Tuesday, 11 April 2000
.....
As I was walking back to my office after having consumed a Veggie Dog with Homemade Coleslaw ($1.50 from Squeaky), I was holding a book that I had gotten because...well frankly, I had gotten it because it had been 20% off in a "special" sale.
Oh, I wanted to read the book, no doubt, but I got some pleasure out of that bit of illusory thriftiness--I mean, 20% off!!! Of course, at this bookstore, paperbacks are normally 10% off, but no matter. It was that extra 10% that made me feel good.
I was feeling pretty good about the $1.50 veggie dog, too. And by one of those leaps by which my calorie soaked mind is wont to tease me on bright spring days, I thought of a passage from Cranford that seems to tickle everyone who reads it:
I have often noticed that almost every one has his own individual small economies - careful habits of saving fractions of pennies in some one peculiar direction - any disturbance of which annoys him more than spending shillings or pounds on some real extravagance. An old gentleman of my acquaintance, who took the intelligence of the failure of a Joint-Stock Bank, in which some of his money was invested, with stoical mildness, worried his family all through a long summer's day because one of them had torn (instead of cutting) out the written leaves of his now useless bank-book; of course, the corresponding pages at the other end came out as well, and this little unnecessary waste of paper (his private economy) chafed him more than all the loss of his money...
I am not above owning that I have this human weakness myself. String is my foible. My pockets get full of little hanks of it, picked up and twisted together, ready for uses that never come. I am seriously annoyed if any one cuts the string of a parcel instead of patiently and faithfully undoing it fold by fold. How people can bring themselves to use india-rubber rings, which are a sort of deification of string, as lightly as they do, I cannot imagine. To me an india-rubber ring is a precious treasure. I have one which is not new - one that I picked up off the floor nearly six years ago. I have really tried to use it, but my heart failed me, and I could not commit the extravagance.
Small pieces of butter grieve others.
(That last line is so cool!)
The most bizarre small economy, which really was a great extravagance in disguise, was my father's incessant buying and hording of Progresso Lentil Soup cans, the one-person serving. Granted, at the time, in the area of PA where we lived, they were moderately difficult to secure. And they were just the right size for one person, whereas the normal can was much too big. But in the cabinet above the stove we had row upon row of these soup cans, stacked two high and at least three deep. Anytime he saw them in the store, he'd buy them all up, bring them home, and stack them. He ate maybe one can every couple of months.
I'm sure some of the back row cans were several years old at the time. Of course, I might add, my father is a maniac.
One pleasure I take is in the breaking of other people's small economies. Done gently and lovingly it can be quite exhiliarating. Long distance phone calls are always a likely candidate. Even I, who maintained (or degraded!) a long distance relationship through continual telephonic interaction, still wince at making or receiving such calls, though, truely, they have gotten so cheap as to be painless in real terms (which, I'm sure my mother will remind me, they were not when I was a-calling). But Zoe was even worse than me (as were her parents)...Why not call once or twice a week? Nowadays, it's almost cheaper than writing letters.
My grandmother, too, is most amusing about phone calls. When I call her, as I do once in a great while, we talk for maybe forty minutes before she gets nervous and starts saying, "Well, I don't want to break your nickel." She never thinks to make me hang up and call me back. She never considers that $3-4 every 5 months won't break me. In person, my grandmother can talk for hours, but there's a little timer in her head that goes off as we approach the 45 minute mark...
This is Small Economies <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/422>