Putting the Recess Back In Recession

Before I begin musing once again about interesting (to me, at least) linguistic phenomena, let me preface my remarks by noting that I am fully aware that the recession has hurt many people, and these may not find much of a silver lining in the current economic situation. The President himself has recently noted that while Americans are losing jobs, the recovery--however promising it might look to some of us--has a long way to go.

That said, I did want to mention some of the more positive events that have been collecting in my pile of tear-sheets from the newspaper, and to muddle around in yet another etymological connection.

We probably all remember that blessed moment in elementary school every day (sometimes twice) called "recess," when we'd all pour out of doors happily to escape our educational imprisonment for twenty minutes of running around screaming, playing on the monkey bars, playing four-square, or jump-rope, or trying to elude the reigning bully. It occurs to me now that all my memories of "recess" are drawn from the single year I spent in a U. S. school, between my father's stints in Japan and Taiwan. All my schooling before and after that occurred in Asia, until I returned home permanently to begin high school--and I don't really remember "recess" as part of my experience overseas.

The only other "recess" story I have involves my son, and the first pre-school he attended at about 4 and a half. Since he could already read, I let the administrators place him in a reading program meant to encourage and build on existing abilities. But when I picked him up after his first day, he announced in no uncertain terms that he hated reading. Oops! It turns out that the school's special program involved keeping kids in from recess to read instead of going out to play.

Now, I don't know whose lame-ass idea that was, but I yanked that kid out that school the very next day, and eventually found a Montessori school out in the country, which turned out to be about the best thing that ever happened to either of my children (my daughter started there at 18 months, at her own insistence). Recess to children in this country is sacrosanct, so if you want to, say, break them from smoking or drinking, insist that they stay in for recess to do it, and the problem is licked.

All silly jokes aside, "recess" was once a good thing. But because it comes from the same root as the dreaded word "recession," I thought that playing around with the innate concepts involved in that root might be illuminating, and suggest reasons for some of the more positive views of the current economic moment that are starting to emerge.

The noun, recess, according to the OED, refers to "the act of retiring for a time from some occupation; a period of cessation from usual work or employment," or "cessation from work, relaxation, leisure." It comes from the Latin resessus (from the verb recidere, to recede, draw back, retire, retreat) which means a going back, a receding, a retreat--or even a place of retreat. The thing about words that always confuses us, however, is that they frequently connote both positive and negative aspects of the same concept. So, while recess to a kid is replete with ideas of fun and games, that's hardly what recession implies in economic terms.

However, I have been noticing an increasing number of efforts to put a positive spin on current conditions. I'm thinking in particular of a photo in the Dallas Morning News a few weeks ago (I can't even hope to find it now) of a guy sitting on his back patio reading the paper, simply because he had started to slow down. His family is eating meals together on a regular basis these days, because they're becoming more conscious of how much money they spend, and aren't eating out as much. Instead of running out to breakfast and shopping afterward, he was relaxing in his back yard on a pleasant Saturday morning.

Another recent article from the local rag (pinched from the New York Times) by Pico Iyer carried the headline, "The Joy of Less." It was originally posted on the Times's new "Happy Days" blog, which carries this description:

The severe economic downturn has forced many people to reassess their values and the ways they act on them in their daily lives. For some, the pursuit of happiness, sanity, or even survival, has been transformed. Happy Days is a discussion about the search for contentment in its many forms — economic, emotional, physical, spiritual — and the stories of those striving to come to terms with the lives they lead.

Pico Iyer's contribution describes his own, rather spare, life in the outskirts of Kyoto (which I find enviable, to say the least, based on my remote memories of the Japanese countryside, and the simplicity of our life in rural Japan). He notes, however that it's not for everybody:

I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

In the papers every week I see evidence that the economic downturn carries, at least in some sense, a positive aspect, and perhaps an optimistic note or two. The local kerfuffle (I do so love this word, and Rachel Maddow didn't use it even once this week, so I will) over city chickens (whether or not they can be sold in Dallas garden shops is the Big Topic lately), the increasing number of backyard and front-yard veggie and herb gardens, the resurgence of various nesting behaviors (among people as well as chickens), the formations of more-or-less accidental communities of like-minded folk: all of these stories and events provide a little hope that we've managed to muster a bit of can-do spirit to replace some of the whining we used to do about how bad things were.

