A whimsical tale

about the moment I became a member of The Greatest Generation

There comes a time when most of us realize we have become our parents. Our utterances and our very facial expressions mimic theirs. I theorize this relates to that devastating moment the wrinkles emerge and we notice we are no longer young. Casting about mentally for the role models, we land inevitably on moms and dads or aunties or whoever brought you up. The people with wrinkles. A group which now includes you.

The other day though I unlocked a whole new level of holy shit. In my perpetual effort to eat healthier foods, I’d bought a bag of rolls at the grocery¹ and frozen most of them. I can thaw and warm up one at a time in a square of aluminum foil to go with my dinner. After retrieving the warm roll from the clean foil, … I … I shook the crumbs off the foil, folded it up, and put it back in the drawer. The next day I retrieved it and warmed up another roll.

And that was the moment I realized I’d become my grandmother. This grandmother, a member of The Greatest Generation and a child of the Depression, insisted on homemade cookies², homemade meals, homemade clothes, reused foil. This predilection for spending zero extra dollars most certainly derived from the scarcity of her young adulthood — the crash happened when she was 18 — but also her youth, which she spent in a very rural, very poor Alabama.

There it is, the folded foil in the bottom drawer. On top of the reusable pine resin-coated food keepers subbing in for saran wrap.

None of this reflects my own upbringing and typically I feel no qualms at spending money or giving it away or whatever, unless I don’t have any at the moment. But somehow reusing approximately 1/100th of a roll of aluminum foil that costs $3.25 feels imperative! Perhaps the impulse has less to do with frugality, and more to do with avoiding wastefulness. I seem to value economy of word, deed, and supply.³ But maybe I’ll eventually get there, to the point of making everything from scratch to pinch those pennies.

I’ll know the transformation is complete when I decide sewing my own bathing suit is a good idea.⁴ Until then, I’ll try to cling firmly to my mom’s age group, which is OH MY GOD the Silent Generation.

Fuck.

1. You might be thinking that rolls from the grocery aren’t exactly health foods. Just compare them to something decidedly worse, and you can see what’s going on here.

2. leading to one very clear memory which maybe I’ve written about before, where she and I rolled a can of ice cream ingredients back and forth across the kitchen floor for like an HOUR because she didn’t yet own an ice cream maker. And the stuff still had curdled bits in it. Y’all.

3. Guess what this doesn’t apply to? Fruit. I should eat fruit every day but I don’t. I buy it and then it sits on the counter. That’s extraordinarily wasteful. Plus, if you don’t eat fruit, you get scurvy. I’m very committed to not getting scurvy. Here’s a helpful description if you need to know more.

4. It’s not, ever.