What I know about high finance might fill a specimen cup. Yet even I sensed that something was amiss when I unfolded "USA TODAY" the other morning and read the headline, "Historic Dive on Wall Street". Accompanying the inch-high words was a big, thick, red arrow pointing down. "USAT" added a smaller, helpful line: What You Should Do Now. I didn't bother to scan that part. I know perfectly well what I'm going to do if I lose every penny of my retirement savings: I'm going to live under a bridge, eat canned cat food, and push a shopping cart around while muttering crazily to myself. Don't pity me - at least half of my female friends have the same plan. I won't be lonely. My husband tells me not to worry, that he'll never let me sleep in a refrigerator box, but who are we kidding? I'll be outliving him - how many years with me could any man endure before willing himself to die in his sleep? My therapist used to call this "anticipating catastrophe". I call it "financial planning".

You can buy a load of books these days that will help you analyze your relationship to money. Mine is like being in love with a gorgeous, drunken sailor. When he's around you feel giddy and all things seem possible. But when he leaves, you can't figure out how to contact him, and frankly, you have no clear idea of where he goes or what he does when he's not with you. Substitute "money" for "sailor" and you've got me all figured out. It's not that I have a spending problem. I like my material pleasures as much as the next girl, but I do keep the shopping under control. It's more of a comprehension problem. Like, this 401-K that my company keeps sending me statements about. Where exactly is that money being stored? Am I allowed to visit it? I'm so ashamed of my fiscal stupidity that I signed up for a class a few years back. Do you remember the Walt Whitman poem, "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer"? In it, Walt goes to a lecture given by a famous astronomer, who talks at great length about the math and science of the night sky. But Walt finds himself growing weary and bored until finally, he leaves the lecture hall, goes outside, and looks dreamily up at the stars. Stars, for Walt Whitman, are things of beauty and wonder, not of charts and measurements. My experience at "Investing for Women" was similar. After a couple of hours of municipal bonds, I sneaked out, bought a Snapple, and sat on the grass imagining all that I'd do if I had a million dollars. Pondering the wonder of things is lovely, but it doesn't yield concrete results. Whitman never built a spaceship, and with my willingness to pay a buck nineteen for a pink lemonade, I haven't built a fortune. Still, in my truest heart, I'd rather feel a kinship, however tenuous, with Walt Whitman than with Warren Buffet.

Relations between women and money have always been uneasy. It wasn't all that long ago that women were largely considered property - and in some parts of the world still are. Even today, at the dawn of the 21st century, we're uncomfortable when a woman's income outstrips that of her husband. Material ambition is thought less attractive in a female; that mantra of the 1980's, "Greed is good", doesn't work when the greedy party is a girl. We discourage women in ways that are both subtle and overt from displaying too much interest in money. We label Anna Nicole Smith, the pneumatic young widow of an ancient Texas billionaire, a golddigger. We read in the best-selling book, The Surrendered Wife, that the only appropriate way to handle marital finances is to turn them over to the husband, regardless of which spouse is more comfortable or qualified to manage the books. Many of us still encourage our daughters not to become doctors or stockbrokers, but to marry them. In a perfect world, we might be able to pretend that thinking about money is a terribly unfeminine pursuit. Here in the real world, the unfortunate reality is that the majority of our poor are women and children. That's where not understanding money gets us.

