Here are two words not heard very often, at least not in the old sense, spare & change. T'was a time when you'd be approached by someone looking for a handout and the phrase would be, "spare some change?" But so many people these days simply don't carry cash at all, not even a few dollars, much less "pocket" change (another phrase pretty much gone, as if pockets themselves may be the next thing to disappear). That was also a time when a flat tire meant that you had to dig into your trunk and grab your "spare" tire, except most new cars today don't carry a spare tire, even if equipped to do so (my friend told me this after he returned home with his new car and found that a spare tire was included only as "an option"). This all came up when I peeked in my garage one morning and discovered that our car had a flat tire, as in flat, flat and not at all drivable. Out came the repair van and he was old school, complete with a
tire iron, something every car used to carry...that is,
when you had a spare tire (most services such as AAA will ask you if you have a spare before coming out). If you think back, when was the last time any of us changed a tire? And would we even know how to do so (those pneumatic lug nut tools mechanics use to attach and rotate your tires make removing those bolts pretty much impossible for the average weakling like me). But it was no problem for the cheery repair fellow: off came the lug nuts, off came the tire, and down came the spare (did I mention that our cars are 2010 models, a time when every car still came equipped with a full-sized spare tire). This is your pulley, he told me, but it's sealed; I'll have to pry it open, he said (he may as well told me this in Greek, for I had never looked at that part of my trunk; but indeed there was a small indicator which blended in nicely with the rest of the vinyl mat in the trunk, a piece that said "spare tire" on it). A quick dig with a screwdriver and out popped the cork-like seal, after which he grabbed the tool in my car (again, I had no idea of what that tool was for), lowered the pulley (the what?), and pulled out the spare. They're designed to last the life of the car, he told me, perhaps seeing my look of concern that I would now be driving on a 15-year old tire that had never seen the road. But everything was fine, the tire, his 15-minute repair, and my old flat tire fixed (with some bonding glue, no less). Haven't had a problem since...
But this is more a post on that other word, change, as in the spare change when you once emptied your pockets and plopped your coins and bills onto the dresser or into a dish, all those pennies* and dimes, and perhaps a few quarters. When younger I would eagerly poke through that pile, hoping for an old coin, not so much the date on the coin but the old style of the coin...a buffalo nickel or a mercury dime (both would still appear about once a month when I was kid). I had no idea what they were but I just knew that someday they'd be worth something so I would quickly separate them and plop them into a
Whitman coin collection folder (which cost a LOT if you were just a kid). So I often went without lunch as I saved my lunch money, eagerly planting the quarter or half dollar into the booklet and watching my collection grow (and also happy when the coin and date were ones I already had which meant I could eat lunch!). Years later, and many moves later, those albums remained packed in some box and only recently did I dig through them and found that while the coins were all still there, the albums had been lunch for several mice...so thus, a quick decision to locate a few coin shops, hoping that they still existed.
Have you gone to a coin shop lately? What? You haven't? Didn't you used to collect coins as a kid, like me? Okay, I'm showing my age here (I felt that same when my parents would tell me about their friends collecting postage stamps, all in the days when you had to actually "lick" stamps -- no self-adhesive stuff back then). But as a child, things such as coins
did change, even to my adolescent eyes. Finding not only a "steel" penny but a "wheat" penny, was possible since they were still being given out as change. I would dutifully put those "rare" coins away, even those pennies. Someday they'll be worth a lot, I mused. Little did I know that those old coins, LPs, art figurines, and such would not really become valuable until someone would want to buy them from you, and for most of those skipped-lunch "valuables," that would be nobody. The delusion is evident if one peeks at Ebay or Etsy, or watches people congregate at estate sales; you quickly realize that while there are a lot of people who still want to find that "lost" Picasso or other garage sale bargain to resell, for the most part all those long-saved coins and antiques are not things anyone wants these days. Ask any parent (or me) and they'll likely tell you that such items make it into the thrift store box or garage sale simply because their children aren't interested in their "old" things -- not the furniture or beautiful china dishes, and not even the jewelry or grandma's things. My nephew, when my brother and his wife offered their 3-year old car to him (free) since they were going to buy a new one (he didn't have one at the time), he simply told them that he didn't want it, and if they gave it to him anyway he would simply sell it (they did, and he did). The puzzled look on my brother's face echoed mine...it was a world of "change" these days.
