Paper Sales

Some things have gone by the wayside over the years, such as manual typewriters with the throw carriage, reel to reel tape recorders, and even paper sales. Some things are moving towards extinction such as televisions with rabbit ears, VCR players, and answering machines. You will only find a wind up alarm clock in an antique store or flea market. Why even a clock with hands and numbers is not as prevalent. There was a time when all clocks had hands. I actually met someone several months ago, a grown woman in her 20s, who said she had never learned to tell time with the hands on a clock. Often folks have never heard of a slide rule as well.

Maybe some of this is good. Certainly my laptop is far easier to type on than the manual Remington's I learned to type on in 1958. At least, the keyboard is still the same, and I can type with the touch system. I can't really say I miss the paper sales though I really wonder why we spend money to run recycling trucks through the city when the old paper sales brought in money for the schools. Why if every school had a recycling center for the neighborhood, can you imagine how much that would cut the city budget for sanitation. I never minded taking my recycling to the big bins at the grocery store or to the school paper sales.

The way the paper sales worked was this. You'd save up your papers, and every so often the school would have a paper sale on a Saturday where everyone brought their newspapers, sort of like what is done for Christmas trees at various stores. The school would get the profit for the newspaper recycling. I personally liked that better than schools selling expensive gift wrap paper as some do now.

I do, however, have a funny story about the paper sales. One particular year I had a hard time getting to the paper sales. Either I would forget or I had conflicts with getting there. Needless to say, the newspapers stacked up in the garage till it was just overwhelming. I kept meaning to get to the next paper sale for sure. This went on for well over a year, maybe even two years. Finally, I couldn't take it any more. I wasn't waiting for the next school paper sale that I might miss again. One of my workmen was here doing some repairs. He had a pickup truck so I asked him to take all the papers to one of the recycling bins that were at various locations around the city.

To my chagrin, the newspapers literally filled up his pick-up truck. I could not imagine how I had accumulated so many papers in my garage. At that time I did have the newspaper delivered seven days a week, and I even read some of it. My intentions were good in saving them for the school paper sales, but I had ended up with a garage full of papers.

I guess the same thing can happen these days when the city recycling misses a few pickups, especially with them only picking up every other week. I'm all for recycling, but I fail to see how gasoline for the 1000s of recycling trucks is saving money or the natural resources. I prefer the old fashioned recycling, I mean even before paper sales, before returning soda and milk bottles, back in the day of my grandmother.

Nothing was wasted on the farm. My grandmother bought flour, meal, and sugar all in cloth bags. She used the cloth to make dresses, dish towels, table cloths,or quilts. All the food scraps either went to the dogs and cats or the pigs. Any bread bags were used to store leftovers. Leftovers were always eaten at the next meal; some times a whole meal might even be left on the counter. To this day, I don't know how no one ever got food poisoning. It was a totally different era, and I'm grateful for my experience in rural America with my grandparents back in the late 40s, 50s and 60s. As long as grandmother could stand on her feet, she always hung the laundry on the clothesline on sunny days even after she had a drier. She still made her own clothes, quilts, and bread. As long as the farm had cows, she made her own butter, cottage cheese, and buttermilk. She grew all her own vegetables in a huge garden, and we picked blackberries and grapes off the fence and gathered pecans and plums from the trees.

They say change is good. Let's think about that for a minute. Have we thrown out the baby with the bathwater? There does seem to be an increase in interest in people having their own gardens, eating more at home, walking more, and bringing their own grocery bag to the store. So why not bring back the paper sales for education and use the money we use for recycling trucks to hire more teachers. Three cheers for paper sales.

Self-Help

If I read a book to help me with such self improvement as to become more frugal with my time and maximize my productivity, lose weight, or save money, that should help. However if self-help books really helped, why are there so many of them? One plan is in vogue and then another. People fill their bookshelves with self help books.

There is one I go back to from time to time. It was published in 1936 by Dorothea Brande, "Wake up and Live! A Formula for Success that works!" The main concept is to act as if it were impossible to fail. Instead of remembering all the times you have failed, you begin anew with no preconceived notions that you will again fail. It also delves into the ways we sabatoge our success with substitute activities.

