Millions of people around the globe have been gasping from a daily dose of headlines suggesting that just maybe we are once again in the grip of the dreaded recession or worse, the return of the historic depression that descended on the world with the stock market crash of 1929.

Our spirits have been jounced up and down till we have scrambled brains trying to cope with the daily good news/bad news dose emanating from Wall Street.

I was nine when this happened before. A barefoot boy. Eighth from a family of ten. We were living in a rented two-story house in Portland. The roof leaked so bad that it was a regular routine to get out the kitchen kettles and place them around the first floor to catch the drips. We didn't worry about the upstairs bedrooms. We just moved the beds to a dry spot.

Dad was a salesman who most days rose early, put on a tie, polished his black shoes, ate some oatmeal and when he didn't have a ramshackle Willys Overland, or a Franklin Air Cooled or a Buick Touring, walked a half mile to the streetcar line on Union Ave in Portland. Destination, downtown.

Much of my youth, he returned at about five p.m. He was a salesman or a stock and bonds broker. On the weekend he stayed home. And read books.

When he had a car he sometimes took the family on Sunday drives to Oregon beaches.

Sometimes he took me with him on sales call around the state. He had a gifted tongue and would find rich dentists or doctors and match them up with inventors.

Sometimes, we got help from welfare, the Portland police, the Elks club, neighbors, school food drives, and the Mallory Ave Christian church. None of us ever got in trouble with the law and we all had to earn our own popsicle money.

I don't ever remember being an unhappy kid. Sometimes hungry, but never short of feeling loved.

Both parents filled my head with words to live by. Even Dad practiced the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule.

A depression? What did we do about it?

We lived near the railroad tracks and saw lots of hoboes. They showed me how to walk the tracks and pick a weed called brock. Mom made salad out of it. One showed me how to make mulligan stew in a coffee can if I brought him vegetables from our small garden.

We did a lot of wild-blackberry picking.

We hung around the hog ranch and helped ourselves to the fodder corn planted for the hogs to eat. When Elsbeth was a girl in Germany people never ate corn on the cob.

We pushed our go-cart to the humane society each night and got a free bottle of raw milk from my classmate whose dad ran the place.

We scavenged the trash bins behind the drug store on Killingsworth, sometimes finding stale chocolates.

We piled wood for 10 cents a cord and sometimes helped grown ups on one end of an idiot whip crosscut saw for a nickel.

We always sold apples from our Gravenstein apple tree for 50 cents a box. No charge for the worms.

We fished a lot in the slough near the slaughterhouse. Mom cooked up lots of sunfish, crappies, and catfish.

At school, Mrs. Wilson came down to the cafeteria every day and bought me a half pint of milk with her nickel.

Rupert Reedy whose Dad had a job, sometimes gave me his peanut butter and jelly samich at lunch.

Millicent Solberg sometimes gave me her orange. That was something big.

I sold magazines, and perfume door to door and earned a potato gun. You jabbed the barrel into a potato and it shot a plug at other guys. That didn't last. Dad caught me in his garden.

Best money came from rolling my eyes to amuse my sisters' boyfriends. Two bits, but I had to get lost right away.

I guess I learned that if you are resourceful you can survive a depression. But I hope nobody asks me to roll my eyes. If they do, they better have a roll of quarters