Toni Stone June 11, 2003
401 Buck Hollow Road
Fairfax, VT 05454
cheap honker habits
a cheap honker habit i still have is not to order a beverage when i am out at a cafe sometimes,
if i don’t think i will drink the whole thing. instead, i will sip Steve’s coffee instead of
ordering my own cup. i mean really, who cares?
this is from the days i was pressed to pay the check at all, and its really not necessary
to have this noble habit now. it’s kind of numb or dumb. . .
when i was a kid, my Mother was very enterprising. she would bring food from home
when we went to the museum of fine arts. we could go to the cafe to get drinks and fries,
but we had our own home-made sandwiches. she thought it was fine, because it meant
we could even go there. we used to slide down on the chairs to try and disappear,
when she brought out those waxed paper wrapped sandwiches.
sometimes she would even bring hard-boiled eggs out of her bag and then whack them to crack them.
probably no one ever saw us doing that or cared, but my brothers and i, we were totally mortified.
today, i will put an avocado in my bag and Steve will slide down in his chair,
like we used to. he will say, “Toni, why do you have to do that?’ but i don’t care.
i bring an avocado not because i can’t afford one, but because the cafe doesn’t have them.
i know i can afford them, so it doesn’t feel like mortification or any embarrassment to me.
its not scarcity anymore.
what else i still do that’s a cheap habit is not buy a plant i really love, if it’s too expensive.
i have a little ceiling on the price for plants and if it’s higher, i just can’t part with the money.
if it’s for you, oh yes. but if it’s for me, “of course no. you don’t really need it.”
we took Audrey to the new 4 Seasons in Burlington. the place is like a green circus. a real destination.
i told her pick out some plants you like. she found a beauty of a Hawaiian something or other. real tall.
a little weird. pink and languid looking. it was a beauty. way over priced.
“you like it?” i said. “oh yes, i love it,” she said. i flanked it into the basket.
“how much is it?”she said. “no matter,”
i said. “you like it, i’ll get it for you, whatever it cost.” “it’s $29.00,” Steve said.
“that’s too expensive,” Audrey said. “no, we are getting it for you,” i said.
she doesn’t ask me why i am buying tiny little three dollar plants for myself.
besides the fact that i like them for my desk, i also like them because they are three dollars,
even though i buy eight dollar Chinese pots to put them in. and if you add the whole mess up,
i could have gotten three tall pink languid whatevers.
the way i have been taught to think, is similar to most of us born after World War II;
the you-don’t-really-need-it generation.
sometimes i catch myself in the fruit department in front of the cherries,
which always seem so much more expensive than last year saying, “you don’t really need it.”
then, if i don’t by them, i buy some lousy genetically-modified apples that sit and rot
in the bowl at home, when all i really wanted was cherries.
now when i catch myself in the insanity, i simply say,
“hey, you can afford these,” and i buy them.
