When we become poorWhen we become poor we will never go to Turkey, but it will not matter much as we have already been there. When we become poor we will have less clothing, but even now we cannot buy the most necessary things as we have no time to see to it. When we become poor we will not have the money to throw any food in the cart at the nearest supermarket or to dine out in a cafe paying through the nose, but we will have time to go to the bazaar to choose fresh and cheap groceries. When we become poor we will always have time: we will be able to watch the sunset, to chat on the phone for a long time, to read books not on the double in the metro, but sensibly, at home on the couch or even maybe in the strict silence of a reading room at the library. When we become poor we will not drive for entire days about the city on business inhaling the exhaust of huge trucks on the left and on the right, we will be able to grow squash at leisure around our old dacha, to listen to birds' song, to walk, to bathe in the evenings, breathing the fragrance of grasses and flowers near the river, learning of its approaching from the enthusiastic laughter and splashing of children by the sandy bank. When we become poor we will have time for the friends who are forgotten now, we will get together with them as previously, we will drink beer, cheap wine or, if worse comes to worst, tea, we will talk about everything in the world and if the light of subconscious dreams and hopes does not appear in our eyes again, then the warm light of affection that we feel for each other will. When we become poor we will dedicate our lives to our grandchildren, we will be able to stay with them, to feed them, to read good books aloud to them, to give them everything we have not given to our children who are captured now by Internet and MTV. When we become poor our home will be filled again with valueless mementos which like things our grandmothers accumulated will be precious not because of their cost, but by the memories of the circumstances in which they came to us and then our home will find its character lost in the conventionalism of "Euro-renovation". When we become poor it will be probably not so scary, as it seemed to us at the beginning of our unending race whose failure will be perhaps more dear to us than victory, and continuing our struggle we will tell each other fearlessly, but with a smile, as if dreaming about something desirable, but rather vain: "When we become poor".
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