BoomerGirl Diary

My sisters and I are so frugal that we are still using towels from J.C. Penney that we bought during the Reagan administration. The Sainted One claims that our towels have become so non-absorbent that he doesn't dry the water from his body anymore. He scrapes it off. My brother-in-law has declared that he fears for the health and safety of Mr. Happy if he's forced to use them any longer.

But they're perfectly fine, we reply: no holes, the hems still sharp (literally), the colors still fast. But then we were raised by the Queen of Frugality, the Emperor of Cheap, the Potentate of Tight: Our mother.

There was a reason why a rubber band ball made a guest appearance at Mother's funeral. My sister Susie held it up and explained its presence to the attendees, about how we'd marveled as we'd gone through her house and opened drawers, how we'd exclaimed at the carefully pressed gift wrap and saved aluminum foil, at the buttons and pins and bags that might be used again, at the rubber bands on the ball, bands that had lost all elasticity and fell to dust if you attempted to use them. But you just never knew when you might need a rubber band, and if you did, by God she had them, useless or not.

She believed that small individual packets of facial tissue were a waste of money. So was bottled water. If she found a good deal on toilet paper, she would buy a carload. She was a manager at Penney's catalog desk, and she never saw a return that wasn't worthy of purchase. Dented, imperfect, flawed ... didn't matter. To a child of the Depression Era, what a deal!

Reduce, reuse, recycle, don't buy it if you can't pay cash, don't buy it if you don't need it, don't fall for advertising that makes you believe that you can't live without packaged foods full of mystery additives ... was my mother just a frugal German midwesterner who lived through the Depression, or was she actually ahead of her time?