the last book I ever read (The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas, excerpt nine)

from The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas:

On the phone, I told my mother that we were assembling a portfolio for a loan application.

I can’t believe it, my mother said. I would never have expected it of the two of you.

Our families had a foundational myth of me and Mama that was different from our own. My mother believed that our love for each other had something to do with the way that we tolerated each other’s mess and procrastination, even enabled it. For my father it was the fact that we lived so modestly, with a great tolerance for discomfort. He couldn’t understand why our couch was so narrow, our bathroom so cramped, our meals so meager. For Manu’s parents, we were united in our love of old things. The first time they visited us in the city, soon after we’d moved into our apartment—which we’d furnished with a farm table, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, and a record player—they said that the place was like the village homes of a century ago. It wasn’t a compliment. To them, old things did not have the charm they did for us. Aged objects pointed to hardship, to ways of life they did not need to romanticize, because they had experienced them firsthand. Their own home resembled the lobby of a three-star hotel.