It Isn't Easy Being Green

Kermit really nailed it when he said it isn’t easy being green.  But then again he was addressing the race question.  Lately I’ve been thinking about a whole different kind of being green.

            Today, “being green” means being environmentally conscious - a technical term meaning don’t waste stuff.  Our grandmothers used to call this being “frugal” but how tedious is that?   Back then it wasn’t a choice.  It was a lifestyle dictated by a lack of funds.  It was essential to be careful with your stuff - you didn’t go overboard using stuff, buying stuff, or throwing stuff away.  Now we have so much stuff we find it hard to appreciate any of it.  And stuff is soooo easy to come by.  Wal-Mart and the internet are chock full of stuff that is guaranteed to make us happy.

            Yet, at every turn we are encouraged to be “green”. We now have Greenpeace and The Green Party where once upon a time we only had The Jolly Green Giant. You can see how much more solemn things have become.  And why was The Giant green anyway?  Was he the product of the first misguided genetics experiment that crossed radioactive broccoli with humans?  Or did he climb down a beanstalk and decide he liked farming and advertising?  Or possibly, his excessive height just made him seasick from bobbing around in high altitude winds as he ho-ho-ho’d over various agricultural operations.  I don’t think he had any personal policies on “greenness” at all.  I suspect he might have even used pesticides.  But there must have been some reason he was so Jolly.  Maybe he grew things other than vegetables. 

            Greenpeace and The Green Party are not at all Jolly.  They are pretty serious, and have members who go around with the perpetually furrowed brows of the disapproving.  Maybe if they spent more time on farms and in gardens they too would be Jolly.  It would certainly be healthier than perpetrating endless acts of fruitless persuasion.

            At one time, back before anyone even thought up the idea of being green, it was all just taken for granted.  Recycling hadn’t been invented, at least not technically.  My dad, who didn’t live long enough to witness the birth of recycling as a political act, was nevertheless a dedicated recycler.  Every time he took a load to the dump, he helped them out by bringing more back with him than he had dropped off.  Today he would be arrested.  It would be illegal for him to make boat seats out of chairs with missing legs, wrong to bring home a millstone and turn it into the world’s biggest grindstone, and immoral to pick up that discarded wooden barrel that later housed such lovely flowers.  I’m almost glad he didn’t live into the era where he would have become an offender.  The mere thought of it makes me shudder – my own dear dad arrested for beauifying things that other people threw away. 

            Now, going to the dump involves a lot of rule following.  You and your vehicle must be weighed before you rid yourself of that bag of stinking meat that was fouling up your fridge.  The dump is so regulated that after you hurl your bag of meat into the appointed spot and drive away holding your nose, you and your vehicle must be weighed again.  It’s the municipal version of Weight Watchers.  The dump uses different scales for vehicles entering and exiting.  If your vehicle should ever weigh more on the outbound leg of your trip, a frightening situation could unfold.  They might tear apart your vehicle seeking the contraband garbage that you had squirreled away under the back seat.  Theft from a store is called “shrinkage”.  It will get you arrested.  You’re not allowed to shrink a landfill site either. 

            Fortunately, there are many ways to improve your greenness on the home front.  Our most recent endeavor was an energy saving showerhead.  I must admit that it did indeed save energy.  During a seven-minute shower, it grudgingly squeezed out about a cup of water.  My feet didn’t even get damp.  A day with one hundred percent humidity would have yielded a more suitable environment in which to work up a lather.  I smelled like a shampoo sample until mid afternoon.  And all the water I didn’t use lapped around in the hot water tank all day, doing no one any good.

            The downside of being green is that it can spawn conflict.  Suppose I read by candlelight in order to save energy.  Am I perhaps doing more damage by releasing carbon into the atmosphere with the candle flame?  Can I expect someone to ring the doorbell and slap me with a carbon tax?  And once I’ve saved that electricity just exactly where is it?  Does it get put aside as my own personal kilowatt hour, or does some other less conscientious person get to run his plasma screen TV with it? 

            So maybe, in some cases, we should take our example of how to be “green” from Kermit and The Jolly Green Giant.  They are the experts on greenness, and you can bet they are never, ever going to be as cranky as Greenpeace!  Butting other people’s ships and engineering high seas confrontations are not on their list of Green Things To Do.  And I’m pretty sure that despite how helpful it is to the environment, neither of them is ever going to endorse showering in a mere cup of water!

A Brief History of Swimming

            When I was five years old my parents had the good sense to build a cottage.  Now, to me, the actual cottage itself didn’t matter, nor did the view, its size, or its charming lack of plumbing. I didn’t care if the neighbors were clones from Deliverance.  All that mattered was that it was on a lake, an actual body of water.