I do wonder about the differences between those who reach their goals whatever they may be and those who never come close. Look at the commercials, the talk shows, the news. We are bombarded with another savings plan, makeovers, another weight loss plan, and yet another study. The latest weight study proposes that obese people spend more on health care. I don't think we needed a research study to prove that one. We even have reality shows about weight loss. Never in my life have I seen so much information on weight loss, yet none of it seems to work.

I don't recall a single weight loss type program when I was growing up. Of course, at that time there weren't many fast food places. There was a dairy queen near Chicago area where we lived, but it closed in the winter. In the small town in Texas where I lived as a teenager, there was only one Dairy Queen. The other places were locally owned like the Lottaburger and the Sweet Shop. For the most part, we always ate at home. We never had a "tv dinner" as they were called when they first appeared on the market. There were no artificial sweetners in soft drinks until Tab came along. I don't think I drank a diet soda till I was in my 40s. I fried chicken if we wanted fried chicken. I always bought whole milk. We'd have bacon and eggs, toast and jelly for breakfast. We had many a baked potato and varieties of recipes I made with hamburger meat. I'd never heard of romaine lettuce or any dressing but French dressing or blue cheese. Yet all those years I never weighed more than 115 pounds.

So why is there such a problem now? I did walk to school all through high school. It wasn't that far, but I carried a French Horn back and forth as well as several textbooks. In college I walked everywhere. Interestingly, I never had any food in my room, no snack box. I ate at supper and that was it. We had sit down family style meals with tablecloths, napkins and serving dishes. We filled up a table before we began eating, and left when everyone was finished. Even in the early days of my teaching and marriage, I did a lot of walking. I cooked all my meals from scratch, no boxed dinners. I take that back, there were two. We loved Chef-boy-ar-dee pizza in a box. I'd mix the dough and spread the sauce and toppings on it. The other one was those danish rolls that came in a can. I'd ice them after baking them. They were great on Saturday or Sunday morning even though they tasted more like biscuits that were supposed to be rolls. I think they still make them to this day.

Back to self-help and the book I'm rereading for the 14th time (or at least it seems that way). I don't know if the book is even still in print, and it's strange I'd even read it as I usually won't give the time of day to books like this. That's something I'll have to check out today online. I personally like the story of William James, the pscyhologist. In one of his books he mentions the idea of will using an illustration of getting out of bed on a cold morning. He doesn't want to get up and leave the warmth of the covers. Then finally he forgets about it and just gets up. Maybe I need to reread James instead of Dorothea Brande, "The Writings of William James," all 858 pages,including the 40 page annotated bibliography. Interestingly, I just opened the book to page 684, the chapter entitled "Will" where there's a crack in the binding.

You mean I wrote this entire essay to rediscover my 1977 edition of "The Writings of William James." For sure it beats any study by the CDC or any reality show on NBC and any diet plan. I think this is why I never gave much credence to books like Dorothea Brande's. I would always begin and end my reading with the famous philosophers and psychologists of the ages. But how many of us are going to plow through 800+ pages of a psychologist when we can sit and watch a reality show about losing weight and eat our popcorn and cupcakes while we watch it.

I'll be checking back later about my progress of reading again William James as well as the progress changing my life to be more productive.

More Prunes with Pits

Wouldn't you know it, I go to Publix yesterday instead of Kroger, and what do I find? You guessed it, Prunes with Pits. So they haven't quit selling them both ways. So I looked at the various size cans and brands, with pits, without pits. Even Publix had their own brand of "Plums", then below it "Prunes." I guess that's in case we think prunes are very large grapes or something.

I actually look at the labels on the cans and notice that some add fructose. Now that's a good way to mess up something that is otherwise healthy. Then I notice there are premium prunes and just prunes, large cans, small cans, sealed bags. The sealed bags for some reason are more expensive than the cans or at least the cans that aren't really cans but cartons with a metal lid. After all my store research standing in the aisle of dried fruit, I again get the pitted prunes. I guess I just wanted to know they still had prunes with pits, but I didn't really want to pay extra to have the pits in the can.

