Doing Without

I’ve thought for a long time that, in reality, I’m rich. I don’t know how or when my perception of the scope of material well-being was formed, but I do know that my notion of wealth includes things like running water, electricity, heat, and air conditioning.

I count items like coffee and bubble bath as luxuries. I consider the modern acceptance of what my grandmother scornfully called “folderol” to be nearly incomprehensible.

I constantly find myself shaking my head at the marketing ploy of providing lists on Facebook of “things you absolutely must have,” aimed at bored and restless consumers. I look at those lists sometimes, and all I see are things that are made to break; or be used so infrequently and for such narrow purposes that they are likely to be forgotten in a drawer somewhere almost as soon as they are purchased.

About those “narrow purposes”— I grew up going camping all summer, every summer, with my family. We didn’t have a motor-home, we had a Volkswagen bus that didn’t have any built in amenities at all. No toilet or sewage tank, no fridge, no generator, no water tank. It had fold out beds and cunning storage cabinets. It had a table the four of us could barely fit around, which had to be screwed into place, and then removed to double as a sleeping platform. The seat cushions became mattresses. We slept in sleeping bags, and got up in the night with flashlights to visit the latrine. Dad cooked over the campfire, and on an old Coleman gas stove. He made eggs and bacon in tinfoil for breakfast, and porkchops or steak with salads for dinner. Mom made the best sandwiches for lunch, standing at the back of the bus where the cupboards could be rotated to face out the back, and the doors folded down into a countertop. We kids got gloriously filthy, and took ‘spit-baths’ at the campground water-pumps. We’d stop about once a week at a coin laundry in some tiny alpine or desert town to do the laundry, and maybe get a hamburger or ice cream sandwich for a treat.

My father was the epitome of the “make-do” principle. He was a master of making one tool or gadget serve a variety of purposes. He never bought anything new. He bought his clothes at Goodwill, he cut his own hair, he always bought used cars, and he wasn’t afraid to sit down and figure out how to fix something, or make it himself.

My mother was much more subtle about it, but she had a knack for simplicity that let her go along with Daddy’s duct-tape solutions with easy equanimity. She had a good sense of humor, and an endless willingness to ‘get along’ that dealt with Daddy’s occasional egalitarian obstinacy with easy grace.

Oh, and then there was my grandmother, whom I quote altogether too frequently. Nanny’s sayings were pithy, and they easily fit into the category of home-grown proverbs. She told me once that she had only one dress as a child, and washed it every evening, hanging it up to dry overnight, to be worn the next day. She would utter axioms like “All’s well that ends well” and “No use crying over spilt milk” as if she had invented them all by herself. She lived through the Great Depression with my mother, who was born just before it began. Her husband kept his job throughout, but still they had to do without many things, and then came WW2 and rationing. Nanny never missed a chance to point out that things like butter, soda-pop, coffee, tea, and sugar were luxuries: easy to take for granted, but not necessary for survival. She saved green stamps. Now, nobody even knows what green stamps were. Or bottle deposits on glass bottles.

I’ve been noticing recently that there are a lot of memes on Facebook with pictures of things that used to be in common use, but which now have disappeared. Sardine-tin keys, saddle shoes, skate keys, clothespin bags, and oil-can spouts. They’ve inspired me to add a bunch more things I remember, like Fels-Naptha soap, Caladryl lotion, Borax, Brillo pads, penny candy, wax lips, candy cigarettes, popsicles, Beeman’s gum, jawbreakers, cloth diapers and diaper pails, slingshots, cardboard kaleidoscopes, and hula hoops.

I grew up without television. There were no computers, no mobile phones, no iPads or iPods, no PlayStations, no cable tv. I’m not trying to brag, but I do think that growing up without all these things has made it easier for me now to be comfortable with the idea of doing without. I’m not as used to these things as some folks who’ve always had them, you see.

There was another hidden blessing as well, that of being given the ability to see clearly the deceptive trickery that is built into consumerism. Because I grew up in a household without any form of covetousness; because my parents were deeply suspicious of any form of ostentation; because social status was a topic of mild amusement in our house, along with a touch of scorn, I came to adulthood with a deeply ingrained understanding that virtue is its own reward. In our family, honesty was a habit; tough-mindedness was a given; and excuses were pretty much beside the point. Putting all that together, I ended up with a pretty jaundiced view of the world I live in today. Nevertheless, if I look around me now, at the real people right next to me, I still see those self-same values being lived into. I don’t see those values in social media; I don’t see them in the news; I don’t see them in advertisements and marketing ploys, but they’re real, and they matter.