I am completely, utterly, hopelessly heat intolerant.  When the weather gets hot I take it personally.  I mope, I fret.  Some say I get cranky. I’ve been known to hallucinate.  This is because in all the years of my childhood, I never once had to cope with being too warm.  After all, a blue body of water waited in my front yard, beckoning me to jump into it. 

A typical cottage day consisted of a swim after breakfast, interrupted by a brief break for lunch and supper.  At bed time I would be required to get out of the lake. 

My mother had two rules.  Rule number one: no swimming for one hour after eating.  Rule number two: no avoid eating so as to duck rule number one.  This left me with a one-hour void three times a day, which could be squeezed down intervals of fifty-minutes each if I adjusted the clock.

In order to avoid being parted from the water for too long, I would place my miniature aluminum lawn chair in the lake and sit in it while I waited for the hour to pass.  This satisfied the technical requirement that I not swim, while allowing me to stay wet.  However, sneaking the lawn chair into water higher than my waist was strictly forbidden.  This action invariably netted me fifteen minutes of banishment to the shoreline.  I never really understood any of this, and I still don’t.  I’ve never encountered any cases where gut-wrenching post-lunch cramps caused the demise of a person sitting in a chair.  I suspect my mother hadn’t heard of any cases either, but maybe she needed at least a few waking hours where she didn’t have to watch the back of my head bobbing in the lake.  I was probably more at risk of being struck by lightning attracted to my metal framed chair than I was of being seized by a cramp.  People don’t seem to worry about the swimming/eating thing as much today, but in the sixties it was one of the top ten worries, along with radioactive fallout, Russian spies, and whether or not someone might slip LSD into your Kool-Aid.

            Back at home in town, I still sought water everywhere.  Swimming pools were uncommon during my childhood, but you could cool off under the lawn sprinkler.  We were lucky enough to have rich neighbors who had a pool.  At least I thought they were rich – how else could they afford the extravagance of a plastic wading pool? 

Pools and plastic were both rarities in the early sixties.  The circular wading pool had two inflatable plastic rings for sides, one orange and one yellow, and a thin plastic bottom. It was a whopping four feet in diameter and could be filled to an impressive depth of 4-5 inches. Any deeper than that and you were “wasting water”. The water nicely covered your feet all the way up to the tops of your ankles if you were standing, or to the tops of your thighs if you were sitting.  Maximum capacity: two kids.  Actual capacity: five kids with an additional six standing nearby yelling that it was their turn.  From a parental point of view, it was the best possible swimming experience, as there was zero chance that anyone would drown. A kid was more likely to die of infection brought on by multiple toenail slashings.

Later on, as I went farther afield in the world I made friends with someone who had a real swimming pool – a large rectangular hole in the ground, with concrete squared off nicely around the edges. It had a snappy blue liner and a diving board at one end.  You could even swim in that thing on weekdays – no waiting to get to the cottage!  It didn’t matter that the population density in the pool rivaled that of Singapore, it was water, and it was deep enough to swim in.  And best of all, it wasn’t a public pool! 

My mother disapproved of public pools, and was ultimately proven to be correct in her analysis.  The one and only time I was allowed to go to a public pool I returned home with only one shoe.  To be more accurate, I returned home with no shoes, as the one shoe that was not stolen seemed just too heavy to carry back home after I discovered I’d been the victim of a one-legged thief.  Wearing a single shoe for the long walk home was more painful than scorching my bare soles on the hot pavement. Midway between the pool and home I pitched the useless unpaired sneaker into a shrub. 

Not long ago I walked past that same shrub, which is now a massive clump with stems thicker than a sailor’s arm.  I bent down and looked beneath the leaves but the shoe was not there.  Too bad – it might have made my mother re-think her position on how “irresponsible” I am.

On hot days I still like to take a dip, proving that swimming can be a lifelong pursuit.  You are only briefly too young to swim, and almost never too old.  But you do need to remember a few rules:  no swimming for one hour after eating, trim your toenails when swimming in close quarters, and keep your eyes on your shoes!

Phones: Then and Now

             When you think about it, phones have changed a lot in the last fifty or more years. They are now not only portable, but small enough to get lost in a tooth cavity or show up in unexpected places, like in the fishing tackle box you hid under the bed.  Last week I retrieved two cell phones from the laundry hamper and one from the dog’s dish.  I got there just in time.

            Back when I was a child we were like every other family.  We had one phone and only one phone.  And like all phones of that era, it was a black phone with a rotary dial.  It was at least twenty years before it occurred to anyone that a phone could be manufactured in a colour other than black.  