Buy metals, my mother used to tell me. When times get tough, the only thing to barter with will be gold or silver coins, "hard" cash. I was but a young lass when she told me this; but even then I thought, did I really want to live in such times? Open the door when things are that bad and you're more likely to be blown away rather than able to do a bit of polite bartering. Still, there they were, my step-father's own hobby (unbeknownst to me) of picking up a few Morgan silver dollars when they appeared and putting them away. And now they were in my mother's safe deposit box. You take them, she told me, you'll need these to trade with. Move forward a dozen years later and when I had to change my own safe deposit box (my bank was closing...no really) and I discovered the roll of old silver dollars. What would they be worth these days, because just as the name says, they were silver. As it turned out, pretty much little more than their "melt" weight. That 1898 Morgan silver dollar my dad left? About $23...for the silver (and yes, you can also buy bags, literally a full bag, of Morgan silver dollars).
Which brings me to that subject of change...as in "pocket" change, which, like sweep-second watches, are vanishing, at least for the everyday person. In today's world, it seems rare to carry cash of any sort, much less a bunch of coins. For one thing, where to put them? Machines with slots for coins are few and far between (when was the last time you saw a pay phone, or phone booth, that accepted coins?); even vending machines are phasing out using cash (Las Vegas did so years ago). Been on a flight recently? Tap and pay with your card or don't order a drink. Or use your watch. Bend your wrist over to tap and your payment is sent. Perhaps this is just me nostalgically thinking of simpler times, when cash was "cash," as in hard cash. You'd stop to pick up that shiny dime or nickel on the sidewalk. And if you found" a quarter? Well, it was indeed your lucky day. But today not so much. Even solid wood furniture is too heavy, too bulky, too full of flaws and knots. Here's how a piece in
The London Review put it:
At some level, old furniture may have served as pseudo-heirlooms. No doubt it was also often associated with a sentimental regard for the traditional. The hard-hearted may be inclined to welcome the dissipation of such pretensions and falsifications, but something of value has been lost: contact with previous generations and their values, knowledge of alternative models and manners, even resistance to the novelties of fashion and commerce. Now that I have become that "previous generation," I can see a few things from a different viewpoint...as can Father Giuseppe Orsini.
When I first glanced at his recipe book, I was intrigued. A priest writing a cookbook (he's actually written several). Here's a small sample of
Italian baking wisdom passed down through the ages and why you should treat all flours as unsifted:
...if possible, weigh it on a scale to measure it correctly. Never sift flour for bread but always sift it for pastries and cookies. If you weigh your ingredients, sift the flour after measuring; if you use a measure, sift before measuring. He also added that despite the hard grain durum wheat used for pasta, and the golden soft wheat durum used for breads: ...
only about 2 percent of Italian breads are made with whole wheat. But what grabbed me more, as the priest-author pointed out, was his pointing out of the disappearing regionalism, the individuality, the traditions. As he wrote:
A Tuscan would no more choose to eat a Roman pagnotta
or a Milanese michetta
than he would expect to find Weiner schnitzel on his dinner plate. So how could it come as a surprise that each region boasts variations on its breads and ingredients and makes its local tastes into breads that define a small geographical area?...And how could it be otherwise in a country scarred in medieval times by cities that chose to fight ferociously with their closest neighbors to prove their supremacy, their dedication to local alliances finally leading them to stamp their own identity not only on the landscape but on the foods as well? And in case you were wondering, he notes that "four & twenty blackbirds baked in a pie" was a genuine Italian recipe that appeared in Europe's first cookbook,
De Honesta Voluptate e Valetudine in 1474.
All of this is not the rambling recollections of an old gent (me); well, it sort of is, along with the disappearance of paper boys, wrote Smithsonian (my first job and no, despite the series on Amazon, I never saw a paper girl, but then I was only 12 so I wasn't really looking); or the --gasp-- pre-teen babysitter, wrote The Atlantic: Babysitting used to be both a job and a rite of passage. For countless American teens, and especially teen girls, it was a tentative step toward adulthood—responsibility, but with guardrails. Perhaps you didn’t cook dinner, but you did heat some leftovers for the kids. Maybe you arrived to find them already tucked in, and you read them a story, turned out the lights, and watched TV until the car turned into the drive. Wait, what?? What sort of parent would let a young girl be alone in a stranger's house? And would any parent let their child go out in the dark morning hours alone, and on a single-gear Schwinn bike, no less?