I’ve come to the conclusion that unless a person is right here in the real world where I can see the sheen of sweat on their skin, hear them breathing, and tell what they are looking at, then that person isn’t entirely real. I just read an article about ‘deep fakes’ which describes how video images can be manipulated to create a fictional person who can be made to do and say anything, and who can’t be distinguished from a real person. It made me laugh. Of course they can! No image on a screen can ever be taken as a real person. No story in print or film can be substituted for real events. Something is always missing, left out for expedience’s sake, or deliberately manipulated for an intended effect.

A friend of mine was describing some of the reasons that she is exhausted by having to teach classes in a video format, and she pointed out that her students couldn’t tell which of them she was looking at, so they didn’t know that she was trying to call on them. Her comment exploded in my brain, and my neurons are still ringing with the aftershock. What really scares me is that it doesn’t seem as if many people are aware of exactly what they are missing. I don’t think we can survive without  being in each other’s presence to communicate. I’m reminded of the stories of people who have driven off cliffs following the GPS navigation in their cars.

It’s necessary, it’s essential, to place our senses in contact with the real world!

I have another notion: The reason video pastimes are so addicting is that our brains are constantly straining to find the information we are used to getting from the environment, and when we don’t get it we feel compelled to keep on trying to locate it. The smells, the tastes, the background noise, the gravity, the centrifugal forces, the wind, the sun, the subliminal presence of other bodies…. all are missing, and we are compelled by their very absence to keep on trying to find them. And all the time, no-one can tell if you are looking at them.

So, now I sit in front of my computer, looking at tiny faces on the screen, feeling their absence even as I see them right before my eyes. I can’t tell if they are looking at me or not, and I feel my shoulders hunch and my diaphragm tighten, and I wonder what it means. We are not in the same room, and we don’t share the same odors or sensations; we don’t participate in the same distractions. It’s a desolate feeling. If the people on the screen are my friends; if we have a shared history of doing things together, then my memory and imagination can supply some of what is missing, but if they are strangers, people I’ve never met or don’t know well, then things just keep on getting more and more surreal.

Back to childhood and the things we remember:

We love to remember these things because they are actual things. They anchor us in reality. I remember the smell of those wax lips and candy cigarettes. I remember the smell and feel of laundry washed in Fels-Naptha and dried on the line in the sun. I remember the dust on my saddle shoes and the squeak when I tightened my skates onto their soles. I remember leaning with all my weight on the oil can spout, and the satisfying chunk as it punched through the top of the can. I remember the smell of my Dad’s sweat and the grease on his hands as he lifted me up so I could pour the oil into the engine all by myself.

I remember my mother rinsing diapers in the toilet. I remember plucking pin-feathers out of the Thanksgiving turkey with a pair of pliers. I remember the smell of iodine, and calamine lotion, and the vinegar my grandmother used to put on my sunburn. I remember the smell of lightning bugs captured in a jar. I remember my little sister and I putting on our bathing suits and running outside to play in summer thunderstorms— splashing our feet in the racing gutters and sticking out our tongues to catch the raindrops.

Recently I’ve gone back to reading real books with pages that turn. I’ve thought about getting out a real deck of cards to play solitaire, or buying a real jigsaw puzzle and putting it together on a real table. I’ve gone outside in the yard every day for the last two weeks to pull weeds and prune, plant seeds, rake and sweep, and spray vinegar on the bindweed. I have mosquito bites and a bit of a suntan. I can feel the winter sludge being sluiced out of my pores by my sweat. My water bottle runneth over, and I gulp down gratitude with every swallow. I squirt the hose over my head after the sunbaked hot water finishes running out of it, and gasp my praise out with the splashing.

I encounter miniature monsters boiling hastily out from underneath the border rocks to escape the vinegar. Ants. Earwigs. Pill bugs. Box elder bugs. Centipedes. I sense a whole dark world among the grass roots and damp undersides of things. It goes about its silent, intense business without me. I brush the earwigs off my ankle and carry on.

I collapse into the hammock and marvel at how the breeze surrounds me on all sides. The climbing roses clamor redly and expand to the edges of my view. The sparrows chant and chatter for no reason, flying pell-mell in and out of the ivy on the chimney. A magpie stolidly ignores the sparrows’ sudden high-decibel outrage and keeps on eating a fallen nestling. A starling sits on the roof-peak and flips its folded wings in some secret code, squealing in hypersonic rounds of inexplicable enthusiasm. Aspen leaves rotate on their contrary stems, flipping nonchalantly through a thousand different planes of time and space, as I watch dumbstruck in appreciation.

All this goes on whether I notice or not…. but here’s what I know for certain:

This is what I can’t do without.