My grandfather planted pecan trees he never lived to eat from. He knew it when he put them in the ground. When I was a boy I thought that was a sad thing. Now I think it was the wisest thing he ever did, and I have come to see the same wisdom in the men who have done very well in this country.
The wealthy are patient. That is the first thing to understand about them, and it is the thing their critics never understand. A working man is paid on Friday and taxed on Friday. The money is gone before it reaches his hand. The wealthy man does not live that way. He holds. He waits. He lets a thing grow, and he pays on it when the time is right for him, and for all I know, if he is patient enough, the time never comes at all. He simply hands it to his children, and the bill goes into the ground with him.
I want to be honest about something. I do not understand how most of it works. I imagine there are ways to call a man’s pay something other than pay, and ways to hold a thing until what is owed on it quietly goes away. I have never seen the inside of those rules, and I do not need to. I trust that a man with that much money understood them, and I trust that the people who wrote them understood him.
If the rules were written with the help of the very people who use them, I do not know why that is supposed to bother me. Who else would write them? You do not ask a man who has never owned a boat to write the rules for the marina. You ask the boat owners. They know the water. They know where the shallow places are, and they know how to mark them so that only the right kind of boat gets through.
My own paycheck is taxed before I see it. There is no waiting for me, no holding, no clever arrangement. I used to resent that, back when I was younger and more inclined to complain. I have come to see it as a mercy. I am spared the temptation. A man who cannot wait does not have to worry about waiting too long.
That is why I will vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall. I want those rules left with the men who wrote them. The other side seems to want them rewritten so the patient pay on the same Friday I do, and I would not wish my Fridays on anybody.
There is a lesson in all this for the young. Do not envy the man who pays later. Learn from him. Plant your trees. Hold what you can. And if it turns out you cannot hold anything, because the bills come on Friday too, then at least admire the ones who can. Admiration costs nothing, and it is good for the character.
Patience is a virtue. I have just never had the means to practice it.
D. M.