‘Stripped’ tips No. 1 and No. 2

Anyone who’s read these blog entries is likely to notice that I tend to ruminate on the hidden meaning of even the smallest actions. (See yesterday’s post). I don‘t apologize for that, because I believe there is something to be gleaned from even the thinnest slice of the most ordinary life. But just to break things up a bit, I‘m going to try to force myself to offer some tips that are stripped of excessive commentary.
So:
1. Don’t carry change in the same pocket as your car keys. You’re likely to spill a coin or two in the process of pulling out your keys.
And, conversely:
2. A good place to find coins (and even, occasionally, folded-up paper money) is along the yellow lines in parking lots, near where the driver’s door would be.
I once challenged myself to “find” money every day for a month, and it wasn’t as hard as you might think. I didn’t change my routine; I just paid more attention to my surroundings.

Is there beauty in thrift?

I think I may have found a symbol to represent this blog.

It’s an image from a moment of desperation far too insignificant for a screenplay, or even the most tedious memoir. Yet I can’t get it out of my mind. I like to think it’s an example of the beauty that can sometimes be found in thrift.
Let me connect the dots as briefly as I can: We were hosting a yard sale several weeks back, and managed to stay fairly busy despite the fact I hadn’t gotten around to putting up any signs. (I had, however, put an ad in the paper, and our three-tent circus was easily visible from the highway.)

Around midday we had a lull, though, and this made Uncle Rick, who was out of work (and had hauled over three trailer’s worth of “inventory”), understandably anxious. He began to follow me around, fretting about the sign problem, as I located cardboard and a couple cans of spray paint that were too far gone to be of any use.
Finally I found a squirt bottle of the kids’ craft paint and a brush. I was poised over the cardboard, brush in hand, when I realized I didn’t have anything to squirt the paint onto. I dribbled some paint directly onto the cardboard, but it was clear that wasn’t going to work very well. A ruined sign would only extend Uncle Rick’s misery, not to mention my own. Without really thinking about it, I picked up the only thing within reach: a large oak leaf. It held the paint perfectly, as if it were designed for just that purpose. More importantly, it provided an exit to that particular microdrama.

It was, at that moment, the perfect fusion of form and function.

Uncle Rick and I didn’t discuss the aesthetic merits of the leaf, mostly because he was in such a hurry, hustling the signs away before the paint was dry. I tend to think he appreciated the concept, or would have, if he hadn’t been distracted. He’s the sort of guy who’s always coming up with unusual solutions to real-world problems -- a skill that was no doubt enhanced by growing up in a family that didn’t have much money. (He’s currently incorporating this skill into a home-based repair shop; Uncle Rick is not one to stay idle, or unemployed, for long.)

This doesn’t mean that the next time I paint something I’m going to track down an oak leaf as part of the process. (Though I would love to find some use for all the leaves we have around here.) Besides, it wasn’t even an act of frugality so much as desperation.

But I like to think that a frugally trained mind is better able to spot solutions like that one -- to perceive that a coat hanger can be untwisted into a piece of wire, if you happen to need one, or that the plastic mat for the kids’ Twister game could be (and has been, in our house) used as an emergency birthday-party table cloth.

Minds trained to look for solutions in stores have a harder time envisioning paint puddling in a leaf like so much dew.

A solution to a coffee conundrum

So the other day I’m at work, and as usual I’ve drained the coffee in my travel mug and want another cup. Maybe two. So I go over to the office coffeepot, only to discover we’re out of coffee filters.

I was checking my pockets to see if I had fifty cents for a cup of vending machine coffee when I noticed a roll of industrial-grade paper towels on the counter. I tore off a couple of pieces, nestled them in the filter basket, and in the time it would’ve taken me to walk downstairs to the vending machine I was pouring myself a better tasting brew at a fraction of the cost.*

*The “cost” amounts to contributing a can of coffee every so often.

The generosity generator

Lately I’ve been reflecting on our daughter’s generosity, and wondering if that’s a trait that skipped a generation, the way my grandmother’s Depression era thriftiness seemed to pass right over my mother before showing up in me.

On a recent family vacation, Rowan, 16, spent the souvenir money I gave her on gifts for a favorite teacher and her boyfriend. A few days later, she took food to a friend who, despite being sick, was pining for Taco Bell. A 79-cent order of triple-layer nachos would have sufficed -- this was, in fact, my hard-hearted counsel -- but she tacked on a Mountain Dew and cheesy fiesta potatoes, spending $3 of her $5 spending money for the week.

I can’t help wincing when I consider that on the same family trip, I was secretly glad we didn’t use the provisions I brought for a chicken-and-noodle dinner, knowing I could use them for a meal back home the next week. Whereas my sister-in-law would’ve been disappointed if we hadn’t used the dyed-black pasta and almost-orange alfredo sauce for our Halloween dinner. She, too, is more generous than I am, it would seem.

