As I was pushing my shopping cart through the grocery store yesterday, getting ready to head to the checkout line, a strange sensation came over me. It led me to the “paper and plastics” aisle, where I grabbed a total of eight food storage containers of various sizes, but with the same size lids to fit them all.
And then I drove home, where I told my wife: “I’m declaring the Great Depression over!”
Technically, I wasn’t alive during the Great Depression, which ended in 1939, a decade or so before I was born. But I grew up like a Great Depression kid because my parents lived through it, and they never really got over the idea that the hard times were behind them.
It didn’t help that World War II followed hot on the heels of the Depression, forcing Americans to ration everything from rubber to steel in order to supply the troops overseas. Families all over America learned to do without, or to find a way to squeeze every bit of use out of an item before discarding it. By the time Dad came home from the war and the lean times were finally over, he was close to 30, with Mom not far behind. They had lived most of their lives not knowing what abundance felt like.
And so, when I was born a few years after the war ended, in a period of abundance all over America, my parents still lived as if the next privation was lurking just outside the door.
Mom and Dad never let us throw anything away if there was the slightest chance that it might be used again. They could have written a book on the merits of thriftiness: “101 Uses for that Bread Bag and Ball of Twine.”
Dad was always dismantling things before discarding anything, breaking them down to their component parts — nuts, bolts, nails, screws — and storing them in coffee cans above the workbench for future use. Whenever he needed to do any carpentry work around the house, it was my job to sit on the sidewalk with a hammer, straightening out old bent, rusty nails so he could use them again in his new project.
It was the same way in the kitchen, where Mom saved everything — pickle jars, sheets of aluminum foil, cottage cheese tubs — and used them to store leftovers. She used old tin cans to bake little loaves of date-and-nut bread. She had a drawer filled with bread-bag twist ties and newspaper rubber bands of every size, color and length — more than you could ever use again in a lifetime, but still.
Though my wife’s parents weren’t quite as fanatical about it, the story was much the same as she grew up. And so, when we got married, it just seemed natural to keep doing what we were both used to doing all along. Any plastic or glass food container with a cap or lid that could be sealed tightly could be washed and used again. We filled our kitchen cabinets with them and used them over and over.
But yesterday, walking through the aisles at Jewel, I suddenly decided that enough was enough.
When I got home, I strode in with a smile and gave my wife the joyous news: “I’m declaring the Great Depression over!” And when I carried my shopping bags into the kitchen, she rolled after me with a smile, eager to learn the madness to my method.
I opened the kitchen cabinet that held all our food-storage containers and spread them across the kitchen floor. It would have broken a Tupperware salesman’s heart to see it, because it was nothing more than a pile of random plastic butter tubs, cottage cheese containers, and the like — more than 50 of them, and most of them without a lid that still matched it.
My wife sat behind me and chuckled at the mess.
“I’m not even going to try matching lids to any of them,” I said. “The Depression is over!” I shoved the old containers and random lids into a pile. Then I put the new store-bought food storage tubs with matching lids on the shelf and closed the cabinet door with an almost-hollow thump.
I packed all the old plastic tubs into a trash bag and carried them to the garage, where I dumped them into the recycling bin with only a twinge of worry that I would someday regret being so rash and wasteful. I took comfort in knowing that, since they were being recycled, perhaps I would see them again in some other incarnation.
When I came back inside, my wife smiled and pumped her fist triumphantly. Because — at least in our kitchen — the Great Depression was finally over.
And, who knew, maybe the Depression’s end would someday finally reach my workbench and all those coffee cans filled with old nuts, bolts, nails and screws.
