In the summer of 2000, my friends and I were all poor. Not Emperor of the North or The Grapes of Wrath poor, mind you. However, we were all either still working on college or recently finished with it, and none of us were setting the world on fire. We managed to miss the boom before the dot com bust.
Our experiences with our own personal recessions in the early part of this decade gave us some practice for the upcoming period in our lives when we will grow old with little retirement saving and no social security. We knew how to adjust the rabbit ears on our cable-less television set so that we could sort of watch our local stations between the fuzzy lines. We knew how to manipulate marketing promotions to obtain free long-distance phone service, internet service, and online dating services. We practiced the art of regifting at Christmas.
I don’t remember exactly why, but four of us decided to spend the Fourth of July at the empty apartment that the mother of my friend Erin had just rented. Erin’s mom had just taken a job in Pittsburgh, signed the lease on a new habitat there, and now all she needed to do was move all of her furniture into her new home. She would not be in town for the Fourth, so somehow it was the “perfect” place for us to have a picnic. Erin and I were renting a townhouse together in Johnstown at the time, and her then-boyfriend was living in Pittsburgh but with his parents. Erin moved to Pittsburgh shortly afterward, and I followed a few years later.
The four of us chipped in as much money as we could spare to buy groceries for our picnic. The total collected came to less than $40. I realize that $40 was worth more nine years ago, but we still were able to only buy some hamburger meat, some kind of pasta salad mix, and some potato chips.
From what I remember, it rained most of the day and we actually had our own little “picnic” in Erin’s mother’s empty apartment. I guess that we sat on the floor.
I’m trying to think of all of the ways that I used to be resourceful, and this memory jumps out at me. Last year I read Not “The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?” by Leslie Bennetts. Overall, the book does not have much to do with this particular blog post. However, one particular quote from the beginning of the book jumped out at me. One of the young women interviewed remarked that as a single woman in her early 20′s, she has to relay on the “plucky, resourceful” side of herself. She insinuated that she is afraid of losing this side of herself if she eventually becomes and old married woman. I used to have a plucky, resourceful side of myself and I wonder if I have completely lost this talent.
I wrote a creative non-fiction story a few months ago about all of the ways that Erin and I used to make ends meet. I am now trying to decide whether to post this story on the blog.
Readers, if there are any of you out there, what are some of the inspired things that you did to make it through your own personal recessions?
(Did you like how I ended this? I stole this denouement from the linked Wall Street Journal blog.)
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