Humor

Bigger used to be better
by Mitch Jayne

I can’t help but think of my dad in these days of miniaturization. He was born in 1900 and though a small man himself, he always thought, “the bigger the better.” He applied that rule to everything, from everyday objects to schemes to make a living in the great depression of the 30s.

I keep wondering what he would have thought of phones the size of a candy bar, book-sized laptop computers, four-inch discs that hold the music of a whole symphony orchestra, CDs with more information on them than a Sears catalog and tiny televisions you can put in your pocket.

Even today’s trend toward compact cars would have appalled Dad, who in 1935 (maybe to show a brave face in lean times) traded his medium-size Chevrolet for a mammoth old Hupmobile from the 20s. It had huge spare tires in covered front-fender wells deep as cream cans. Our whole family of five rattled around in that cavernous interior like so many peas in a whistle.

Dad felt the same way about homes and furniture, and my mother— who was also small—wrestled tall-backed beds, out-sized couches, burly tables, easy chairs and a radio big as a chopping block around our barn-sized house.

Dad, like our new President Roosevelt, insisted on thinking big—and he once traded Mom’s old Hoover for a used industrial size vacuum cleaner. Though it could suck dirt out of a scrubbed tile, she couldn’t possibly get the clumsy thing up the narrow, winding steps to the many rooms upstairs. Mother put her foot down, and Dad, chastened, found her a smaller one but kept the coffin-sized cylinder to clean out the Hupmobile.

Things that would have tickled Dad today are our farm tractors, those towering things with covered cabs that pull equipment as wide as truck gardens. He’d like giant hay bales and the great tracts of land they came from. He would also have approved of giant mining machinery with tires a story taller than his garage, and I’m sure he would even admire the monstrosity of our national debt, if only from amazement that small people could actually make something that size.

I kind of understand that way of thinking back in those times when size meant might, and the big movie screens made our stars look as tall as trees. It takes a new kind of people to imagine a smaller, more compact world, but sometimes I wonder what that means to us all. I remember the record albums of my youth, with their foot-square pictures of musical heroes. They are now reduced to humble postage stamp size faces of pre-shrunk glory. Sort of like painting Mona Lisa on the head of a pin.

Dad’s long gone, but I can still imagine his impatience with our miniaturizing of things we live with. I can hear him now:

“Next thing, they’ll come up with little bitty toasters!” he’d grumble; “And what’s that say about the size of everybody’s daily bread?”

Frugal?
Was that a dance?
by Jack S. Bray

We Americans may imagine we are well off because we charge each other so much for stuff. I’m not talking about those things we all have to buy more or less regularly— fuel, fertilizer, building materials—and which seem to be more expensive every time we make a purchase. That’s sticker creep of a persistent nature, and we’ve sort of come to expect it.

My wife may tell you that I am tight-fisted with money. But I don’t think it’s so much a matter of my being cheap as my frame of reference is 50 years old. I remember when everything cost a lot less, and I simply cannot get used to prices being raised without explanation, apology or apparent guilty feelings. Money simply ain’t what it used to be.

And no one under middle age can comprehend what a dramatic change has taken place with prices long term—over the past 30 years or so. Take postal costs. This month, the price of a three-cent stamp goes up to 42 cents. It’s no wonder e-mail and UPS have the U.S. Postal Service on the ropes. When I complained to the guy at our local post office, he didn’t offer much sympathy.

“Yeah, well, we have to keep up with the soybean growers,” he said dryly, without acknowledging the fact that soybean prices also go down at regular intervals. Not so with postal rates, which seem to move only in one direction.

For example, when the price of a pound of coffee (actually, a pound of coffee contains only 13 ounces these days) climbs from $2.69 to $3.49, my wherewithal to buy it doesn’t go up by 23 percent. There’s seldom an excuse for coffee to cost that much more all of a sudden. Maybe coffee plantations in the Andes had a late frost, or Juan Valdez’ mule died. Every time I read some economist’s barely-intelligible paper about cost-push monetary expansion stimulating the economy, I wonder if he realizes that the cash in my jeans is a fairly static commodity.

Money used to be something important and vital and closely related to life itself. Like blood. Or coffee. Nowadays, you hardly ever hear things like “a penny saved is a penny earned.” Instead, you hear expressions such as “it’s only money” and “If you want it, go ahead and buy it.” If you haven’t got the cash on hand, plastic will do the trick.

I’ve never gotten used to this new, expensive society and I probably never will. I like frugal people, even when they are spending their money on me.

A time or two a month, I go to lunch with a friend of mine who still has an idea of what a dollar is worth, and he usually treats so he isn’t a tightwad. But when the waiter brings the check, my friend totes up every item and raises a protest if something is billed at higher than the menu-listed price. And, if the service was satisfactory, he carefully computes a 15 percent tip right down to the last nickel. If the service was lousy, he doesn’t tip.

My friend gets some smirky looks from wait persons, but he simply hasn’t lost his idea of the value of a sandwich and the effort to serve it. And that, I believe, was the original idea of money. 

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