In the 1960s when we borrowed $15,000 to build our dream house -- modest dreams were in vogue then -- I lay awake nights for weeks worrying about a $103.20-a-month mortgage. Eventually, sleep returned.

But the late-night insomnia returned recently after news reports that something called AIG was about to go bottom-up. AIG? Wasn't that the investment company that N.C. State University used for funneling monthly deductions from my wife's paycheck, for decades, to provide a nest egg for her retirement? Furthermore, didn't my stockbroker once mention that some of my own retirement savings were under AIG's protectorate?

So instead of dreaming the "American dream" of a secure and worry-free retirement, I lay there wondering how I would pay my bills if a $700 billion meltdown of the economy left me destitute.

Born in the Great Depression, I've lived with the childhood memory of my farmer father coming home from the Winston-Salem tobacco market and saying to my weeping mother, "It only brought nine cents a pound."

As a consequence of those dire times, my inheritance consisted primarily of an abiding, perhaps abnormal, fear of debt, causing me to cast a cautious eye on credit cards and indulgences that I couldn't see my way clear to pay for.

In time, I relaxed a bit and, like many of you, managed to educate the kids and put aside something for the future, not a great fortune, or even a small fortune. Journalists and teachers rarely amass fortunes.

So, friends, at whom should we direct our current frustration and anger? There's enough blame to go around.

• Big Business greed and corruption that created more and more billionaires along with more and more people at the poverty level.
• A nationwide epidemic of free spending self-indulgence, goaded on by our government and irresponsible lending institutions, and a national sneer at the old-fashioned "pay as you go" philosophy replaced by a "You can have it all! And now!" obsession.

So, more than in any time in recent years, millions of us are sleepless in America, imagining the reality of walking in the shoes of the poor among us. The very thought of those shoes pinch painfully.

Poet John Donne once wrote: "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, the bell tolls for thee."

Ah, yes, this nightmarish financial crisis tolls for thee -- and me. Even the babe in the womb.

And gives us more to worry about than who will win the Big Game next Saturday or where the students at Broughton High will park their BMWs.

Delbert: In memoriam

Unlike Carl Sandburg's fog, which comes on little cat's feet, Delbert would come in at 6 a.m. on fat Basset feet the size of lily pads, his toenails clicking loudly across the hardwood floor. If we feigned sleep, he brutally brayed us out of bed.

My granddog and I long enjoyed an adversarial relationship. When a puppy, he would sink his needle-sharp teeth into my ankles with the same enthusiasm that he chewed the legs of the dining room table. I wearied of his bellowing howls when the doorbell rang or a distant dog barked.

Once when he was young and fleet of foot and I was dog-sitting, he escaped through the front door. Desperate to collar him before his family returned, I wandered the streets yelling, "Delbert! Delbert!"

"Delbert out again?" a neighbor asked, to which I, surprised, said, "You know Delbert?"

"Everybody knows Delbert," she said with a smile. "We love Delbert."

Who can explain our culture's unrealistic affection for pets, be they cats, parakeets, gold fish or guinea pigs?

Not even poet Rudyard Kipling could make sense of it:

Our loves are not given,

but only lent

At compound interest of

cent per cent ...

So why_in Heaven

(before we are there)_

Should we give our hearts

to a dog to tear?

On our last visit, Delbert was unusually affectionate, padding after me from room to room, gazing up with big, baleful eyes, pleading for a pat. While I worked at the computer, he draped his heavy weight across my feet under the desk. I let him lie there until my feet became numb from his weight.

I think Delbert was trying to tell me something. I think he was trying to tell me goodbye. Delbert, 11, is sorely missed.

Don't tell

The recent end-of-time column prompted this from Bob Daniels of Wake Forest:

A young man just out of Bible college went to the North Carolina mountains to convert sinners.

Encountering an old man standing by his mailbox, he asked, "Sir, are you ready for Judgment Day?"

"When is it?" the old guy replied.

"It may be tomorrow or it may the next day," the young evangelist replied.

"Please don't tell my old lady. She'll want to go both times," the oldster sighed.

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