do you know what the hell parsimony means?

so last night was my first venture out since the new year began.  my dear friend jessy is in town from germany and we had planned an overnight getaway at a downtown hotel so we could have a much needed catch up session without the interruption and pitter patter of little feet.  it was a wonderful evening (and so needed) but i do feel like a bit of a cheater because the evening definitely would have been a budget buster without the generous help of jessy's mom.  she covered the room and movie ticket expenses and i happened to have a $25 gift certificate lying around to macaroni grill.  we took trax and avoided parking fees so i only spent $7 when all was said and done but it would have been a lot more in the real world.  i guess i danced with the devil but for purposes of the experiment i'm still on track.  today it is back to homelife and tuna fish and dinner from the pantry!

in our current culture, frugality isn't exactly lauded as a virtue.  we tend to value pomp and circumstance and glorify excess. (here's an example of the ultimate glorification--mtv's retarded show cribs.  jaren and i spent a sickening hour on the couch on new year's day watching the 10 most expensive crib pads ever and it was pretty depressing to see what the rich and famous do with their milions--pretty much universally uninteresting things. how many escalades does one man need?!)  

i think the best thing the current downturn in the economy can do for us is remind us of what it means to pare down and be frugal.  i think we all recognize in our grandparents a relentless thriftiness and almost disdain for waste that was born from living through an era of want like the great depression.  i have never wanted to imitate my grandmother before, but i realize that her defining characteristic may be her frugality. in fact, i recently ran across the word parsimony and had no idea what it meant until i looked it up. parsimony: extreme care in spending money; reluctance to spend money unnecessarily. my grandmother mere is an expert in parsimony.  i recall her walking the streets to collect cans to go and recycle for money so she could create a diaper fund for my little cousin. and this was in the 80s mind you...people weren't doing that kind of thing!  her kitchen cabinets were always filled with random mason jars filled with 1 lollipop, a handful of marshmallows, a candy cane.... she never threw anything away.  at christmas, wrapping paper was patiently undone and she would save every scrap and reuse it to wrap her own gifts.  she canned and preserved, kneaded bread, and sewed. she used the same 100 lb toaster for 50 years!  i still can't leave her house without receiving some random item that she doesn't need or want but just can't bring herself to throw away.  i've become her goodwill repository (and usually that is where most the stuff she gives me ends up) but before i take it there, i try and take a photo of it.  i now have a big folder of "things my grandmother gave me" photos.  here are a few of the good ones.  

mere's frugality and miser status has always made me crazy because it felt like a mania and not very much fun and in my consumerist brain it seemed silly to go to all this time and effort to hem and patch an old blouse when she could just head to the store and buy a new one that would be tons cuter.  but suddenly i can see the value of those lost arts she cultivated and i feel a bit sad that when the mindset of my generation and hers finally may be converging, she is on her way out.    maybe this month is the ultimate tribute to my waste not want not grandmother. too bad she won't buy a computer to read this.