My cranky little newly-repaired heart was warmed this week by a conversation with my daughter, who lives in a converted industrial building in one of the legendary neighborhoods of Dallas: Deep Ellum (or "way down on Elm street"). Although it's being gentrified by rehabbing, a new DartRail station, and new construction, it's still a bit seedy and if I hadn't already planted myself here in the northern 'burbs, I would seriously consider moving there. Her fellow loft-dwellers are a generally friendly lot, and several of the neighbors have gotten together to form a sort of Sunday supper club. My daughter loves to cook, but seldom does because she lives alone (with a Very Large Dog who can't eat people food) and it's not worth the trouble after a long workday. She and the neighbors and their dogs now pool their resources and have become a little family of folks who enjoy one another's company on a regular basis.

I don't mean to sentimentalize the situation, but the economy we knew was completely unsustainable. People were making and buying way too much crap, spending way too much money, and incurring consequent debt. Having to cut back doesn't have to mean establishing a lower standard of living. Different, certainly, but perhaps actually higher, in terms of contentment, happiness, or whatever we want to call the psychological well-being that comes with shedding some of our stressful behaviors and reassessing our values.

The Times is also running a segment in its Economy section called Living With Less: The Human Side of the Global Recession. The conversations attending this coverage and the Happy Days Blog are interesting and informative, so I highly recommend both to anybody who wants to tune in to this aspect of the debate on recession and recovery, and who might want to be thinking about this whole thing as an adult form of recess.

Image credit: Hammock in a Beach House by Raven712 at Wikimedia Commons. In my advancing stage of old-guyness, a hammock is a necessary requirement for recess, even though I don't yet own one.

Simpler Food, Better Lives

Some of my most treasured moments growing up in Taiwan involved taking a day off from school for an appointment with the Air Force dentist stationed at the "listening post" where my father worked as a radio code guy (we thought he was a spy). After the appointment, I was on my own until Daddy got off work, so I'd head for the base library for the afternoon, and this is where I discovered both science fiction and British children's adventure fiction in the guise of Enid Blyton.

I loved these stories (especially Island of Adventure and Five Go to Smuggler's Top) because the kids were much braver than I was and I could enjoy their perils vicariously. One remarkable (to me) aspect of these adventures, however, was the emphasis on food. The protagonists were always off on picnics or camping trips and would take enormous amounts of food with them. Or they'd buy freshly baked goods and fresh fruit and good cheese from an affable farmer's wife--or they'd come upon stores of tinned food (including, usually, potted meat and peaches) in pirate lairs.

On weekends we'd often head off to Bitan (Green Lake), near Taipei, where my parents and their friends would hire a canopied boat. It doesn't look all that attractive in some of these vintage photos I found, but we'd load the boat up with food, beer, sarsaparilla, and chisueh (a 7-Up clone), and chug out to the middle of the lake where we'd spend the day talking, eating, and swimming.

Many of my earliest memories, in fact, centered on the very particular combination of camaraderie, fun, and companionable eating and drinking. As a result, it's really no wonder why my own utopia is replete with these same associations--especially among eating, drinking, and talking. And it seems that the simplest food--picnic staples like sandwiches and fruit, grilled veg and meat--makes it possible for human beings not only to survive, but to create the background for lasting friendships and meaningful conversations. Summer, even here in the humid Southwest, brings out the legions of backyard barbecue mavens anxious to try out the latest marinade. Beer-swilling minions brave the heat and the mozzies to show off their cooking talent, and fill the breeze with the scent of roasting flesh--and lighter fluid.

Ah well. If only these folks would learn that they don't have to douse their charcoal with petrochemicals in order to make it burn. A simple chimney affair will get it lit within a few minutes and move us one step further from dependence on fossil fuels. But, I digress.

