Cheap? ...or just thrifty?

Stretch that thing

My parents were divorced in 1959. I wasn't even 4-years old. After the divorce, mom and we three kids moved in with my grandmother who, only a couple of years earlier, had become a widow. She operated a nursing home and it had an attached personal residence in the back. A nursing home would be where I called home for the next four years until my mother remarried and we moved away to Boston.

My grandmother was born in 1905. When the US stock market crashed in October 1929, marking the beginning of the Great Depression, she was newly married and soon to be pregnant with her first child (my mother.) My mother's earliest memories would have been ones overwhelmingly influenced by the brutal economic climate and the unimaginable social calamity of her earliest childhood years. Bread lines, unemployment, homelessness, and general malaise and hopelessness were the order of the day for millions of people. Fortunately, our family fared better than some.

There was a motto during those times: "Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without." Frugality was required and it affected how most households operated. If you had any available greenspace, you planted a vegetable garden. Meals were dominated by one-pot varieties, casseroles, soups, lower-cost meals like macaroni and cheese, beans and franks, and creamed asparagus or chipped beef on toast. And you never wasted anything, especially food. It was considered sinful to waste food. 

By the time I came along in the mid-50s, I was living with two women that knew how to squeeze every drop out of every dollar spent. Most of my clothes had been my brother's a few years earlier. We never threw away any bread no matter how stale it became (mold was the determining factor, not freshness.) I remember smelling the milk (every time) before pouring it to check for the aroma of sourness. If I thought it was sour I'd tell my grandmother and she would say, "drink it... it's fine." She was right, of course. (But it really was becoming sour.)

I find it pretty funny that I still live, in many ways, with one foot in the depression-influenced environment in which I was raised and the life of plenty I have enjoyed most of my adult life.

I think nothing of spending $9 for a cup of coffee (w/ tip) from my favorite coffee shop but I still feel the urge to invert a virtually empty ketchup bottle directly on top of the newly opened one to get the last $0.26 worth of that Heinz goodness into the new bottle.

still some in there

You'd think it was frankincense from biblical times.

I don't think twice about buying a $200 DeWalt power tool that I may actually only use 3 times before that tool sees its first birthday... and yet, I still hesitate throwing out a jar of Better Than Bouillon in my refrigerator that has a "Best used by" date of 2022 (because I know it is still usable and won't kill anyone.)

My life straddles the world of encyclopedias and the AI driven search engines of 2024. I'm a guy that gets all my money's worth out of my Amazon Prime membership but still has the urge to wash out and re-use Ziplock bags (I don't though.) I am doing better.... you'll find no leftovers in margarine or Cool Whip containers (I can't write Cool Whip without hearing Stewie from Family Guy say Cool Hwip.)

We always seem to have and make good use of leftovers. "I can make a meal for us out of these leftovers from the last 3 days," I say. I feel so accomplished when we "clean out the fridge" like I have successfully taken all my scraps of cloth and made an heirloom quilt (I've never made a quilt, btw.)

So, my question is, am I cheap or am I just thrifty?

I think the answer is yes.

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