This virus is making me nostalgic, so I hope you’ll bear
with me as I ramble here. When I was a kid, I thought every family had a pantry
stocked with at least a dozen cans of beans, mixed vegetables and tomato sauce (and
frankly most of them did). My mother, aunts and grandmother saved bacon grease
in coffee cans instead of buying oil or shortening and washed and reused tinfoil
until it shredded. Uncles and my friend’s fathers had baby food jars of used screws
and nails of every size. Dad wasn’t handy but he was a prize wheeler-dealer with
bargaining the price of everything and could squeeze a penny until it screamed.
My parents took a lot of pride in taking us to the bank when we were still in
grade school to open a savings account and they were almost religiously fervent
about setting aside money for a rainy day. Perhaps I was aware of the
frugality, but it seemed like everyone’s family was money cautious. What I was
aware of was approximately where our family was financially. My father went on
strike at his company and decided after a time that he didn’t want to work for a boss who could lower his wage or arbitrarily lay him off. So, he and
my mother took all their savings and became business owners. While they were
successful and after a while there was more money in the house, we moved to a less
posh neighborhood to make that shift happen. My brother and I were expected to
work from about age 8. I knew we were financially in better shape than most in
my neighborhood, but all that family frugality let me know that we were not wealthy.
By the time the ‘greed is good’ era of the 1980’s came
around, I had graduated high school and had a pretty fair job. Frankly I needed
a good job because I moved out on my own at the age of seventeen – which was
actually possible then. Of course, I moved nearly everything I owned in the
back of my hatchback. Clothes, a small stereo, books and a bookcase made out of
cinder blocks and a single box of kitchen stuff was all I had or needed, except
for my bed. My family’s scrimping was something I wanted distance from, so maintaining
my savings habit fell off the radar. Only old and worried people saved money
and I had
lots of time to make more. I pretty much spent whatever I made
and I was hardly unique in that. When I’d
visit my parents, I would try to convince them to look into new and improved
products or technologies or maybe remodel their house. I thought I was pretty savvy and that they were old
fashioned. They thought I was wasteful. Still, when the “Lifestyles of the Rich
and Famous” became a television series I knew, absolutely knew that
these were not My People. No one I knew even had contact with actual rich
people. Still, it was fun to watch women in spangly tight dresses with massive
shoulder pads sip champagne on yachts. Voyeuristic thrills were on offer so all
us regular folks could peek inside mansions with marble foyers and master
bedrooms larger than our entire house. They were Them and we were Us.
And We could watch Them like visitors at a gilded and ridiculous human zoo.
Alright, that sentiment is not exactly true because with the
onset of the 1980s in the United States we began to be subjected to the idea
that we might, just maybe, have some piece of the Rich pie. Here’s
an example – huge brick-sized cell phones first came out in the mid 1980’s and
by the end of that decade some businesspeople leased them and would cart
them around in their cars. People like moi might even get to see (or
gasp…use) one. Cue up Boyfriend from 1988 whose parents had one of these (then)
fantastic devices. Before a road trip his mother handed us said magic device locked
in a swanky case with the instruction, “use only in case of emergency – I mean
it – the car better be on fire.” That admonition fell out of his ears by the
time we hit the 3-hour mark on the road. He reasoned that we really ought to
tell my friends that we were coming for a visit and we were running later than
planned. Alrighty then! “Hello friend… yea … this is me. We’re on the road. No, we’re not using a payphone. We are ON THE ROAD.
Like, in the car. We’re calling you FROM THE CAR!!!” (insert happy squealing
here). That call led to another, and so on and so on until we hit my parent’s
driveway. Of course, we had to call them from their driveway. How else
could said boyfriend impress the parentals? They were actually impressed (or
horrified, I can’t be sure now) We must have ‘made it’ because by gawd we were
driving my almost new, very sporty car (that I owed an arm and a leg for) with
said shiny dialing brick (that wasn’t actually ours) and we could afford
weekend trips (down the valley, paid on my credit card)!
Our belief that we had somehow jumped the class barrier was
rather quickly squashed a few weeks after we returned from our trip. In the good
old days every single call one made came listed separately with the telephone
number and the duration (and cost!) of each call. Each call cost about a
zillion dollars. Seriously. We racked up nearly $500 on a handful of seemingly
short telephone calls. Not only did we not have a mansion und a yacht, we had
to finance repaying that telephone bill over months! If that wasn’t enough to
convince us that we were not rich and famous, the look my beau’s
mom gave us along with the verbal throttling were fantastic reminders.