The nature of these activities is almost primal. Grilling our food takes us back to our roots and ties us into the first culinary traditions. Cooking outside also keeps the temperature in our houses down, and reduces the amount of electricity and/or gas we use, thus lowering our energy bills. But the sheer simplicity of it all is what attracts me: throw a few peppers on the grill along with assorted other bits, make up a simple salad, bake some flatbread, and voila: an al fresco feast worthy of our earliest ancestors. As long as we don't char everything, we can avoid the carcinogenic effects of grilling; as in everything else, moderation is the key--as is mindful preparation.

There's a lot to be said for peasant food, especially in times when folks are spending more and more of their budgets at the supermarket. The less processed the food, the cheaper (as I mentioned in my last post), and the more potential there is for creating truly healthful menus. In many ways, meals based on whole grains and pulses, with vegetables and fruits cooked or eaten raw alongside, would address a number of problems (including heart disease, diabetes, and cancer) and help transform the economy.

Unfortunately, the world-wide food picture looks rather grim. Here I am, suggesting that everyone eat more whole grains, while the price of grain is making even this basic "staff of life" more and more difficult to obtain for more and more people on earth. The causes are manifold, but among them is one ironic ingredient: the growing prosperity of formerly marginal economies is increasing the demand for meat--which in turn raises the price of the grain used to feed cattle. In addition, the growing demand for biofuels is further affecting the price we pay for a bowl of cereal or a loaf of bread. Supplies can't keep up with demand, and so prices go up--it's the law of the market economy. The situation provides yet another reason to decrease our intake of meat. Even if you can't bring yourself to become a vegetarian or a vegan, it's not all that hard to forgo being a carnivore a couple of times a week. It might also be time to make friends with a hunter or two.

Dairy products and eggs are also increasingly expensive, especially if one insists on buying from organic, free-range, grass fed sources. Few of us would like to give up our daily glass of moo-juice or grated Parmesan on our pasta. But these are essentially luxuries that can be extended with some imagination--or even done without altogether. I seldom use eggs, so that when I buy them I can afford a half-dozen organic cage-free versions from (preferably) local growers. In a pinch, dried skim milk will sub for the fresh variety in cooking, and a glass or two to drink is all we really need. We are, I'm constantly reminded by vegan friends, the only species that drinks the breast-milk of other lactating animals. So it's certainly not an absolute need. In truth, almost everything we can think of cooking can be made without dairy products at all. Well, maybe not real lasagna . . . .

Reading books on how people survived the Great Depression and rationing during the war years can be instructive, and the best of these is M. F. K. Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf, originally published in 1942 (and reprinted, along with others, in the collection The Art of Eating). She goes off on everything from the idea of "balanced meals" (in her chapter, "How to be a Sage without Hemlock") to eating sparsely with friends ("How to Be Cheerful Though Starving"), and much of what she wrote then is still applicable today--and certainly timely. With the possible exception of Frances Moore Lappé's Diet for a Small Planet, I don't think any other book has more thoroughly influenced my views of food and community as this one has.

I also recommend reading the recent reprint of Helen Nearing's Simple Food for the Good Life: Random Acts of Cooking and Pithy Quotations, from the doyenne of simple living. The original version was published in 1980, and there is no better source for solid advice on plain cooking with wholesome ingredients. If you're a confirmed carnivore, you could learn a lot about how to get by without eating animals from this book. The Nearings' work is being carried on these days at The Good Life Center, which deserves a visit, if only online. And for truly inspiring source on simple eating and building community, see Eat Grub--the organization founded by Anna Blythe Lappé (daughter of Frances) and "eco-chef" Bryant Terry.

