Upstairs Craig and the $15 Loan

My undergraduate roommate, Joel, and I had become fairly friendly with our upstairs neighbor in our off-campus apartment junior year. I don’t know about Joel, but I thought it was fun to have an acquaintance who had a real job. Everyone else we knew was a student. Craig seemed much more of a grownup. Passing on the stairs, Joel and I would complain about problem sets in our “Non-Euclidean Geometry and Convexity” and five-page papers for our “Hawthorne, Twain, and Melville” courses. Craig would complain about his low paying job.

We were hardly surprised thereby, when Craig knocked on our door one Tuesday afternoon. After the obligatory pleasantries–Joel and I had an exam coming up; Craig was annoyed with his boss–Craig talked about his financial situation: it was dire. Craig owed money to a number of his friends, he was behind on his rent and–this is why he had come downstairs to talk to us–the electric company was going to turn off his power if he didn’t get over to their office within the next two hours.

He needed $15.

It is perhaps noteworthy to put the dollars in context. Minimum wage was $1.60 an hour in 1976. Fifteen dollars therefore represented a little more money than Joel or I could earn in a full day of work grading math papers. Fifteen dollars was also a little less than what it cost to feed us for a full week. A pound of hamburger or a pound of cheese were both about a dollar and a half. I’m no economist, but I think $15 in my college days would be about $150 today.

Craig swore up and down that he would pay Joel back on Friday, that he only needed the money for three days, that he was going to get paid and would give Joel the $15 first thing after work on Friday afternoon. I remember the phrase “You have my word as a friend” being repeated.

Joel loaned Craig the $15. Needless to say, Craig used the money to buy a keg of beer and have some friends over. It is now 37 years later and I think it is safe to assume that Craig will not pay back the $15 that he owes to Joel.

My buddy, Joel, is now long since out of law school, has three grown children, and is coming up on his fourth decade of marriage to the “girl of his dreams.” Though far apart geographically, Joel and I still chat a couple of times each year. The subject of “Upstairs Craig and the $15 Loan” comes up now and again.

For years and years the message of this story was, “How could we have been so dumb?” Of course, Craig was the worst of bad credit risks. He already owed money to everybody he knew. We should have known he had no intention–certainly no ability–to pay back the $15.

Over time though, the subtext has evolved. Now when we talk about Craig and the $15 loan, Joel and I have a different view. Joel is still the same sweet guy he was in the mid-70s, generous to a fault. But he is in a different financial position. He is now a successful attorney in New York, not a starving college student taking public transportation to the grocery store trying to feed himself on under ten buck a week. Joel now gets asked for loans or all kinds, loans in the $15,000 range.

As a result of Craig’s thoughtful lesson learned all those years ago, Joel is better able to discern a good credit risk from a young man who is likely to invest in beer.

What’s the take away for loving parents trying to bring up healthy kids in this unhealthy world? It’s hard to argue for allowing our children to use bad judgment. It’s hard to lecture to a room full of concerned adults about allowing our children to fail. Yet it is the small failures when they are young that inoculate against the larger failures later.

“But if I don’t do his homework for him then he’ll fall behind and he won’t get into a good college” opines the mother of an eighth grader. To which a response might be, “Honey, if you’re doing homework for a 15-year-old, admission to a good college is the least of your worries.”

Many alcoholics have an enabler in their past, someone who softened the blow, rescued them from suffering the consequences of their actions. We can’t force our children to be successful in school any more than we can force the alcoholics in our lives to stop drinking. What we can do is allow them to find their own way to success.

This unattractive lesson for parents might be stated as: The less you do for your children, the more they will be able to do for themselves. Or, our children can’t learn from their mistakes if we never allow them to make any.