I don’t have to tell you that since that time so many of the
things that were once considered out of reach luxuries are today almost expected
acquisitions and expenses for anyone with a job. Highly powered and fairly new
cellphone with unlimited minutes – Check. Nice car with air conditioning and electronics
package – Check. Home with beautifully designed kitchen and bathrooms – Check.
Professional haircut and coloring – Check. Dining out (despite the lovely
kitchen) – Check. Your mileage may vary, but you get the point.
How, may you ask, do we have such luxuries now when back in
the day people would routinely call long-distance and let it ring 3-times and
abruptly hang up to let their parents know they were safe, while not racking up
a long-distance call charge? I would call it “The Great Middle Class (AKA Almost
Rich) Hoax.”
Again, by the late 1980’s companies began to routinely
entice working people with the idea that while you might not be able to be exactly
rich, you could have at least some of it. You could have that brick cell
phone, even if you could only afford 2 calls a month. You couldn’t afford
couture, but design houses had 2nd tier ‘designer’ clothing that you
could probably save for – and as a bonus they would slap their label - Dior or
Chanel or Gucci - right on the outside so other people could easily witness
that you were nearly rich-ISH. Decades rolled on and we got cell phones we
could actually buy and not lease, and phone plans that gave us a set number of
minutes that we could pay for in a lump (just don’t go over.. for gawd’s sake..
don’t!) Business computing systems were followed with home computers that just
kept getting more upgraded (and necessary) with every passing year. Ok, you
might not be able to afford Monte Carlo, but you and your family could go on a
cruise to exotic places. I mean, it isn’t your yacht but still – Mexico, the Caribbean
and (ohmygosh) Europe was within your grasp if you saved long enough. Or, there
was credit. I mean, why wait to save when so much cool stuff was out there for
the taking! The message was – you’re just wasting time trying to save. Do it
now, while you can! And, while you’re at it, please note that it takes way too
long to cook your own food, or wax your own car or mow your own lawn, or wait
for next week’s television program (VCR anyone). Life was just getting better
and better and we were all getting posher by the minute.
Except we weren’t, not exactly. What society, and maybe we,
failed to notice is that we got this new lifestyle mostly by going into greater
and greater debt. In the 1970’s the savings rate percentage of the average
American was in the double digits. But once we all got access to easy credit,
we took it. Then we had to stay ahead of the debt. So, we all began to work more and more. But
that was ok, because it was explained to us that you could not Have It All
unless you pushed and climbed and clawed your way through and up. It was all about the career and the experiences
and things and titles that all those hours would afford you. And it was worth
it.
Except it wasn’t. Society also failed to make most of us notice
that while our cars and house and hairstyles got flashier and we had more and
more of the good life, actual Rich People had gotten fewer (percentage-wise) and
even richer than before. The Lifestyle kept getting farther away, even as we
gave up more and more of our time to work and had to continue to outsource things
– due to exhaustion- like cooking, growing food and seeing our families. Who needs
grandpa and skills anyway? Packing a lunch is for poor people!
Fast forward to today. Who are our heroes now? Who are we
looking up to? For starters, with coronavirus we need, and I mean NEED those
whose labor serves others. Yes, doctors and nurses of course. But also notice
that grocery stockers and clerks, pharmacy techs, mail and package delivery
workers are our heroes. How would we survive without manufacturers, farmers and
pickers? Chefs and cooks of every caliber are superstars (can people actually
cook without YouTube videos?) Drivers are still out there too – buses, trains
and ferries are running and someone is making that happen. Those people whose labor
has been ignored or even denigrated are finally rising up and we can see (and I
hope appreciate) them. Hey, maybe when this is all over we could actually pay
them what they are worth. Artists! Do you see how we need music, dance, painting,
theatre, fashion/sewing to keep us all from going stir-crazy as we are in enforced
confinement sheltering in place?
A professor of mine (a particularly callous and dense human
being) told our class that the world would be a much better place when all the
older generation just died and we could get on with a more enlightened
populace. The nerve and ignorance of that statement angered me then but is
fantastically stupid today. Most of the oldest generation now alive remembers
how to grow a garden, bake a great loaf of bread, make stock from vegetable
scraps, sew a quilt or fix their own leaky roof. Most of them were masters of perseverance
and tenacity, even if their phones and haircuts were generally crap.
