Poosey Digest: A part of who we are

Mrs. Lillith, Poosey’s oldest resident, still washes her “delicates” by hand and hangs them on a clothesline strung across her back yard. She still checks her watch to see how long she’s been on the phone, and she beats her own rugs.

Mrs. Lillith only stopped raising her own laying hens a few years ago when the town passed an ordinance against livestock within the village limits. Truth be known, the city fathers would have allowed her to keep her chickens but she’s a law-abiding citizen and was getting tired gathering eggs anyway. “After 101 years,” she said, “you can buy an egg or two and it won’t kill you.”

Our town’s oldest gal isn’t a skinflint or a kook; she was simply raised in a generation where you took care of yourself with as little help from anyone else as possible. What Tom Brokow has aptly labeled “The Greatest Generation,” earned its wisely frugal ways by living through both the Great Depression and World War II. As a result the members of that age group are the only complete (and sadly dwindling) generation of Americans living today who not only lived through our nation’s toughest economic times, but whose character was formed by the hardship.

I’m not a doomsayer but it doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict that things might get economically worse before they get better, and the pendulum of reactions are swinging everywhere between “Let’s try to save a bit,” to the more radical, “How many guns can I collect to save my family from the hoards of mongrel invaders sure to come swarming over our boarders?!”

As usual, the sane reaction is probably somewhere in the middle.

Suffice it to say as the world economy continues to shift we’ll have to adjust to the wobbles. We can. We will. We always have. The question is whether we can keep our integrity in the process, or, like The Greatest Generation, actually be improved by tough times.

I was raised in a house with neither fried potatoes nor oatmeal. My mother had lived through both the war rationing of the 1940’s and the lean times of the 1930’s, and swore that after eating oatmeal every morning and fried potatoes every night she didn’t care if she saw another oat clump or fried spud as long as she lived. As a result I grew up deprived, I guess. But what I lacked in starch and fiber, I more than made up for in being raised by a child of tough times.

Mom cooked all of the chicken, you didn’t do laundry until you had a tubful, candy was for special occasions only, Christmas purchases were not extravagant, and you never called anyone on the phone just to chat. You took good care of your automobile, you carpooled back before the term had been invented, you walked whenever possible, and if you had to hire someone to do any work around your house it had better be labor that required a skill you didn’t have. As a result, we were not deprived, we were blessed.

No, my generation didn’t learn the lessons as well as our parents and with each succeeding branch of the family tree we’ve lost more and more of these can-do skills, but it’s not like self-sufficiency and frugality cannot be learned by a new generation. We are after all still a resourceful breed.

I once asked my grandfather who had lived through two world wars and one great depression how his generation was tough enough to have not only weathered the triple storms, but to come out as the leaders of the free world. He laughed and said, “Oh there wasn’t nothin’ special about us. It was our times that made us what we was.”

“It was our times that made us what we was.”

Much will be said in next 12 months about what the government must do, what it must not do, and who’s the best to lead us. But oh how refreshing to have a President who will simply say, “Here’s what WE must do, you and I.” If you want someone to take ownership of an idea you can’t do it for them, you must ask for their help. Grandpa was willing. His father was willing. And despite the fact that she deprived me of fried potatoes, Mom was willing. We can do it again. It’s a part of who we are.

You ever in Poosey, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.