Not being naturally endowed with the sharing gene, I’ve had to construct an artificial mechanism for funneling a portion of our resources toward the welfare of other people and institutions. It’s been in action for five years now, and it’s worked remarkably well, neutralizing the irritation I used to feel when hit up for a donation and alleviating the anxiety that came with writing a check to those causes that we really did want to support. (Living just above the reduced-lunch income level for 15 years makes you hyper aware of every penny that goes out.)

Our charity fund is little more than a sudivision inside our savings account. We dump a portion of each paycheck into that cul-de-sac, and even though we’re still not up to 10 percent, it really adds up over time. Thanks to the magic of online banking, we just slide the appropriate amount over to the checking account every time we want to make a donation.

So, are we in fact being more generous, or are we just more aware of our generosity now that it can be documented?

The most obvious change in our charitable giving the past five years is that we’ve added monthly donations to the Unitarian church we periodically attend. Before 2004 we weren’t churchgoers, other than an occasional appearance (and small bill tossed in the collection plate) at the church I grew up in and my parents still attend. We don’t give as much as more traditional churchgoers probably do, just 1-2 percent, but that in itself probably matches and maybe even trumps an entire year’s worth of giving before we started tracking (and funding) this budget category.

A couple of other change indicators: We’ve cracked the triple digits in our annual giving to public radio, and now give five times as much to the American Cancer Society -- a development closely tied to my father’s bout with nonHodgkins lymphoma a couple of years ago. (Even as I write this, I wonder whether we should be giving more; can you put a price tag on your gratitude when a family member survives cancer?)

The real life-changing example that I always associate with the success of our charity fund, though, has to be the chicken dinner tickets my son’s baseball league sells.

This isn’t one of those slick yuppie travel teams, but a small town sandlot operation. Every year they ask the kids to sell 10 tickets. I was about to type, “I can’t tell you how much I hate this,” but in fact I can: I hate selling things, I hate making my kids sell things, even to relatives, we live out in the country so door-to-door sales aren’t an option, and on top of all that, only one out of the six of us even likes chicken on the bone.

Imagine my relief when our charity fund, emulating the holographic doctor on “Star Trek: Voyager,” tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Pardon me, ma’am, this looks like a job for Generosity Man.”

We used that account to buy the suggested $50 worth of tickets, then donated them to a food bank. One giant burden removed, two good causes supported.

All thanks to the artificial generosity generator we call our charity fund.

Inspiration in the express lane

I’ve been on a kick lately where I’ve been paying cash for groceries, partly for sentimental reasons -- that’s what I did years ago when I first quit work to be a stay-at-home mom -- but also to see if it was easier to make budget when I could clearly see what I had left to spend.

So I got in the express lane the other day with my four half-gallons of short-dated milk (69 cents each) when I noticed the young man checking people out had Down syndrome.

It was incredibly cool to see that somebody at this store, the Village of Coventry Scott’s in Fort Wayne, Ind., was willing to give this guy a chance to do something other than push a broom. But as I went to pay, I hesitated -- should I give him cash like I’d planned, or whip out the debit card to make it easier for him?

I went with the cash, and he did fine. More careful, probably, than the average teenager.

A new beginning

I returned from our annual family trip to Tennessee last month with a powerful urge to restart this blog, abandoned last spring when I suddenly found myself immersed in a project that, in hindsight, would’ve gone much better if I’d taken advantage of this outlet.

But I was having blog-concept issues as well. I knew I wanted to explore, and try to emulate, thrift found in nature. But I was limited by my knowledge of those processes in the natural world. All I could think of was water finding the most efficient, economical path to lower ground.(And we saw plenty of examples of that on the trail; water never sits still on a mountain.)

The other problem was that I wasn‘t entirely comfortable calling myself a “natural thrift.” I mean, I’ve known for a long time that thrift is a part of who I am, but I’ve had a years-long conflict of how I dealt with ‘fessing up to it, knowing that many people interpret frugality as stinginess. And sometimes it is. I’ve certainly struggled with that on this Odyssean journey that began 15 years ago with the decision to be a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom.

But frugality can also be a thing of beauty, like in nature, or in math. And all too often, in the past, the pride generated by what I perceived as a triumph of economy would dissolve into shame when exposed to the gaze of a “non-believer,” if you know what I mean.

I think I found some clarity on this latest foray into the Great Smoky Mountains. It’s too early to say whether I found my own fossilized backbone, perhaps misplaced years ago on an earlier hike up these same trails. But that’s how it feels.

Experimenting with sour milk

Yesterday, encouraged by some postings on other frugal blogs, I tried making biscuits with milk that was six days past its “sell by” date. But I can’t even say for sure whether the milk was “sour,” because my son poured some on his cereal by mistake earlier in the day, and said the taste wasn’t noticeably different. The biscuits were good, everyone agreed, but we couldn’t tell if they tasted any different, either.
Exploring the science of sour milk feels like a brave new frontier for me, because it suddenly creates a bunch of uses out of the very cheapest kind of milk. I’m even thinking about setting the rest of the jug out on the counter and seeing if it separates -- and if so, whether we can make it into cottage cheese.