Tonight, as I make my own tortillas, look at the dinner
rolls I made yesterday, figure out the 18th way to use ground beef
to make a meal, and marvel at the face mask I created from a pattern (without
throwing the sewing machine out a window), I am so grateful to those feisty and
cheap forebearers of mine. Because of their example (and friends and YouTube yet
again) I have the skills to not only cook my own food but to grow it. I’m not
afraid to cut my own hair, change an electrical outlet, paint my own house and
(heaven forbid) hang laundry out to dry if I have to (yes, it’s a thing).
You’re lucky too! I know that right now it might not feel
that way. You might have lost your job (or at least your place to GO to work)
with this virus and that’s scary. You might be so young that you believe coffee only comes from a barista at a place called Star_ucks (it's beans and water, I can show you how.) It is possible that your family
subsisted on fast food burgers and the occasional sushi so they didn’t pass on
culinary skills. But what you do have right now is a little more
time. Even if you’re still working, your commute has likely diminished from
many miles to a few feet – Win! And working in PJ’s – come on! With all that time you can reach out to people
you know. Those people know things! They can share ideas, tips and techniques
with you about all kinds of stuff you used to have to pay other people to do
for you. You might have grandparents, parents, aunties and uncles, former high
school teachers and neighbors and they all know stuff you don’t know (and you
know stuff they need to know!) Sharing! Hey, my nonno used to make his own wine
– dang why didn’t I learn that?
The things you can’t do for yourself, the super important
stuff is still being performed by intrepid Essential Workers - aka those people
who used to be kind of invisible or whose presence we took for granted but who
we all now realize are exceptionally vital. Isn’t that incredible and aren’t
we so blessed by them? (If that statement refers to you… thank you from the bottom of my
heart.)
This virus is not a joke or a picnic. The virus is not a
vacation. People have died and even more people will die. Those are facts. But
this is also a moment of some blessing. You can unplug a bit from the rat race
that was your life. Did you know working so hard is not actually required? It
is a social construction and we can de-construct it. Let’s do. Did you previously realize all the things you
actually can do without? (I’m looking at you paper towels) With a little time you
could walk outside and smell the air and listen to the birds. Remember birds? And
clouds? And trees? Remember how each season had a color and a smell that was unique?
That’s still there. Remember how you got that cat/dog/parrot/gerbil (fill in
the blank) because it was so cute and you enjoyed playing with it… could you do
that again? Hint – they would love that. If you haven’t Marie Kondo’d all your
books I bet you have a few (cough .. dozen) you intended to read but never got
around to. Bonus – there’s probably more stuff in those books that teach you how
to do even more stuff (or maybe just how to shoot space aliens, but still.) Have
you given any thought about the talents you have that you haven’t used lately?
If you aren’t spending 50, 60 80 hours a week with work+commute, couldn’t you
dust off some of those abilities that make you awesome and unique and You?! Hey,
video yourself and teach someone else.
As I sit here wiping down the foil that I used to cover
yesterday’s casserole (yea, I said it), I want to remind myself – and you – We Got
This. We always did. We just fell into a stupor for a (long) while that told us
that money and fancy things were more important than people and time and
dreaming. But we’re woke now. Can we keep it that way?
Oh, and lest we be tempted to fall back into that shiny and
stupid dream, let me ask you a question. How many lost paychecks away from
ruin are you? Keep asking that question any time you find yourself falling
down the seductive ‘you could be rich’ rabbit hole in the future. Because generally
we do not save money anymore, your answer might be 1 or it might be 6 paychecks,
but I’ve got to tell you that you are NOT the 1% and that’s where the truly
rich are – in that very excruciatingly tiny slice of the population. We used to
know that, and I think we should know that again. And … do you know what that
makes you? You …. We… Are (GASP) The
Working Class. Yup, I hate to break it to you but if you’re not able to survive
without a paycheck, you need a job and people who need jobs are Working Class. So,
when we get back to work, and we will, let’s not forget that whatever color our
collar might be, (another stupid social construct), we all need (and should
take better care of) each other. Working class people are valuable. YOU are valuable.
Ok, now let me get back to my tinfoil and you … go make
something. I believe in you.
