Economy

Geoff Campbell, the headmaster of prestigious Phoenix Country Day, and I used to go camping and hunting. We did this in the winter, usually just after Christmas, and would wander around the Blue Ridge or Cumberlands until we got too cold. One year we took a canned ham with us and ate from it for two days. By the second day it had acquired what I believe to be Staphylococcus aureus. This bacteria produces a toxin that causes cramping, nausea and diarrhea, usually in fewer than five hours. You can’t get rid of S. areus by cooking since the toxin is heat stable. It’s probably living in your nose right now, by the way, but let that pass. We both were ill, but Geoff was in agony.

My children think that I’m a cheapskate. This is unfair. I may be economical, but I’m neither stingy nor miserly. I look for value wherever it can be found. And I really don’t want to grow old and become one of those who hoards money and belongings.

I can always get one more use out of anything. Toothpaste tubes gives me more trouble in this department than they used to. They used to be made of metal and one could really squeeze the last molecule on to the sparsely bristled brush. The brush is sparsely bristled now; it was not that way when new. I can make both last for over a year.

A tube of original Pepsodent is 66% less expensive than most of the other brands. It is much cheaper than the $4-$7 you’ll pay for your ferret’s toothpaste, according to the non profit group “Massachusetts Ferret Friends”. Visit them on the web.

I collected tubes of Ultra Brite toothpaste (the toothpaste with sex appeal) once during a six week jaunt through the middle east and Europe. In Italy it was “Ultra Brait” (denti bianchissimi), in Austria it was “Ultra Weiss” (die zahncreme mit dem wildengeschmack) and in French it was just “Ultra Brite” (le dentrifice au gout sauvage).

I got a huge kick out of that packaging. Most people bring really cool souvenirs home from their trips. I brought toothpaste . . . and used it.

My economy is somewhat compulsive. It’s not as bad as other compulsive behaviors I have such as knowing precisely what time it is even if I awaken in the middle of the night.

To greater and lesser degrees all members of my family of origin suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder. My sister’s manifestations of this disorder involve irresistible urges to make a fresh pot whenever a Mr. Coffee is sighted. For reasons known only to her she will then allow it to become cold, serving others from a dented metal thermos with yesterday’s brew therein. Another of her compulsions is to wash any clothing not safely closeted. She does this in blistering hot water. Most of my parents clothing is too small for them nowadays. It is all very white. Beka also will locate a partly emptied container (oh, let’s say a shampoo bottle) and fill it with another liquid located nearby. It need not be any form of soap or shampoo. She discards the newly emptied container with something approaching Buddhist serenity, and returns to her television (always channel five).

This is why I’m used to our housekeeper, a possibly legal Mexican from Monterrey, who will unpack anything in our house and store it where she believes it belongs. Consuelo (whose real name is Linda, by the way) abhors packaging. Egg cartons? Never! The bag of potatoes? Forget about it! A multi-pack of go-gurt? Let’s let it out! “Libertad” is her battle cry. She has numerous other quirks. Rearranging the furniture is one. Once she cut the grass. Another time she washed the front of our house. I call her Consuelo only because I always wanted a maid named Consuelo. She is a treasure for us even though she speaks no English and apparently doesn’t want to learn. I am reasonably fluent in Spanish, but when she hides my son’s Nintendo DS and its stylus, I am as mute as a swan. How does one even begin to inquire?

As a child my brother used to “double click” his milk glass against his teeth before drinking. He would “double tap” a doorjamb on this way through. He would “double touch” just about anything for a number of years. My parents harbor deep suspicions of psychiatrists and, even worse, psychologists. Their manner of handling such aberrant behaviors was to shout them out. “Stop that!” they would cry. Eventually Bayne subordinated his compulsions. He mastered them. Unhappily, as everyone in the world except my family knows, these compulsions are still with him. They are not really mastered at all. They ooze out in his adult life, like the alien Sigourney Weaver had to kill. He is tremendously uncomfortable with peace and quiet, for example, and will turn on rock music in his fully wired house while he shouts for me to come listen to one of his children perform a song or instrumental selection. One of their dogs is usually barking, several dozen of their phones will be ringing, and he’ll suddenly rush to his computer to play “EverQuest” while eating a jalapeño popper. If Beka’s serenity is achieved by fulfilling the demands of her inner voice, Bayne’s is achieved through sensory overload.

Can you imagine a full family gathering with these people? Wait, it gets better. My mother is hard of hearing. Dad shouts. Mama believes he shouts because he, too, is hard of hearing, not because he has lived with her hearing loss for decades. Dad will begin his part of the conversation from a distant room in order to be well into his declamation upon entry. He is oblivious to other conversations taking place and is usually waving a newspaper or magazine article when he enters. All of his conversations end like this: “Read this and when you’re through, throw it away.”

Mama hasn’t needed to hear for many years due to the fact that she’s usually telling a story. That’s her compulsion. The last known listening event for her occurred back on August 7, 1978, when President Jimmy Carter declared a federal emergency regarding the Love Canal. The special report on channel 5 pre-empted Charlie Hall’s weather forecast and that made her “damn mad.”

The Love Canal was located in a neighborhood of Niagra Falls, New York. It was flooded with toxic chemicals, backfilled, and a school was built on it. Epilepsy, asthma, and miscarriages were some of the problems. 56% of children born in the neighborhood had birth defects. It’s still a mess. I am so glad that young people today are interested in saving the planet. I hope it’s not too late.

I’m certainly not immune to this compulsive problem. On the contrary, I’ve got it worse than all the rest of them. In schools today we are actively investigating why so many students have trouble with their “executive function.” The executive function is knowing how to put first things first. We learned it by hearing my father intone “first things first” on a daily basis while growing up.

My executive function is my only function. When I realize, for example, that the car’s oil needs to be changed, I cannot think of anything else. Late on a Sunday night I will be seeking a grease monkey who can provide relief. My executive function says, “This is your sole reason for existing. Get the oil changed.” It is not unlike Beka’s coffee-making.

I count when I’m toweling off after a shower and while getting dressed. I count when I’m filling a glass with water. Once I watched the glass overflow, and I let it overflow, until I reached 10. Ten was the number I had to reach before shutting off the water.

Usually these things are funny. They are not deeply inconvenient. Moreover, they are the quirks that provide the color to our lives.

During the nineties everyone was fond of claiming “dysfunctional families”. It was sort of a fraternity of right-thinking-young adults whose brotherhood revolved around rejecting their families of origin. A former student of mine pointed out once that if you had a roof over your head, a bed, clothes, and were made to go to school, your family was not dysfunctional. Quirky, perhaps, but not dysfunctional. I like his definition. And I definitely like quirky families.

I don’t see much compulsive behavior in my children, yet. I can identify traits in them, however. Lillian has almost no conception of minutes or hours. It is clear to me that if she is supposed to be at a 6:30 appointment she will leave the house precisely at 6:30. In her mind, evidently, space and time will bend; a worm-hole will appear; she will arrive at the same moment she left. Caroline will, out of the blue, make peculiar statements that immediately stifle subsequent conversation. Once she quieted an entire roomful of people by proclaiming that she didn’t like to get wet. No one knew what to say in response to this odd announcement. She’s also in a “justice” phase. She still has some vague memory of the Garden of Eden and believes that life is fair.

I believe that children are in the Garden. Sometime around the end of third grade or the beginning of fourth they leave the Garden. Banished. There’s no where to go now but across the desert, finding an oasis from time to time.

For me those oases come from nature. That’s why things like the Love Canal are so immoral. And don’t even get me started on the Everglades.