No doubt everything old is new again. I also read last night an article in the May issue of AARP Magazine on the same subject except they titled it "They're Back (the 1930s, That Is." Then they showed pictures of Clark Gable with his mustach and Brad Pitt with his mustach. They proceeded with a chart of the trends with a column for then and now. My favorite, "Trouble -prone Yankee sluggers", then was Babe Ruth and now is Alex Rodriguez. I'm not sure Rod Blogojevich would like being the now for Chicago outlaw, especially when the then was Al Capone. It is a rather timely chart. Guess my mind was in the same place when I wrote about the prunes earlier.

As usual, I stand corrected once again. For anyone reading, there are still prunes with pits.

Prunes with Pits

Prunes were always a steady part of our diet when I was growing up. Mother would bring a pot of prunes to boil in some water and let them simmer a while until they were soft and juicy. They always had the pit. There was no choice of pitted or unpitted. I don't know when the stores quit selling prunes with pits, but I can't remember when I've seen them. You can buy store brand or several name brands, in a bag or a can, but they come without pits. I didn't think that much about it until this week when I ate a can of the most delicious prunes, juicy like my mother always fixed them. And then, I found one lone prune with a pit! In that I grew up with pits in prunes, I guess I wasn't surprised and didn't bite into it by mistake.

This rather insignificant incident made me start thinking about all the things that have changed in my lifetime. Sure, there are the major changes such as computers, missiles to the moon, and central air conditioning, not to mention cellphones and televisions without antennas. However, many of the changes probably are never missed unless someone or something reminds us of it, such as eating a prune with a pit.

I know for me some things I have kept the same, such as I still cook with a pressure cooker, the one that was a wedding gift in 1964. I prefer to make tea with Lipton's loose tea rather than a teabag. I use the same potato peeler, and nothing grinds meat like my meat grinder that you turn by hand. It makes the best chicken salad or ham salad.

Who misses party lines? Who misses Person to Person phone calls? My daddy would stand by the phone when we called long distance. We had three minutes; then we'd have to hang up as it was just too expensive to talk very long on these long distance calls.

Probably very few women particularly long for the days of garter belts and hosiery with seams. However, in many ways, it was probably more comfortable and definitely healthier than the tight crotch in the pantie of pantie hose. Stocking that you used with garter belts were more economical. At least you had two stockings to ruin before you lost the whole thing. With pantie hose, a run in one stocking and that's it. You throw them away, unless you are like me. I have always mended them if possible either by stitching the run when it first begins or painting the run with clear nail polish.

I'm sure there is no doubt that we are better off today with our technology and ways of preventing and healing illness. The early window air conditioners were better than the heat of a hot summer's night, but a long way from being really comfortable. They were always slightly damp even in the dry heat outdoors. A computer definitely beats typing an entire script over by hand and typing carbon copies. Who in their right mind ever enjoyed typing a term paper with a carbon copy if you wanted a copy of the original. Erasures on the copy were not an easy feat as the paper might slip; and when you retyped the word, it would be out of line with the rest of the words.

What I find interesting as I get older, now on number sixty-six in my life, is that from a very early age, everything was modern. It was the newest latest thing of its time so I never felt as though I was deprived because I didn't have a computer or I had to type term papers on a manual typewriter. I was thrilled when I got my first stereo as that was the latest. No, I didn't miss an ipod, nor do I today because I've never had one. I still play records with a turn table, though I must say cd's are a vast improvement over tapes and records as far as finding the song you want to play. However, I don't think you can't beat the sound quality of the turn table and records.

I would think that those of us who are over sixty could probably do with less and not miss it. I could adjust to most changes, but I must admit, I would hate to give up e-mail or the Internet. However, the one thing about being human is we do adapt; otherwise, we might still be living in a cave or for that matter, extinct. Maybe we should all take a week without any of the technology or modern conveniences just to see how we survive. Maybe that's why we have storms, a forced period without technology, a test to see if we can survive without what we think we have to have to live even one day.