I had to replace my laptop a little while ago. The old one put up a good fight, but after two years, a thousand articles, two drafts of a novel, and two books of compilations, it finally surrendered to the inevitable. For a hundred dollars I couldn't have asked any more from it, but this still meant my wife and I would have to share our desktop.

She has often said she thinks what I do is important, for a lot of reasons, and I appreciate that. However, that doesn't mean I'm not going to feel guilty about monopolizing the computer and preventing her from doing the things she enjoys doing. This meant there was a certain amount of urgency to find me another computer.

Not so long ago, a friend of ours offered us an old tower to use as back up for music and graphic files. I figured if the offer was still available, it would make a good stopgap until I could find another affordable laptop. I called our friend and she said no problem. She'd have it ready in a day for me; she wanted to completely dump the machine's hard drive.

Ten minutes later she called me back and said, "Let me buy you a laptop. I've got some extra money and I can afford "x." To say I was taken aback and grateful has to be the understatement of the year. This is a person whose finances, up until a year ago, were so bad she almost lost her house. Through some fortune and luck, she found herself solvent and with money to spare.

As she put it, one of the great things about having extra money is that she is in a position to be able to do things like buy me a new used laptop without having to even think about it. What I find amazing is that a person whose existence has been fairly hand-to-mouth for years — a single mom raising three boys — is able to understand the concept of extra money, while people who make thousands of dollars a week can't.

The money she spent on my laptop would have bought food for a month for her and the one son who still lives at home, or she could have just frittered it away on things. I wouldn't have begrudged her a penny of it because she'd been so long without money to spend on herself. She had everything she wanted and needed for herself, having given each of her sons money to do with as they felt, and that was enough for her.