And this is really the core of getting by and eating well: learning to enjoy basic foodstuffs, and to do without what isn't really necessary. Since I try not to eat tortured animals, I eat little meat. I could probably become a vegetarian again fairly easily, although I'm not particularly bothered by eating animals who've been humanely raised and not killed in horrible scary factory abbatoirs that haven't changed much, it seems, since Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle. But one could easily argue that killing anything is hardly humane, at the core. And that may be right, and I may come around to that way of seeing things in the end. Nevertheless, it is certainly wise to minimize the amount of meat one does consume, and to make sure that it's not plugged full of hormones and antibiotics and other crap. It just makes sense to eat any food in as natural a state as possible.

One encouraging sign, in addition to the proliferation of farmers' markets I mentioned in my last post, is the growing availability of so-called "heirloom" plants. A burgeoning effort to re-establish fruits and vegetable varieties now makes it easier to buy tastier versions of everyday items like tomatoes and apples, and easier to grow your own alternatives to Burpee Big Boys. At the moment, the supermarket offerings are pricey, and unless they're organic they've probably been sprayed abundantly with bug-murdering chemicals. But local markets are offering more and more alternative choices with the possibilities of different nutrients (according to color) and more varied flavors. Once you've bitten into a fresh, warm Mortgage Lifter tomato (an appropriate choice for the current economic moment), you'll never want to touch another Beefsteak. Try doing a Google search on "heirloom" tomatoes to see how pervasive this movement is becoming.

I'm not sure how it was that Americans became addicted to all things sweet, but we could easily do without all the sugar we consume. Of course lots of food contains various sugars, and it's not necessary to avoid them. But huge amounts of added sugars end up in processed foods, and are completely unnecessary to our existence on this planet. Another advantage to cooking from scratch is that you can control the sugar content by not adding any.

While I'm at it, the very idea that "dessert" has to be a part of everyone's evening meal is ludicrous. And if we really want to round out the experience of eating a lovingly prepared bean casserole and a salad, a nice fresh peach in season should do it.

Confections such as cakes and cookies do not have to be a regular part of our diets. They can certainly be eaten on occasion, but we do not have to have them every day in order to remain human, I promise you. We tend to add unnecessary sugar to everything, including bread, but why not bake wholesome, unsweetened whole grained flatbread (like pita or naan) most of the time, with the Friday night challah (made with whole wheat flour) ritually added as a weekly treat? While there's no reason to deny oneself of the celebretory slice of chocolate cake, there is also no reason to assume that we actually need this stuff. Buy yourself a good jar of honey and leave it at that. Don't keep sugars in your pantry, and you'll find other ways to satisfy your sweet tooth: a handful of dried cherries, a few dried figs, a nice cold apple.

The bottom line is this: simple food can be inexpensive, nutritious, and relatively easy to prepare. Minimize the meat and sweets, and concentrate on fiber, along with colorful vegetables and fruits. You need nine servings of the latter per day, but a serving is only the size of your fist--so it's pretty easy to accumulate the optimal number, and it's not terribly expensive if you buy in season--especially from local markets. We are extremely fortunate in this country to still have abundant food (far too much of it in many cases) at prices most of us can still afford. But if we could imagine, even for one day a week, what less affluent folk have to get by on, perhaps we could become wiser about what and how we eat.

Cooking simple, nourishing, traditional foods with friends not only provides companionship and builds communities, but it provides opportunities for sharing garden produce and learning new cuisines. The adventure of discovering new ways of cooking may not be as exciting as stumbling upon tinned peaches and Spam in a smuggler's cave, but it can have its moments--and you won't have to worry about being abducted by pirates.

Photo credits: "Peasant Meal," an illumination for Aristotle's Politiques et économiques, France, 15th century. Paris, Biblioteque nationale, Département des manuscrits. "Old tomato varieties" taken at Marché Beauveau, Place d'Aligre, Paris, by "Popolon." Photo of 6-braid whole-wheat challah in the process of being shaped for baking. Photo taken on March 30, 2006 by Yoninah. All from Wikimedia Commons.

