Judy Was Meticulous

My sister suggested a while back that I should write down some of my memories of Judy.  Most of the things that matter the most to me are too trivial and personal, but I do have a million of them.

Throughout our married lives, Judy and I never had an argument about money.  For that matter we rarely even talked about money.  We never made a budget.  We never had a financial plan.  Don't ask me why it worked or how.  It just did.

We always had a joint bank account and never even thought of doing things any other way.  When we married, I was the only one of us who had an account, so we just added Judy's name to it, and that was that.  She wasn't worried.  As she explained it to me, "What's yours is mine, and what's mine is mine."  I think she was joking, but I was never sure.  She liked to keep me off balance.  

Anyway, since I had the account to begin with, I kept up with the money.  Sort of.  Six years later, when we moved to Brownwood, Texas, for me to begin teaching at Howard Payne College, Judy suggested that she take over all the finances.  That was fine with me.  She'd majored in economics in college, and she was great with numbers.  I, on the other hand, was not.

So it came as no surprise to me that she was appalled when she took over and learned that my method of balancing the checkbook was to take the bank statement, write down the amount that the bank said was in the account, and let it go at that.  When she took over, things changed.  She balanced the checkbook every month, down to the penny.  Sometimes things came out right on the very first run-through.  Sometimes they didn't, and Judy would spend whatever time it took to trace down the problem.  Ten minutes?  An hour?  It didn't matter.

She also took over the holding of the checkbook.  We had only one, and it was kept in her purse.  It stayed there for the rest of her life, just as she continued to balance it every single month.  If I wanted to write a check, I had to get the checkbook from the purse or ask her for it if we were out of the house.  

She was the same way with with the credit card statements.  Every month she would match the charge slips, which of course we kept, with the items on the credit card statement.  And I mean every month.  She never took a single month off.  Not ever.

Now everything is online, and we could have checked every transaction every day.  Judy would have nothing to do with that kind of thing.  She didn't trust computers and never learned to use one.  She believed in the old-fashioned methods.  That was just one of the many things I loved about her.

For over forty years I rarely looked at the checkbook, and I never checked the bank balance.  When Angela and Allen went to college, I said, "I don't want to know how much it costs.  Don't tell me.  Just let me know if we go in the red."  We never went in the red, so I guess things went just fine.  I never asked any questions.

Judy paid all the bills and did all the business connected with my writing, not to mention the proofreading.  I still remember the envy that some of my writing friends felt about this when they found out.  As Mary Christian put it once at an MWA meeting in Houston, "I need a Judy!"  

There was only one Judy, though, and she married me.  I was a lucky, lucky guy.