IT’S IN YOUR AGE

How you are, that is. It seems to me we are a product of our generation and we sometimes don’t know it.

I know a gentleman who happens to be a few years younger than me, who I happen to like. I admire his honesty, his humbleness and his leadership skills. We were talking recently about protocol and respecting people’s religious beliefs, and he related to me a story about his mom.

It seems it was her birthday, and he sent his mom an edible fruit basket, and decided to follow it up with a call. He asked his mother if she got the fruit basket and she said yes, but why did he send her the basket of fruit?

He explained to her that he had a present for her, but wanted her to have something on her birthday until he could give her, her present, and she replied that she couldn’t possibly eat all that fruit. He said he felt like banging his head on a wall and told her he was sorry that it caused her so much angst, that maybe she could share it with her friends and neighbors!

Years ago, when I was in Florida with my wife and kids on a vacation, we left a restaurant after lunch and outside was this fountain with a pool. On the bottom of the pool was a lot of coins that people tossed into it for wishes of success or good luck or a dream. TLW (The Little Woman) started to toss her coins into the pool and gave what she could to the kids to toss too. She then asked me for coins and I said no. She made fun of me for being cheap (I’m really not) but I held my ground.

I started to think about those two incidents, the gentleman’s mom and me and realize we are all products of our generations. His mother probably grew up in the Great Depression and I was a child from a poor family that lived by the habits of those who grew up through the depression, we don’t know any better. Frugality was a way of life, something you did automatically. To waste food or throw away money was unheard of, a sin of the highest.

It even explains to some degree my being a saver of old clothes and shoes and things I really don’t need or use anymore, but I can’t toss because they look perfectly good, style or no style.

Now a gallon of milk usually lasts in my house about 5 to 7 days. That includes coffee, and cereal every morning or an occasional glass at night, and this is for 3 people. Yet whenever a snow storm is forecasted, people go out and buy up 3 or maybe even 4 gallons of milk, enough cold cuts to fill a salt mine and God knows what else, while topping off their gas tanks for their cars that will sit in their driveway or garage, idle because they are snowed in for a few hours. I wonder how much milk and food goes to waste every winter?