Honestly, I can’t help but think that I am way ahead of the game when it comes to an economic down-turn, incipient depression, bubble-bursting, or whatever the heck the mighty media organs want to call it. I lost three jobs alone last year, before the major misery even started. I’ve already processed the grief, adjusted to a fairly Spartan lifestyle, and gotten very well adept at bargaining with institutions demanding money from me. I cobbled together another series of paying ventures, including fifteen hours a week at the phone bank – which does have as a virtue (perhaps it’s only virtue!) that it is at least reliable in providing work hours and the resulting paycheck. Amazingly enough, I’ve lasted there long enough that many of the other drones on the floor know me by name, which is nice enough, I suppose – but I still call it “The Hellhole”. My original plan called for quitting around Christmas – but alas, Blondie loosing a job of her own put paid to that notion. So – tight budget all around, and welcome to the joys of bargain hunting, at yard sales, thrift-stores and in the untidy shelves at the back of various retail establishments labeled ‘clearance’ or ‘final sale’ or ‘70% off!’

I don’t know if I will really ever be able to embrace full retail prices again, after this year. I don’t think I will ever be able to walk into an upscale shop and cheerfully pay the full price for something, without feeling an incapacitating twinge of regret. I guess I have just enough of my grandmother’s canny puritan soul in me, and how it has a chance to flower. Unlike Granny Jessie in the Great Depression, though – we will not be keeping chickens. That’s going a little too far. But we have picked up a barely-used bread machine (at a yard sale for $10) and make our own bread, since I have a liking for the very expensive wheat varieties that are loaded with fiber and flavorful seeds and spices, which cost better than $3.00 a loaf at the Humongously Enormous Big-Ass Grocery. So one step closer to self-sufficiency – and Blondie is teaching herself how to knit. Much more of this, and I can see us living away off in the country with a satellite dish, a generator, our own water well and a milk cow. Talking over this whole gestalt with Blondie, and neither of us can remember the last time we bought a non-food item at full price. Everything has been on sale, second hand, bought in bulk at Sam’s Club or an ethnic grocery, or made at home. Even the ink cartridges for my printer are recycled from Cartridge World.

And this is not to say we don’t have a lot of quiet fun with this – we have bought some lovely, frivolous things for practically pennies and even some items which miraculously replaced those lost in the fire at Mom and Dad’s house in 2003. This very week at the new Goodwill Store which opened in our neighborhood, Blondie found a round silver-plate drinks tray which – after ten years worth of grimy black tarnish was cleaned off of it and she checked the now-visible hallmark – turned out to have a market value of about a hundred times what she spent for it. And there was also an odd set of crystal glasses, all jumbled among a long shelf of glassware. These were as fragile as bubbles, and appear to be hand-etched with a bamboo pattern; four with a short stem, three with a long stem and three which look like miniature martini glasses. I think they are Japanese, since they look so much like a set of crystal that I bought in the BX there ages ago. Blondie adds them to the collection that she is setting aside for her own house, against the day when I am a best-selling author and can buy her one.
I was much more interested in a find on a table of books: a stack of the old Time-Life series about the foods of the world. Mom had a subscription to the series in the late 1960s; each volume focusing on the food of a particular country or region came as a two-part set. One was a lovely, lavishly illustrated examination of the country and it’s cuisine, and the other a small spiral-bound collection of recipes. Of course, Mom’s collection was among those lost in the fire, and the ones I found at the thrift shop were the coffee-table book only – but still, I was very fond of that series. The cooking of provincial France, of Spain and Portugal, of Great Britain, and Scandinavia…. I think those books were where we all learned to be adventurous about food. It’s good to have them back.