The women in my family lived very traditional lives for the most part. I'm the first, and so far only, woman in the family to have earned a college degree. My female relatives were discouraged from working outside the home -- too shameful for their husbands. A working wife signaled a man's inadequacy as a provider. Many of these women didn't even finish high school. It wasn't a question of their aptitude or desires; it's just the way things were done in the blue-collar immigrant culture they were raised in. My Grandma Blackhair would have loved to have been on the stage. The closest she got though, was a job on the production line at Whitman Chocolates in Philadelphia, a job she had only because it was World War II and there weren't enough men around to make the bon-bons. Her experience in the world of finance taught me a powerful lesson about the importance of money. Married at eighteen, she went straight from being her father's daughter to becoming her husband's wife. She was Mrs. George F. Lynch, homemaker, wife, mother. From an official documents standpoint, she had not even a name to call her own. It wasn't an easy life, but because she'd married for love, it was mostly a happy one. It never occurred to her that she needed anything of her own. After all, her Georgie, her sweetie, her love, took wonderful care of everything. That is, he did, until the day his private plan spiraled nose-down into the dry, rocky soil of Kemmerer Wyoming, killing him instantly. My grandmother swiftly discovered that she didn't really exist, at least, not in the world of mortgages, credit cards, banks, insurance - in short, the world of money. My grandfather, not expecting to die at age fifty-six on such a clear autumn morning, hadn't put his affairs in order. His wife, shattered by grief, was left to sort out a world made suddenly bewildering and hostile by his absence.

I was with her the first time the system erased her. We'd gone to the mall, to Sears, as we'd done a hundred times before. Grandma Blackhair loved Sears - "Honey, nobody ever went wrong shopping at Sears." I don't remember what we were there to buy, only that she pulled out her Sears charge card, battered from years and years of loyal use. The clerk entered the number into the register, paused, made a face and reached for the phone. Less than a minute's worth of careful conversation later, she replaced the receiver, turned to my grandma and said, "I'm sorry Mrs. Lynch". Taking a large pair of scissors, she neatly cut the Sears card in half. Grandma Blackhair said, "What are you doing? The account is current. I just paid the bill!" The clerk replied, "Mrs. Lynch, this isn't your account. It was your husband's, and now that he's deceased..." The woman's words trailed off. The three of us stood there in silence. The clerk offered her apologies, her sympathies. My grandma was stunned, pale. We left the store, exiting into the mall. There was a clump of potted plants, some benches. We sat down, and there, in front of The Gap, the Hallmark store, and a pushcart selling fancy roasted nuts, my grandma wept as though her heart would break. Helpless, only twelve or so myself, I put my arms around her, inhaling the mix of perfume, tobacco, and butterscotch that was her scent. "What will I do? What will I do" she kept repeating. It was so frightening to feel her cry like that - this was the strongest person I knew. She cried out of frustration, fear, sorrow, exhaustion - all the emotions that are part and parcel of grief, compounded by the new terror she faced as a woman without means. It was the moment her life as a widow began, and I'm proud to say that she learned how to manage. But to the end of her days, she never fully recovered from the shame she felt that afternoon at Sears. Since we Lynch women can hold a bit of a grudge now and then, it shouldn't come as a surprise that she never shopped at a Sears store again. She took her business to J.C. Penney, a store that, as she put it, "doesn't treat the customer like a criminal."

Playing dumb about money isn't sexy. Being dumb about money isn't smart. After years of effort on my part, including subscribing to "Kiplinger's Personal Finance", daily reading of the newspaper financial section, and hours spent glassy-eyed in front of CNBC, I've accepted that I'm no financial wizard. I've found someone to help me, a brilliant, down-to-earth woman who understands that I'm worried more about having to subsist on Friskie's Buffet in my old age than I am about what tech stocks are doing. Even with Tricia in my corner, I still do weird things with money, things that drive my husband nuts. I make little piles of it, each allocated for a specific expense. I treat it like pirate booty. I never let myself have more than forty-seven dollars cash in my wallet. I can't float bills or calculate interest or gamble or speculate. I like it when money is just somewhere nearby, safe and dry. There was a quiz in one of the many tiresome financial books I read that was supposed to help you figure out what sort of occupation might be suitable, based on your personal financial philosophy. My score indicated a real fondness for money, but no true sense of how to use it for gain. The perfect occupation for me? Well, it turns out that when giants have a great deal of treasure to protect, they hide it in a big cavern, and hire trolls to stand watch over it. Trolls like things that sparkle, and they have fearsome dispositions. I'd be a fine troll, management material, even. Dream big, that's my motto.