We thought about driving to Mississippi last week to meet my 89-year-old mother and her posse--Aunt Lois and Uncle Ken, and Paula and Gerald, who might as well be family--in Waveland. We ended up staying home because our usual dog-sitter was busy and life closed in the way life tends to do now, with errands breeding errands.

She didn't seem disappointed. She'd never say it, but she might have preferred us waiting. This wasn't their first trip to Waveland, and by now the whole group has a system. They rent an Airbnb on the Gulf Coast. Responsibility for each night's dinner rotates. The men play golf; the women repair to the casino.

I called Mom the morning after she got home to check on the state of my inheritance. "The whole trip only cost me about $100," she reported.

I told her she could probably pull a double shift at her job at Dollar Tree and make herself whole. She laughed and told me how she'd recently used her American Express card to buy 89 cents' worth of scallions at Aldi after temporarily misplacing her debit card.

My mother has always been careful with money, and there were periods in her life when she had to be. Some branches of the family tree handled prosperity less successfully than others. Money drifted away. So did opportunities.

But Mom is comfortable enough now to travel, to gamble and return home satisfied she has entertained herself.

My mother's generation never entirely trusts pleasure. They enjoy themselves with one eye on the ledger. They could spend a week at the Ritz in Paris and come home saying, "Well, breakfast was awfully high, but we split an omelet three mornings."

Her Waveland report carried that same Depression-era........

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