These bygone rites of passage all had one thing in common, and that was trust. We trusted that if a tire blew we could change it ourselves; we trusted that there was value in having cash (and coins); we trusted tried 'n true recipes since we actually cooked; we trusted neighbors and others that they wouldn't hurt grade school kids watching our even smaller kids, or delivering papers (and we trusted the news that came from those "papers"); we trusted our parents, and the police, and our government. Bottom line, we trusted our system and our "leaders." It was a time of, as Irving Berlin composed, that all was okay (I Got The Sun In The Morning & The Moon At Night): Taking stock of what I have and what I haven't, what do I find? The things I got will keep me satisfied. Maybe not all of us were totally happy but things worked well enough.
But things have changed. People and governments have changed, ethics and morals have changed. Even kids have changed. Perhaps this was foreseen when CBS canceled it soapy series, As the World Turns which ran for 54 years. The fact was, the world was changing. And suddenly, seemingly after years of complacency, we may be watching it all happen again...wars, food prices, employment, wages, owning a home, security. What we never thought would happen to us, to our country, is now at our doorstep. For the thousands and thousands who were immediately fired by the White House, and to the many thousands and thousands who will no longer receive food or medical supplies due to approved funding now being denied, it will be a traumatic change. In his book, How to Know A Person, David Brooks wrote: We tend to assume that the world is benevolent, that life is controllable, that things are supposed to make sense, that we are basically good people who deserve good things. Suffering and loss can blast all that to smithereens. "Trauma challenges our global meaning system," Stephen Joseph writes in What Doesn't Kill Us. "It confronts us with existential truths about life that clash with this system. The more we try to hold on to our assumptive world, the more mired we are in denial of such truths"...The journey of reconsideration and re-formation often involves taking what Stephen Cope, learning from Carl Jung, calls "the night sea journey," heading off into parts of yourself that are "split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out."
"When there is a change in the pace of change in so many realms at once, as we're now experiencing, it is easy to get overwhelmed by it all," wrote Thomas L. Friedman: In such a time, opting to pause and reflect, rather than panic or withdraw, is a necessity. It is not a luxury or a distraction -- it is a way to increase the odds that you'll better understand, and engage productively with the world around you...We are generating more information and knowledge than ever today, "but knowledge is only good if you can reflect on it." And it is not just knowledge that is improved by pausing. So, too, is the ability to build trust, "to form deeper and better connections, not just fast ones, with other human beings," adds Seidman [Dov Seidman, founder of the non-profit HOW Institute for Society]. "Our ability to forge deep relationships --to love, to care, to hope, to trust, and to build voluntary communities based on shared values-- is one of the most uniquely human capacities we have. It is the single more important thing that differentiates us from nature and machines,"
It's often said that change is good, and re-writing history is nothing new to our country as more books are banned and more government files are deleted. Even mass immigration is nothing new, our history showing Catholics, Europeans, Chinese, and others all rounded up and deported over the decades, wrote Politico (not including the 100,000 Native Americans forced to leave their ancestral lands due to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, wrote NPS). But most of us no longer have grandparents or relatives who remember tough times, who remember being in a war where there was food rationing, who remember soup lines and the Great Depression, a word which took on multiple meanings. It was hard times, and as with Auschwitz and Gaza, the railroad cars and the bombs --like their leaders-- were deaf to the people pleading, "spare us." So were the stock markets and the dust bowls. Spare can mean having an extra, but it can also mean having enough to want to give to others, and to give with compassion. Let us hope that the phrase "change is good" doesn't go hand-in-hand with the phrase "history is doomed to repeat itself." That is, before the history we now remember is erased...
*If you're wondering about those pennies that may disappear (Trump is just one of the many Presidents and Congress members who have tried to have the penny removed from circulation), you should know two things: 1) it is illegal to melt down pennies; and 2) pennies are made of a copper alloy and are not pure copper. Melt them down into some sort of ingot and you'd soon discover that your "bar" of copper, assuming you could even find a buyer, was worth less than your cost to melt it all down.
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