Saving The World, One Piece Of Aluminum Foil At A Time

My blogging pal Kathie at the Housewife Cafe has challenged me to a dualing post. We both had parents with pat-rack sensibilities, and as I am certain that my parents were worse than hers, having lived through both the Depression and World War Two, I have accepted.

When I was younger, I would have blushed to tell anyone this, much less have published it in the public domain. But I am so far removed from it now that I see how genuinely comic it was. And more than that, I am proud of my parents. Sure, they embarrassed me to death at the time, but they never tried to keep up with the Jones; they never bought into consumerism or felt the need to shop until they dropped. George W's post-9-11 advice to the general public to go out and shop wouldn't have touched them. And thank God America didn't have to depend on my parents' purchasing power.

1) String. Whenever we received a package, the string was carefully removed, unknotted, and wound up into a ball. We were never without; we never had to buy any. Sure, you never found a bit that was the length you needed; inevitably, the piece you unraveled from the string-ball would be too long or short for your needs. When that happened, you cut or knotted until you had the right length.

2) Aluminum foil. We almost never bought this -- it was for rich people! But when we did have it, by God, did it get recycled. By the time we were finally finished with a piece, it was no longer shiny. Or rather, the shininess was not of a metallic nature.

3) Waxed paper. To my endless shame, my mother was the only mother who wrapped sandwiches in this. A little detail like that can cause a kid quite a few headaches. Everybody else's mother used baggies -- and each baggy was used only once. Waxed paper, though, is different! One piece can go on for weeks.

4) Clothes. When we were babies, my mother would, as a special treat, cover us with her Chicago-Manhattan-D.C. coat. This was purchased just after Pearl Harbor, when my mother lived in Chicago, and she wore the coat in Washington D.C. and Manhattan, where she also worked. The coat had a real aura of mystery and glamour to it: we pictured our middle-aged mother as a young, stylish woman, swanning around in this padded black woolen garment with its wonderful old buttons and silky, smooth lining. Decades later, I took this coat when I went to live in Manhattan, then Yokohama, Kyushu, Sendai, and Tokyo. Before I got married, my husband sent it to Thailand along with a length of woolen material and had the coat copied there for me. I still wear this, and I still have the original in a suitcase somewhere.

Shortly after my father died, I found the following items, perfectly preserved, in a suitcase in our garage: 1) his Navy uniform from World War II: hat, trousers -- the whole bit; 2) his letter sweater from when he played football for Burlingame High School, San Mateo -- in 1936. 3) old dresses of his mother, some of which dated back to 1904; 4) his father's old hats and belts.

My mother's worn-out housedresses and other old (as in virtually falling apart) clothes were torn into long strips, braided together, and fashioned into rugs. We also had a huge bag of rags called, imaginatively, The Rag Bag, from which dusters and useful scraps were often taken. Generally, though, this just grew to monstrous proportions and took up a lot of space.

5) Books. My father couldn't get rid of a textbook to save his soul. We had every plant pathology, organic chemistry, and propagation textbook my father ever owned, along with dusty stacks and teetering piles of manuals and periodicals on grafting, pollination, and avocado varieties. My father seldom consulted them.

We never bought books. We never had to. My parents had inherited books from my father's family: a complete set of Dickens, Kipling, and Shakespeare, along with a seriously well-read set of the Classics. I used to go to friends' houses and marvel at all the brand-new books without library markings, the paperback bestsellers, the handsome leather-bound books that were obviously never read. All of ours were old and miserable and falling apart.

6) Food. I don't remember my mother ever throwing leftovers out. I'm sure she did, but this happened so rarely that I really can't recall even one instance. We had a compost heap of worrying proportions; when my father had finished deseeding rotten avocados (which happened from time to time in his line of work), the stinking, heaving, worm-riddled remains were flung on the compost heap and one very unlucky kid had the job of turning the pile. This was not a popular chore.

I once knew a woman who was forced to live rough in New York; she claimed that the food that was thrown into dumpsters was often far better than what you could get in a soup kitchen. I give you my word that this poor woman would have starved if people like my parents were the only ones doing the discarding.

7) Appliances and Furniture: We had the same hideous kitchen table for seventeen years; our washing machine, my mother was proud of observing, lasted from 1951 to 1979, and our battered old Frigidaire finally succumbed after 18 years of solid duty. Our 1950-vintage Electrolux vacuum cleaner could have been featured in a museum. Oh, and we never got new furniture. Ever. Ditto for carpets and draperies.

8) Correspondence. I've got boxes of letters my mother exchanged with her sisters, my father, her friends from all over the world (including a Philippino man from Pampanga, two German medical students, a young Polish woman, fellow Christian Aiders from New York City, and half a dozen aunties from Kentucky). Some of these date back to the thirties and I know I ought to burn the lot, but could you do this? Well, maybe you could, but then you don't have my genetic background.

9) Jelly jars. These weren't really jelly jars -- not after we'd finished the jelly (which, of course, was always the cheapest type of the cheapest brand). They were glasses. Once our minister visited and my mother served him water in a proper glass I didn't know we had. I was amazed: I hadn't realized she could tell the difference.

10) Towels. This is really embarrassing, but here goes. In 1979, my parents were still using towels from his family. And my father's mother died in 1949. Can anyone top that? If so, will you please make this public?

"Use it up, wear it out; make it do, or do without" and "Is this trip necessary?" were slogans that we lived by. To some it might seem that my parents merely made a virtue of a necessity. We didn't have a lot of money, after all, and economizing was important. But it was more than that: even if they'd inherited a mint, I suspect they'd have lived like this. Happily. Recycling and making do were a game, a way to beat the odds, supplying them with a raison d'etre that was infinitely entertaining and worthwhile.

I'm completely different, thank God. I'm a Baby Boomer and although I don't live to shop, I do change my curtains from time to time and I've even been known to shell out for new furniture every blue moon.

Besides, my rag bag is only half as big as my mother's. And so's my compost heap. Oops -- heaps, that is: lucky us, we've got two.