Spring Time

If I had my druthers, we’d be on “daylight savings time” all the time—even though the notion of “saving daylight” is pretty silly. The very idea of mechanical time is problematic to me, since it always seems to interfere with “real” time: i.e. seasons, circadian rhythms, phenology, and other natural forms of “telling” time. But the idea that one can “save” daylight by moving the hands on mechanical clocks around (or resetting digits on a digital clock) seems absurd. It doesn’t really save anything, since the number of hours of sunlight doesn’t change—we just do a bad job of training ourselves to get up earlier for part of the year. It would be more tolerable if the clock switch took place regularly at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes (at which time we would at least acknowledge the fact that temporal changes have something to do with seasons), but when we decide to “spring ahead” and “fall back” now seems pretty arbitrary, and it hasn’t been very constant lately. So the switch tends to leave me fairly befuddled these days.

For some reason I can’t really explain, I’m fond of old clocks and timing devices, although I don’t even wear a watch. I find it amusing to check with my students on the timing of my lectures and usually get a laugh when I’m spot-on (I try to keep the talking and slide-showing down to 90 minutes at a time). Nevertheless, I own two lovely old clocks, one each from the maternal and paternal branches of my family. One, known as “Uncle Fred’s Clock” is a Seth Thomas oak shelf or kitchen clock with a carved case and a pretty etched design on its glass front. It’s supposed to be an “Eight Day Half Hour Strike” job, but I’ve only ever gotten it to work for a few minutes at a time. The eponymous “Uncle Fred” was my great grand uncle, Fred Uhlmeyer, who settled in the Owens Valley in the nineteenth century, and who washed the ore from his mining claim at the spot now known on the U. S. geological survey as “Uhlmeyer Spring.” He’s mentioned on p. 142 of the 1975 edition of The Story of Inyo, by W. A. Chalfant, as having “squatted” in the Valley. There’s also a nod to him in More News From Nowhere, since most of the “action” (if you can call it that) takes place nearby in my future version of the area. [Thanks, by the way, to my Uncle Art—my Dad’s youngest brother and only surviving sibling—who helped me figure this out, and who’ll swear it’s true as long as I get it mostly right.]

At any rate, the clock looks great on one of the built-in bookshelves that flank the fireplace in our bungalow living room. It’s balanced on the other side by an onyx and glass Ansonia crystal regulator (of unknown name or vintage) that came from the Worden side of the family. I remember my grandmother’s winding it before bed each night, when she and her second husband (another Fred) lived in Coos Bay, Oregon. What I really love about this clock, however, is that although it works, it keeps crappy time. And even though it strikes on the hour and half-hour, it’s pretty arbitrary about how many times it “bongs”—and never any more than seven, no matter what time it is. I simply wind it occasionally, but don’t re-set it, so that it keeps its own peculiar time. There’s something reassuring about its complete arbitrariness, a reminder that we human beings are really not in control of anything, and certainly not of time.

Today, on the vernal equinox, the sun shone into my dining room window for the first time since dawn on the autumnal equinox last year. The single east-facing window in that room (the others face north) serves as a time-henge, marking the beginnings of two seasons. I’m not sure when I first noticed it, but made sure to note the coincidence henceforth; since then it’s provided a non-mechanical marker that delights us both. It takes the place of Easter and Passover in a non-religious household as a way of reminding us of “when” we are in the year. This morning my dear, sweet husband, who thinks I’m only a little nuts, gleefully woke me (and the three cats under which I was helplessly pinned) to announce the Arrival of Spring.

All this reminds me that despite my love for machines like clocks and orreries (those wonderful models of planetary motion like the one in The Dark Crystal, or Penn’s Rittenhouse model ), I truly mourn the demise of the physical, sensual ways in which human beings used to tell time. When people had to chip a notch into a bone to mark the passing of a day, or a phase of the moon, it made us more conscious of our connection with the celestial movements that affect our lives directly in such phenomena as tides and growth cycles. There were once ceremonies to celebrate such momentous events as the onset of menses (from the Latin for “month”), and there should be one for reaching menopause— because both events signal the parameters of human fertility, and may once have made women seem magical (that is, before males discovered that they had a role to play and then decided that it was the major role). But the more we insulate ourselves from the natural world, taking drugs that alter our biological clocks, “saving daylight,” building temperature-controlled houses, flooding our cities with incessant light, growing monoculture lawns watered by automatic sprinklers, riding in cars to work and on stationary bikes in gyms for exercise (instead of walking to work and working in our gardens, feeding ourselves)—the more we move away from our physical knowledge of the world, the less we understand about it, and the less we will have to say about what becomes of it.

