Send Us Hatemail ! mailbag@conservativecave.com
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
moniss (7,263 posts)Regarding pricing at the stores I havea story to tell that may not ease the pain but it may be familiar to some and bring a smile from a memory of someone they knew.Way, way back when the first Mrs. moniss and I started getting serious we were invited for Sunday dinner to her maternal grandparents home. They were a very nice couple in their mid-70's at the time. Big Catholic family with lot's of kids and grandkids. They married after high school graduation as I recall and set up house.Before we arrived my future wife told me that after dinner I should ask them about their "books". She refused to elaborate and I was nervous enough that it passed out of my mind as I was worried most about not getting food down the front of my shirt. So we hit the front porch and they opened the door and everything was small house nice with a linen tablecloth with a wide crocheted lace border on the dining room table, a small kitchen with yellow plastic tiles above the white base cabinets and the small kitchen table with the formica top and chrome on the sides with the chairs with yellow, flat, thin vinyl on chrome frames. The grandfather clock stood tick-tocking away in the dining room between two small side tables with beautiful crocheted lace doilies. My future wife told me that her grandmother had made the table cloth and doilies. I was so tight inside all I could do was say "Oh".So on we went through dinner and the food was very good. I did pretty good with no major spills or food falling off my fork and down my shirt. The dishes were cleared and her grandfather and I remained seated at the table. No conversation. He just gazed at me steadily. I didn't start to cry or anything so I must have passed muster. He was in truth a very nice man. But then my future bride and her grandmother came to us with cake for dessert and good coffee made from a coffee maker that looked like it was from the days when electricity was new.It was then that I got a kick in the leg under the table from my future bride. I was just so relieved the day was almost over and I hadn't screwed up that I didn't get why I had been "nudged". I looked at her and she gave me a look that would in later years be used many times. She mouthed the word "book" and then I blurted out about seeing the "books".Her grandparents brightened up like I had converted or something and the grandfather went to the basement and came back up with a stack of ledger books. It turns out that from the very first day that they were married whenever they went shopping or paid for something they wrote it down in a ledger with all of the details. About 55 years worth of detailed descriptions with dates, product descriptions, size and pricing along with at which store the purchase was made. I don't remember the price of eggs in 1948 but it was in there. Every week. So we spent the rest of our time looking at pricing from the 1920's and then after WW2 etc. It all was interesting and time flew by and it was time to leave.I did not understand the meaning I could have taken away from that day. I am only slightly wiser now than I was then. But what was being displayed that day was the lifelong devotion of two people in a marriage, tracking every penny and understanding how to make it through when you are starting from nothing.So to my long gone German great uncle I now fully know what you meant when you said "Too soon oldt, too late schmart".https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220330745
I really don’t know what he said and I don’t think he knows either.
