Today Thelma Jean Brown Dailey turns 80. Happy Birthday to a loving, contemplative mother who has turned out to be something of a prophet.

A decade or so ago Mom started saying, with each generous gift she sent our way, that she was spending her Social Security checks on us kids "since I don't need anything!"

But in a more somber mood she would add that she was spending her government benefits on us "because there won't be anything left by the time your generation retires." In these turbulent days, her words seem prescient and her lifelong habits, a rebuke.

Her generation has seen it all before -- and worse. They've survived deprivation that most modern Americans can only imagine and learned sober lessons that, if heeded, could have prevented much of what the nation is suffering right now.

Thelma Jean was born the eighth of 10 children to Marvin Freeman and Tommie Myrtle Brown. They lived in small-town Texas -- little places like Noonday and Bullard -- where they farmed just successfully enough to feed themselves.

Mom remembers reusing the flowered cotton fabric from 20-pound sacks of flour to make dresses. The older siblings got jobs as soon as they reached their early teens, trying to help the still-growing family make it through an agonizing decade.

Yet my mother remembers being happy, and that's how I think of her, too. The only assertively grumpy thing I can recall this very mild woman ever saying is something she now repeats whenever the topic comes up: "There will be no music at my funeral."

I was stunned the first time she made this pronouncement. Here's a woman who can still sit down at the piano and play hymns fluidly and even grandly, with very few lessons to her credit. A woman who spends most of her day singing while she cleans house. Why, I asked, would she want none of her beloved music at her funeral?

Well, in the tiny town where she grew up, the only schoolhouse stood adjacent to the only church, and whenever anyone died, the school children were summoned to the choir loft next door to sing for the funeral. Perhaps the wall of separation between church and state could have safeguarded my mother's tender heart. Though the sorrows of the 1930s and '40s toughened that generation in a way we soft baby-boomers can't comprehend, the borrowed sorrow of all those funerals must have really scarred her.

But every other lesson she took from her childhood -- and that the rest of her generation learned as well -- has served the nation well. Their work ethic and savings habits and pay-as-you-go mentality stoked the post-war economy.

My musical mom and dad gave us the years of piano lessons they never had. They put us through the four-year college programs that they either didn't get or had to work their way through. They helped us when, as less-disciplined adults with inflated expectations, we couldn't achieve immediately by ourselves what they'd worked a lifetime to attain.

I don't know if other Depression babies went to the lengths my mom did. As a modestly paid minister's wife, she pinched pennies so tight it made Abe's beard ache. When my dad insisted that only Kellogg's Corn Flakes would do, Mom surreptitiously kept buying the store brand and refilling the same Kellogg's box over and over, replacing it with the real thing only when the old box had nearly disintegrated. This went on for many years, til my sister caught her in flake-rante delicto.

Hilarious extremes aside (even my dad roared with laughter), these habits are why she can still joke, now almost despairingly, about using her Social Security checks on her children and grandkids.

She doesn't need anything, she says. But she doesn't "need" anything because she's always been frugal enough to provide for herself and many others. And she doesn't "want" anything because she's the least materialistic person I've ever known. She's the great beauty in a large, good-looking brood -- a true Texas rose -- but my mother has never wasted money or energy adorning herself or seeking attention.

She embodies pretty much the opposite of the spirit of our times -- or what that spirit has been, until recent, sobering events pulled us up short. If my generation gets another chance and chooses to live modestly, within its means, without the unrestrained appetites and self-seeking materialism we've indulged in, maybe we will live long and prosper as my mother has.