The romance of thrift

Because we all know a plank of wood and some rope is a better investment than a television.

A few nights ago at dinner, as a conversation starter, I asked, "What century besides this one would you like to live in?"

A thoughtful silence followed.

Ginny piped up first: "The century when Jesus lived!"

Zoe said, "The sixteenth century, so I could explore the New World!"

(I think Maddie said something about the age before the dwarves inhabited middle earth, but I'm not quite fluent enough in Elvish to understand her completely these days.)

After a long time, Lucy answered, "The twentieth."

Having grown up in it, I've never considered that century anything special, so I asked, "Why the twentieth? You do know that the twentieth century is the one that starts with '19,' right?"

"Yes!" Lucy said. "I just wish I could live during the Great Depression!"

We know her well enough not to contradict her. We just waited.

"You know. So I could be creative and come up with interesting ways to make money and grow food and reuse things in new ways! I think it would be a lot of fun!"

Well... I'm doing something right, I guess, to foster such a spirit, but apparently I am spending too much money on food and entertainment and thus stifling my children's creativity. Next year for her birthday I'm giving her empty flour sacks.

Anyway, I was reminded of this G. K. Chesterton quote, one which often comes to mind as we stick to our guns and do what we love even when ours isn't the most profitable boat in the sea:

“Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance... But the thing is true; economy, properly understood, is the more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste. It is prosaic to throw money away, because it is prosaic to throw anything away; it is negative; it is a confession of indifference, that is, it is a confession of failure. The most prosaic thing about the house is the dustbin, and the one great objection to the new fastidious and aesthetic homestead is simply that in such a moral menage the dustbin must be bigger than the house. If a man could undertake to make use of all things in his dustbin he would be a broader genius than Shakespeare. When science began to use by-products; when science found that colors could be made out of coaltar, she made her greatest and perhaps her only claim on the real respect of the human soul. Now the aim of the good woman is to use the by-products, or, in other words, to rummage in the dustbin.”