It occurs to me that one of the more subtle, yet ominous, effects of global warming is that in addition to causing all sorts of havoc (like this week’s drenching and unseasonal rain) it ’s beginning to muck with phenological indications of seasonal change. I hadn’t realized that folks were actually taking note of the potential for problems until I went looking around the internet for links on the topic, and found one for the USA National Phenology Network, which “exists to facilitate collection and dissemination of phenological data to support global change research.” So it’s already clear that we’re not just gumming up the atmosphere and causing extinctions; we’re causing the signs of change themselves to change. What’s really going to be interesting is to see whether we’ll allow ourselves enough time to learn an entirely new language, especially since most of us seem to have forgotten, or never even learned, the existing one.

Life was somewhat simpler, and probably a bit sweeter, when we guaged time by the spawning of fish or the arrival of sun in a window—or by even the daily winding of Uncle Fred’s clock. But now that it’s officially Spring, I’ll comfort myself by keeping watch for the blooming of the wild gladioli, and get busy with the planting, already.

Muddling Toward Frugality

It recently occurred to me that “frugality” might offer a nice substitute for the over-used and ill-understood notion of “simplicity.” People who talk about “simple living” these days don’t really mean it the way I do (simplifying life by making quicker dinners and spending less time cleaning house seems to miss the point), but maybe what I’m really talking about is being frugal: not wasting stuff, cutting down on excess, using time carefully, saving resources.

I stole the title for this post from Warren Johnson’s 1978 paean to decentralization and the inefficiency of the adaptive process. I’m sure that many of my ideas about utopia come from reading this book and others like it when I was coming of age and needed something to do while I was nursing babies. The only problem is that it may be a bit late now, thirty years later (with things going worse than many of us ever imagined back then), to rely on muddling—as a species, at least. But I think that ultimately most of my ideas about frugality as a laudable approach to life were gleaned from sources like my grandmother (whose father, as I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, drove a stagecoach) and M. F. K. Fisher—whose book How To Cook A Wolf (about surviving the Depression) was the first book I ever read that could be described as a philosophical approach to cooking.

The chapter I remember best is “How to Have a Sleek Pelt,” which considers the ethics of pet ownership in trying times, and allows for fellow-feeling between human beings and animals that’s not circumscribed by notions of human primacy. While feeding animals when people were having a hard time obtaining enough for themselves to eat might have seemed sentimental (or even problematic) at the time, it simply seems generous to me at this point in history.

My grandmother learned frugality the old-fashioned way—at her own mother’s knee—and she practiced it throughout her life. I find myself thinking of her frequently these days, as I rinse out a plastic sandwich bag or carefully fold lightly-used aluminum foil for later re-use. The standard recycling mantra “reduce, reuse, recycle” seems to have been born among people of my grandmother’s generation, who did so out of necessity rather than choice, and then later did so out of habit. And I’ve survived in meager enough economic circumstances during my own life to appreciate what she taught me, and to make use of her lessons even in times of relative plenty.

Being frugal, of course, is not the same thing as being stingy. Frugality implies a sort of wisdom, knowing where things come from, what they mean, where they end up. If you have a fair idea about the origins of aluminum foil and how long it takes to disintegrate, you’re more likely to be careful about how you use it; plastic is even more pernicious, so a frugal person will avoid using it in the first place, and then make damned sure that it’s re-used and at least recycled. I will admit to a certain amount of smug pleasure when I set out the single blue trash bin (my city’s recycling container), on Fridays when all but one other house on the block puts out one or two of the big green bins whose contents are destined for the landfill. But I’d be a better, more frugal person if I could further reduce the number of times the blue bin goes out per month.

