have no real interest in Aston Martins or having a car that expensive, but I do enjoy looking at it.

I said jokingly something like, “Maybe instead of the trip I’ll just buy that.”

And my partner – who also grew up poor and is also unused to not being that way– said, “I don’t know anyone who can afford a car like that.”

I smiled and said, “You’re sitting next to someone who can afford a car like that.”

“Oh. Ha. Yeah,” she replied.

When I bought a car in cash for the first time, I felt like I was pulling some kind of caper. Like, “Who gave me this money? What were they thinking?”

There are some parts of being poor you never get over, and never leave you, not really. Sometimes it feels like I could wake up in a ratty roach-infested trailer again in the inaptly-named Paradise Village and this will have all been a dream.

Nice dream, though.