Spoiled Rotten

I was thinking about this horrible financial recession we're in and trying to put things into perspective when I was snapped out of my funk of self pity. I had been spoiled. For a year I made enough of a living to do things like replace most of a wardrobe, buy a camera for my writing business, go out to eat a few times a week and put enough gas in my van to take aimless drives for the simple pleasure of wasting time by enjoying myself. When all that came to an end, I was plunged into the aforementioned funk. I know that wallowing in self pity is not conducive to creativity and I had to keep working in order to work through the feeling of utter helplessness I was feeling after losing my cushy contract job wages. What helped me work through was my recall of my great grandparents and my grandparents, who lived through the Great Depression and who taught me everything I know about being thrifty. Drawing on the strength of their counsel and the core values with which they endowed my mother and her siblings, I have come to the realization that I am spoiled rotten.

I'm not talking spoiled rotten like the Paris Hiltons and Kari Ann Peniche kind of spoiled; I'm talking spoiled rotten like kids who can't live without their MP3 players, their smartphones, their high speed internets. I know, technology is where it's at but what happens when those very things are taken away from you one by one? Faced with a telephone shutoff or feeding your family, what do you do? You feed your family of course but the insidious part about living in modern times is that we tend to go through serious withdrawal without all of our talking, blinking gadgets.

For example, we lost power during a particularly nasty ice storm back in late autumn. For six hours we paced, we swore, we ranted. We went through denial, anger, bargaining and were mid way through depression and on to acceptance when the house suddenly hummed to life.

During the power outage I realized how noisy we are without even talking. We are silent in a house that speaks through whirrs and clicks and buzzes, creaks, ticks and that pervasive hum of electricity. We must be lulled by these noises because their absence caused much angst and gnashing of teeth.

So yes, we are spoiled. We have a small income still, which puts us better off than a lot of people we know. While I was considering whether or not to apply for food stamps, I kept thinking of my great grandmother and what she would think of living off the government dime. That's when the light came on. My great grandmother would have planted a garden, put aside vegetables and fruits in canning jars and freezer cartons, and baked her own bread. She would have taken clothing and removed the buttons, zippers, snaps, hooks, eyes, and rick-rack. Then, after adding these things to her boxes of like items, she would take the fabric and cut it into strips to either make blocks that would be sewn together to make a warm quilt or, in the case of woolen items, long strips that would find their way into grand braided carpets that were sometimes as big as a room and which kept the floors warm in the western New York weather.

She would have done many other things too, and I remember as a child, watching her pluck and dress a chicken for dinner. She showed me the eggs still in the egg sac and the liver and heart. I distinctly remember her hands, bony and gnarled, her deft fingers bent with a "little touch of arthritis," but which could turn out tatted lace edges for pillowcases and warm wool mittens for my own childish hands. I knew that she would use the chicken feathers later to stuff pillows and featherbeds.

I watched her work incredibly hard until the end of her life. Compared to her, I have nothing about which to complain. When I look at my cell phone which is due to be shut off any day now, and my cable bill, which I will try to pay because I really can't survive without the interwebs in these days of online publishing; when I look in my cupboards and realize that I have a store of recipes in my head for good food for cheap and I realize that I am capable of walking around and moving my arms and willing my fingers to do work, I set out once again with renewed determination and the thought that I really need to not be so damn spoiled.