Variety

Pipe cleaner flowers decorating the fence around a vacant lot on the south east corner of Sherbourne and Gerrard

The same day I read a story on CBC about a nice young couple who were doing well but also crazy in debt - and in debt for the craziest things - our microwave started screaming.

Well, not screaming. The microwave - a piece-of-junk-bottom-of-the-line-over-the-range-General-Electric-model that was all but new when we moved here in 2008 - was beeping: long, loud, sad-sounding beeps. It was on its last legs, and had just enough life left to send a message scrolling on its digital display: KEYPAD SHORTED OUT -- CALL FOR SERVICE.

Right. Call for service. For a seven-year-old microwave, six years past its warrantee and designed to function well for five years, max.

Parts of the keypad had already died. The 4, 6, 8 and zero keys had been non-responsive for years. I'd improvised work arounds to maintain a modicum of functionality in the stupid thing.

Bruce's flower

My flower

Feeling a bit grumpy about having to resort to old-fashioned methods to heat milk for coffee and thaw frozen bagels (the actions that account for about 80% of microwave usage in this household), but not as grumpy as I was going to be when it came to me that I was going to have to buy a new microwave, I read about that young couple who were $350,000 in debt.


I'm aware enough of my surroundings to know that values have changed a bit since the time I was raised. In the house I grew up in, where my parents had memories both of the second World War and their parents' stories of the Great Depression, debt was a terrible thing. 

If you had money, you spent it on necessities: food, shelter, that sort of thing. If you wanted something nice, you saved until you had the cash to buy it. Material things were not so important that you sacrificed your freedom for them.

Fast forward to these days, and this nice young couple, and the staggering implications of an obviously smart and capable person contemplating going forty grand in the hole because "without the glass railing, the look of my stairs is not doing it justice."  

Only con men sell purses for $7,000; only suckers pay that much money for 'em, and I can't think of the word to describe a person who would go into debt to be conned this way. 

Even as I simmered in my sense of frugal superiority to these two silly young people, Bruce showed me there are further points on the spectrum.

The flowers are the result of a pop-up community project, sponsored by the United Way, on June 6. Two young men in logoed t-shirts dispensed the pipe cleaners along with a short workshop on flower-making. Passers by were invited to make a flower and attach it to the fence. 

After I'd turned off my computer and gone downstairs to get ready to go to work, I found Bruce in the family room, laptop open, peering into the screen.

"What're you doing?"

"Looking for replacement keypads for our microwave."

Now that's frugal.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen