potrero view

September 2008

Publisher’s View: Conservation

By Steven J. Moss

When I was a kid in the 1960s my dad maintained careful records of how much gasoline he bought for his Ford Comet station wagon.  He kept a little yellow book in the glove compartment just for that purpose, scribbling in tiny engineer’s handwriting how many gallons he bought at what cost, along with the car’s mileage.  At the same time my grandfather, comfortably retired from a career as a municipal civil engineer, would search the streets and gutters around his home for valuable items:  old washers, bent pennies, bruised and broken toys.  Once he found a treasure trove of wood scraps, which he fashioned into blocks in his makeshift shop in his garage.  My three sisters and I played with those blocks – which were big enough to build small houses – throughout our childhood.

As I grew up I mimicked my father’s and grandfather’s behaviors.  I’d keep my eyes on the ground, finding coins, strange-looking nuts and bolts, and cheap jewelry.  I became skilled at locating valuables hidden within leaves or amongst street garbage.  This talent paid off when I was seven years old and found my mother’s engagement ring, which she’d lost in our backyard woodpile.  

When I got my first car I bought the little yellow book at a stationary store and jotted down the numbers each time I filled-up.  But as my twenties gave way to my thirties, I abandoned these habits.  It no longer seemed worthwhile to bend down to pick up a nickel, or even a dime.  I realized that I had no idea why my father recorded his purchases, and, in any event it didn’t matter to me how much then cheap gasoline I purchased, or my car’s fuel efficiency.

Now that I’m my forties I find myself contemplating these routines as if they were a lost art.  Like many upper-income people, I frequently don’t count my change after a purchase and regularly eat at restaurants where ten dollars worth of ingredients is sold for ten times that much.  I haven’t clipped a coupon for a couple of decades.  Though I worry about having enough cash, it’s in an abstract way.  My relationship with money, with things, has become casual.  It no longer has the intimacy reflected in eagerly rescuing a slightly soiled treasure from the ground, and bringing it home to be reused as a pencil holder or paperweight.

 I’m of course aware that most Americans, much less those in developing countries, have quite a different relationship with money, one that’s more like my father’s and grandfather’s, though in many cases with greater stakes.  The average annual wage in Ethiopia isn’t much more than $100; my wife and I spent about that much last month at a downtown restaurant.  

Still, an awareness that poverty exists isn’t the same thing as having experienced being destitute.  Both my father’s and grandfather’s behavior were hard-forged during the Great Depression, as well as, in my grandfather’s case, even more life-threatening times as an Eastern European immigrant and World War II veteran.  Though my grandfather retired with a good pension and solid investments, he spent his twenties searching for stray coins under stadium seats after an event not as a hobby, but as an essential income source.  Perhaps more importantly, he traveled from a time and place in which virtually everything was worth saving, since the alternative was to have nothing.  

I don’t want to experience that kind of poverty.  But there’s something deeply honest about creating a relationship with money and things that’s based on a full-bodied sense that everything has value.  Not just in a rote – or criminalized – approach to separating compost from garbage.  But in a way that’s more fully thoughtful.  

I now like to think that when my grandfather picked-up someone else’s garbage off the street he was engaged in a spiritual act; the lifting of every tossed wood chip or usable nail akin to a small prayer.  A prayer, said enough times, and by enough people, that will surely be answered.      

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