            Despite the lack of colour choice, you did have two options.  You could have a wall mounted phone or one that sat on the counter.  However, the location of the phone was non-negotiable.  Phones were always located in or near kitchens back then, the logic being that the homemaker spent most of her time there.  Placing the phone nearby meant that she wouldn’t have to run all over the house when it rang.  Etiquette dictated that she must answer the phone within two rings - it was impolite to keep the caller waiting.   She would have to deal with the leg she broke tripping over the dog in her phone-inspired dash after the call had ended.

My dad insisted we needed a wall mounted phone. He was sure that we would knock the table model on the floor and break it - an event as calamitous as an A-bomb plunking down in our back yard.  It was common knowledge that you were allowed one phone per household per lifetime.  That black phone was going to have to last you until the end of eternity, maybe even longer, no one could say for sure. Phones were so special you couldn’t even own one.  They were the property of the phone company, and damaging corporate property was more than likely punishable by execution of the entire family.  In the event of a fire, the phone was to be saved before your purse, your best hat, the radio you hadn’t finished paying for yet, and your Granny.

            The phone didn’t ring much back then.  It was only to be used for serious matters, and only for adult matters.  If you wanted to play kick-the-can with your best buddy you walked over to his house and knocked on the door.  This let his mother decide if you were a worthy playmate, depending on how clean/polite you were, and whether or not their family dog was inclined to seize you in his jaws and toss you around the yard.  The latter was a true test of your character and was an option that simply could not be exercised over the phone.  A clean hankie in your pocket and recently trimmed fingernails also went a long way toward impressing another kid’s mother.

When the phone did ring the phone calls were usually for Mom. These involved the church potluck suppers or bridge club meetings or baby showers that were the meat and potatoes of social life in the 1950’s and ‘60’s.  Rarely, oh so rarely, the phone calls would be for Dad.  This was so uncommon that it would leave the family awestruck for the better part of a week.   A meteorite slicing through the roof and striking you dead in your bed was a more likely event.  Invariably these infrequent calls came during dinnertime.  Forks dropped into plates during the shocked silence that fell over the dinner table.  Billy would swallow his pork chop whole and the dog would forget all about table scraps and start whimpering in the corner.  I would spill my full glass of milk and it would actually go unnoticed.  We would not even breathe.  Something of major importance was about to happen.

Phones were limited use items back then.  For example, the school did not phone home when you misbehaved.   If your transgressions required parental intervention, a hand-written note from your teacher was sent home, summoning Mom to the school.  Both the presentation of the note and the trip to the school by your mother instantly made even small infractions balloon into events of Biblical proportions.  

Schools have now come to rely very heavily on the use of the phone.  They even have phones that can dial themselves.  Teachers no longer need to waste time and paper writing notes to parents – they have an “automated dialer” to deliver the bad news.  The dialer doesn’t have a lot of information at its disposal so it just gives you a tease, kind of like a movie trailer.  It only has a few vague facts:  some student who lives at your address missed something, sometime.  You aren’t given the name of the student, just his grade.  You are given the date, but the time period is just hinted at, for example, “period two.” 

The auto-dialer leaves a cryptic message such as, “A student in grade nine in your household was absent from period three on November 3rd.”  What the message is hinting at is often difficult to interpret and might point the finger of suspicion at more than one of your offspring.  It doesn’t much matter.  If your kids have figured out how to answer the phone, you’re never going to hear that message.  It’s a wonderful example of advanced phone technology, but I don’t think it’s much of an improvement over the teacher’s note.  Sure the note could be tossed in the gutter on the way home, but the note was personal and ditching it would have led to a feeling of guilt.  Foiling the auto-dialer?  Who cares if the autodialer’s feelings get hurt?  That would just be silly.

Now, thanks to cell phones, calls follow us everywhere.  The dentist has to fill your tooth between phone calls and the doctor has to take a break from repairing your aorta to let the telemarketers know that you’re currently unavailable.  The phone rings while your boyfriend is on bended knee with diamond ring in hand, and he has to pause while you tell the Nigerians that they’ll have to wait until later to put all that money in your bank account. Your cell phone rings while you’re pumping gas, and you wonder if you are going to go down in urban legend history by blowing up an entire city block.

 Phones have changed just about everything.  It’s kind of tricky to figure out if their constant companionship is a plus.  A mere fifty years ago your phone would have been at home, safety attached to the wall.  Blowing up a gas pump was way less likely.  Aorta repair and marriage proposals could go undisturbed.  No one drove into a ditch/wall/movie theatre or backyard pool while typing on their phone. Disasters at the office somehow managed to wait until Monday.  And you could plan a whole vacation without ever once having to plot a route that stayed within the range of cell phone towers!