That all prices rise is just a fact of life

How am I dealing with rising prices? I started driving “legally” at age 16, and had to put gas into my mother’s 1949 Oldsmobile if I wanted to drive it. One day a week, I drove her car to school and took two of my friends with me. They each paid me a dime. I pulled into the gas station and the

cheerful attendant would run over to my car, greet us and ask “The usual?” then put one gallon of gas into the car. He proceeded to check the air in the tires and wash the windshield. I’d hand him a quarter and he’d give me back six cents in change.

Yes, back in the mid-1950s I paid 19 cents for a gallon of gas. Over the years, I’ve watched the price of gas rise — from that 19 cents to the current price of upwards of $5 a gallon in some places. Has this caused me to stop driving? No. I’ve accepted the price of gas because I want to drive.

Also back in the late 1950s, I remember my mother sending me to the store to buy a loaf of bread, which at that time cost 23 cents. Milk was delivered to the house and left on the doorstep. Cost? 64 cents a gallon. Today a gallon of whole milk costs about $3.75. Did the increase in prices stop me from drinking milk or eating bread? No. I want the bread and milk, so I pay the price and accept it.

In 1961, I bought my first house in Florida, one that had just been built. It cost $6,800. In 1967, I moved from Florida to San Diego and bought a house, this time an older house, for $13,500 — almost twice the amount that I had paid for that new house in Florida just six years earlier.