In fact, recycling programs, laudable as they are, are something of a sop; they probably give us a false sense of security about our contribution to planetary destruction, when much more drastic measures are really called for. In truth, individual frugality is almost meaningless when the West is on a consumptive binge that shows few signs of letting up, but which cannot go on forever if we, or any other species on the planet, are survive. Not only that, but we’re teaching the Third World to be just like us, so that whatever frugality they’ve learned from poverty will be subverted by newer, profligate economies.

Out of curiosity, I just googled the word “frugality,” and now I’m sorry I did. It, like “simplicity,” has become what I’ve started calling a “lifestyle buzzword”—a bandwagon flag that promises a more fulfilling life if we save our Christmas cards and reuse them to make more crap. “Frugal living” is now also a synonym for “simple living” with its accompanying emphasis on saving money, and making more time for the family by cooking meals more quickly.

None of this, of course, is necessarily bad. But it is misdirected. What we need to save is the planet, not a few pennies on a loaf of bread so we can spend them on gas. Way too many people on this earth can’t afford to have “lifestyles.” It’s all they can do to stay alive.

A truly frugal approach to meals would involve growing as much of one’s own food as possible, to avoid wasting fossil fuels and other forms of energy. It would entail careful planning instead of “quick and easy” menus, and slow, deliberate, thoughtful cooking that involves the entire family rather than mom’s slapping something together so she has time to sit down with dad and the kids to eat before they rush off to the next planned activity.

A frugal approach to time would also involve deliberation: choosing carefully how one spends one’s time, so that learning, community, and communication take precedence over competition and consumerism. Families could play informal games of soccer rather than join organized teams, and stay home to play music instead of going shopping “for fun.”

I am thankful that I don’t have to prepare my own cats’ food, as Fisher once did; but at least I still know how, because her book owns pride of place on my shelf, and I read it whenever I need to be reminded of how easy—if only temporarily so—our lives are today, compared to what things were like in the decade before I was born. They didn't have "lifestyles" then, either.

Simplify, Simplify

All the talk about "living simply" (or, as the Philistines would have it, "living simple") is starting to stick in my craw. Crabby person that I am, I find it at best disingenuous, and at worst self-serving and fundamentally dishonest.

What can be simple about spending a fortune on storage items for accumulated crap? Unless it is simply good for the economy (as the recent sale of The Container Store might indicate). Now, I have nothing against the Container Store itself; I owe what organization exists in my house in large part to the versatile Swedish bookcases I can only buy there. But the very existence of a store whose sole purpose is to help us stow away (fashionably) all of the excess detritus of our consumer-driven lives seems to be counterproductive if our aim is "simple living." Such simplicity seems to come easily to those who live in half-million dollar McMansions with pristine carpets, designer furniture, California Closets, and a plasma television set in each of its five bathrooms. A trip to the Whole Foods in a nearby neighborhood (a bedroom community for the telecom industry) one recent winter brought me into contact with a mink-cloaked woman whose grocery basket was packed with $40 wine, exotic cheeses, organic frozen dinners, and a copy of Real Simple. My inner communist was so offended that I didn't return to the store for over a year, and then only because it's located right down the street from my cardiologist (allowing me to combine trips, and save time and gas--major "simple living" goals). Some of the efforts to effect simple lives seem to have the right idea (the Simple Living Network, for example), but others seem to be missing the point.

So here's the conundrum. How do we channel Thoreau in a modern world that constantly militates against anything that even vaguely resembles what happened at Walden Pond all those years ago? The situation reminds me of what Morris faced as an early Socialist who could only do what he did because he had inherited wealth (and wealth from mining interests at that). His dilemma arose because although he advocated well-designed, hand-crafted items of what we would now call (shudder) "home decor" for everyone, only the wealthy could afford them. The problem persists today, because many of us who still appreciate the Arts and Crafts aesthetic don't have the income to afford it. At best we can buy cheaply-made "Craftsman" or "Mission" style knockoffs because they resemble the real thing; but then we're stuck with piece-of-crap imitations that quickly show their true colors. The Craftsman ideal involved honesty, after all, and the imitations are anything but honest.

