Christmas in Rehab

It occurs to me this morning that what happened to "the consumer economy" was that everyone sobered up and realized we've made an awful mess of our lives. The economy is looking like a holding tank for drunks. Continuing with the analogy, I wondered whether thinking about the present task as a recovery program can help us get somewhere with this mess.

Recovery from any addiction starts with that glimpse of stark reality known as "hitting bottom." I like Dante's description in The Inferno of waking up to find yourself in a dark wood. Recovery programs often help reinforce this realization by encouraging people to testify graphically to just exactly how awful they were. How awful were we as a nation? Consider Christmas.

What a burden it had become! Long shopping lists, waiting impatiently for other people to do the wrapping that was once fun. Obligatory parties. Pre-decorated artificial trees. Disappointment. Something had happened to a holiday that once featured hand-signed cards and cookies made from scratch, and handmade gifts and cherished traditional ornaments. All those things were now purchased by people who also bought storage containers and closet organizers, because we already had more stuff than we could handle.

One horrible Christmas years ago (before I sobered up on this matter) I sat with relatives and watched a little girl literally stagger with tiredness, opening hundreds of dollars worth of Barbie paraphernalia, all bought on credit by grandparents who were going to declare bankruptcy after the holidays. A favored first grandchild, she had been opening gifts all day long, and the evening before. She was only three, but she knew she was supposed to be pleased with every pink outfit that emerged from the recklessly torn paper. She kept trying to smile and do what people told her: here's the remote, you can run the convertible! Blindly, she punched the buttons. Put Barbie in the car! She tried.

Tomorrow the bad news about retail is going to be official; people did shop on Black Friday, violently in fact, but they bought only bargains. That wasn't the idea. Retailers can't afford to have people shop like that. The idea was to lure you into the store with a loss leader (something reasonably priced) and have you exultently fill your cart with other, high-priced stuff. It's looking like the November retail figures will be more sobering news as far as the stock market is concerned, but maybe it's good pain, really.

I notice that my neighborhood is far less illuminated this year than in the past. We ourselves used to string old-fashioned colored lights on one of the pines at the edge of the ravine, but that tree is almost dead, with the climate change. And we figured out that those lights were real energy hogs.

It's okay. The ravine is beautiful as it stands. Maybe Christmas can be beautiful too, can be about peace on earth. What we were doing was beginning to seem garish, inappropriate, tiring and, like getting drunk, not really much fun the morning after.

The new normal

The picture: Jizo in the Zen garden, unconcerned about the change of seasons.
~~~~~~~~
"You know, poverty isn't so bad." I can imagine a character in an off-Broadway production saying it to a friend, with a lilt of surprise in her voice. The play wouldn't be about real poverty, of course, the grind of hunger and bad sanitation, unsafe neighborhoods, no medical care, no hope. It would be about the new poverty many middle-class Americans are facing. You could call it the same old simplicity. We are getting down to basics.

Sales of paper towels have fallen off, I see, 11%, not as much as sales of women's fragrances (47%). It is fairly obvious that perfume is a luxury, maybe not so obvious that paper towels are not one of life's necessities. In fact - here comes some reminiscence - I believe they didn't even exist when I was born, though I don't feel inclined to research the history of the paper towel on this lovely, slow rainy day.

How did you wipe up spills? With a dishrag. With rags, which were torn out of old, old unmendable white sheets, sheets from the day before sheets had pattern and color and lace, yet were functional, and felt wonderful when they were freshly washed and had hung in the sun to dry.

You wiped up spills with dishtowels. I recall my shock the day I noticed in my aged parents' garage a neat package of store-bought rags. My parents were born poor in 1920, and they were thrifty. I'd never thought I'd see the day when they would waste money like that, but I guess neatness at last trumped thrift.

Many thoughtful people have always lived on the sceptical edge of the consumer society, being careful about consuming trees, for instance, using cloth napkins and discussing whether that is really a savings. It might depend on how often you wash them. I recall reading somewhere once that the Duke of Windsor was quite surprised when someone explained to him that napkin rings were used to keep the person's napkin in place from one meal to the next. "You mean they don't get a fresh napkin with every meal?" He really couldn't imagine.

So much of what we are now giving up was unsatisfying, and often experienced as stress. I think of family dinners at cheap sit-down restaurants, because Mom's too tired to cook; hectic travel; all that Christmas. Keeping up that big house, and the cottage on the lake, and the boat, and the cars.

When Tom went into pulmonary rehab several years ago, his class was taught to learn "your new normal." It's hard to adjust to being dis-abled. We had once been able, able to do what we felt like doing, and we resented the loss. There is truth to the grief, fear, frustration we feel in any loss, and we need to acknowledge it. It will pop up its ugly little troll-like head now and again.

It's also true that for many of us the present moment is pretty much alright, warm and dry, the larder stocked. Oatmeal is delicious in this weather. The library has some excellent DVDs, and if you don't buy books you don't need to dust them. The grandson has always preferred macaroni and cheese to just about anything else, and enjoyed learning to play Parcheesi, a viable alternative to his Gameboy. It's amazing how well he remembers the rules, and the outcome of every game.