If we truly want to simplify our lives, it seems that what we really need to do is stay out of stores altogether: Educate our desire, as Morris would put it. Determine what we really need, versus what we only want. A bit of navel-gazing in that direction is usually instructive, as I have often found when I'm short of cash. I automatically switch into what I call "poverty mode" and what had seemed like a compelling need for a new (insert item) the day before is seen for what it truly was: a desire brought about by reading one too many bungalow shelter magazines (what somebody has appropriately termed "house porn" because they're so arousing). I don't leave the house except for work, don't shop for anything except bare necessities (usually coffee, milk, and/or wine--none of which are, in fact, necessary), and around pay day the mode subsides and I hit the bookstore--sometimes for more house porn. Because I teach in a design school, I regard my magazine fetish as an occupational hazard. But I'm cutting back, in an effort to simplify.

I wonder, however, if we have lost the ability to educate our own children's desire. When mine were young, I exercised certain power: no Cabbage Patch dolls, no Barbies, no GI Joes, no Izod--no clothes with logos (why should I pay some guy to advertise his name?). But we were awash with Star Wars toys, Strawberry Shortcake (smelly, but cute), Matchbox cars, and Happy Family dolls. We were the last family on the block with a color television (a little 13-inch job bought in 1980 solely so I could watch Cosmos in color), but bought a Commodore 64 as soon as they came out, even though we couldn't afford one. As a result, I think my children are somewhat more skeptical about advertising and somewhat more thoughtful about consumption than their peers--but neither of them lives particularly "simply." They are kind-hearted (rescuers of stray dogs and cats), and more ecologically-aware than most, but they live in lofts and condos, and spend far more money than I ever would on modern technology.

It's hard for most of my students (who are now somewhat younger than my thirty-something children; I've been teaching for twenty years or so, and there used to be much more overlap) to understand that all of this technology has become available in the last century or so. My great grandfather ran a stage-coach station in western Nevada, where my grandmother was born in 1897. The family moved to the Owens River Valley when she was about 11, traveling over the mountains on the narrow-gauge railway (The Slim Princess). By the time she died, at 104, she had seen just about every major technological innovation that had occurred since the Industrial Revolution--including electricity and standard indoor plumbing. She used to remind me, when I was feeling particularly picked-upon because I didn't have all the stuff my friends had, that they got on quite nicely without electric lights and air conditioning, and without cars. She did own up to rather liking flush-toilets, radio (she avidly listened to Night Owls, one of the original talk shows), and the souped-up '69 Nova she bought to replace her '57 Chevy. And she especially appreciated not having to boil up her own bathwater on a wood-burning stove.

The idea that imperialist types have to save the world from "poverty" by inflicting modern technology and consumer desires on unsuspecting folks dazzled by the glamor of iPods, cell phones, computers, televisions, and the like seems to indicate more about our own guilt than any true humanitarian impulse. We need to re-think the idea of "poverty" in the first place, because some aspects of it lie at the very heart of real simplicity. Not having electricity does not make someone "poor." Not having access to basic medical care, clean water, sufficient food, and reliable shelter does. Being able to educate one's children, foster community, take care of the land, and live thoughtfully are all possible with minimal technology. Yet, the West seems hell-bent on eradicating "poverty" among people who could sustain themselves if we just left them alone to live they way they have for millennia. Most of us couldn't last a week in the wilderness without at least a space blanket and a good sized bag of trail mix, but we think the way we live is "rich." It is certainly rich in stuff, but we seem to be having a great deal of trouble trying to understand what to do with it all.

Instead of buying fancy (expensive) new boxes and bins to house our clutter, perhaps we should think about not buying all the clutter in the first place. I guess it starts with leaving the magazine on the bookstore shelf, but I really do understand how difficult that can be. Especially when confronted with a beautifully-photographed essay on pared-down living in a Green and Green bungalow. Sigh.