Lately, I hear everyone from Obama to my teenage daughter preaching the Go Green mantra.
Helllooooooooo……I know all about Going Green folks. For me, “Green” has been a matter of economics rather than social consciousness or political ‘correctness’. While my children think they’re saving the planet by tossing a soda can into the recycling bin, I’ve ‘walked the walk’ for the past 54 years.
But hey, today’s generation is Green in theory at least.
When I was growing up in the 60’s & 70’s we weren’t Green in theory; we were Green in reality. It wasn’t until I was 10 years old that dad broke down and bought us a washing machine. Until that time, Mom & Grandma washed the clothes in the bathroom tub, with a washboard, and hung them out to dry on a clothesline. Wind-power dried our clothes & not one lick of energy was used, except for the human kind, squeezing clothespins onto the cord. When Dad’s undershirts or Grandma’s bloomers were too tattered to be worn any longer, we’d stuff them into the rag bag to be used to wash the kitchen floor with later on. Shark Steam-Mops hadn’t been invented yet, and, even if they were, they would have been way too expensive & no substitute, certainly, for good old-fashioned elbow grease.
We did have a dishwasher though, her name was Christine.
No air-conditioning in our little household, either. In the sweltering heat of the summer, when Mom insisted we close all the windows so a maniac wouldn’t sneak in and stab us to death, I’d fill a plastic bag with ice and put it between my legs to cool off. That was my version of A/C. Today, our homes have 20,000 BTU electricity-sucking units that are capable of cryogenics……falling asleep with the temperature at 68 degrees can result in waking up frozen solid.
I had transportation of my very own, too: a bicycle with monkey handlebars and a banana seat. That bike took me everywhere and used not one ounce of energy besides the leg-pumping type. These days, at 16 years old, our children have their own cars which are not jalopies with bald tires and Saran-Wrap for windows. My first car was a 1968 Buick Riviera I paid $650 for which spewed pitch-black smoke and fumes from the vents located by the front windshield. I had to stick my head out of the driver’s window just to see where I was going with all that smoke!
We had 1 black and white television set with me being the remote control (and DON’T YOU DARE spin that dial). I’d be the designated channel changer for all of the 5 stations that came in with any degree of clarity. The rabbit ear antennas saw to that. Or else Dad would go up on the roof to wrestle with the big-kahuna antenna instead. Nope, there was no super wide 60” flat screen behemoth sucking up electricity faster than a storm drain in a thunderstorm.
We had a steam iron though, a real electric one. Grandma did all the ironing in the house, including the sheets and towels. You could hear her banging that iron with every ounce of her strength……..I think that habit was left over from the days when irons heated up on a wood stove. Either that or she was taking out all her hostilities on a piece of hot metal and cloth, I don't know.
If anyone dared to leave a light on, my dad bellowed about how he wasn’t working till midnight every day to keep the electric company in business. Today, we leave 123 canned lights burning in the kitchen alone. Our homes are lit up like Christmas trees and our backbreaking electric bills require part time jobs to subsidize.
When I was a kid, we played in the water from the fire hydrants in the street, when we were lucky enough to find them open. If mom was in a particularly good mood, she’d set up the sprinkler to run through for half an hour IF the lawn was scheduled for watering that day. We had no built-in swimming pools with electric filters running 24/7, Aquabot’s to crawl the perimeter and continuously clean it, or a chemical test kit to make sure the chlorine was at just the right level.
The rotary dial telephone hung on the wall in the kitchen, with a short cord which forced the caller to sit at the kitchen table where everyone could hear her private business. We were fortunate……we didn’t have a party line like the vast majority of the neighbors. No call waiting, no answering machine, no *69 to see who last called, and absolutely NO costly information calls were permitted to be made from that phone. Zip. Nada. By the time I was about 17 years old, mom broke down & bought a longer cord which enabled me to go into the bathroom & close the door to find a moment of privacy. These days, we’ve deemed it necessary to pay $250 a month to Verizon for cell phones with blue-tooth headsets so we can be contacted any time of day or night, anywhere on earth, by anyone who cares to speak to us. One end of the phone is continuously plugged into the cigarette lighter in the car while the other end is plugged into our ear canals, while the phone, the CD player & the GPS drain power from the battery of the gas guzzling car the entire time. How did we function without cell phones we now wonder? What was it like to hear blessed SILENCE & be wonderfully incommunicado?
On the nights I had a bath, the water was saved so my grandmother could get in and bathe after me. We were saving water……..not in an effort to be Green but in an effort to save money on the water bill. Nowadays, we have 4 bathrooms and an over sized hot water heater, to make absolutely certain all 3 of us can take 40 minute showers anytime the mood strikes.
We had no need to waste electricity on hair dryers or curling irons; we used soft pink curlers or Coke cans to roll our wet hair up in, cover it up with a hairnet, and go to bed, hoping beyond hope for 15 minutes of uninterrupted-by-pain-or-bobby-pin sleep. We scotch-taped our bangs down before the lights went out & voila, 8 hours later, we had a home-made hair-do.
My legs were another source of energy back in the day. Believe it or not, I walked back and forth to Jr. High School AND High School every day since I lived about 1/8th of a mile too close to qualify for a bus to pick me up. Nowadays, we drive our kids to the mailbox because their feet hurt after a long day of playing Gameboy & watching videos.
If the electricity went out back then, my dad would get on his knees & thank God for a lower monthly bill. Out came the candles & the battery operated radio was turned on to the soothing melodies of Guy Lombardo & His Royal Canadians. Nowadays, if the electricity cuts out, there is chaos in the streets! We’re breaking out in a cold sweat punching OK on the TV remote, over and over again, in a futile attempt to understand why-for-godsakes that picture turned off right before we found out who it was that slept with the hunky handyman on The Housewives of New Jersey.
Every Wednesday morning, we had one trash can for a family of four to put out for pick up. Why? Because we threw away ONLY the rotted pieces of fruit, the pits, bones, egg shells, coffee grinds, the very tips of the vegetables being cut up for stew, an empty milk jug, and maybe a few empty cans of tomato paste used for the Sunday-spaghetti-sauce. In fact, my kooky old Aunt would feed her dog those old coffee grinds & eggshells. Nothing went to waste….absolutely nothing.
In today’s world, we put out 4 huge trash cans on wheels, 6 empty cardboard crates from Sam’s and 3 stray, can’t-fit-into-the-trash-can Hefty lawn bags which do NOT contain grass cuttings. Why? Because we live in a society where everything is disposable. We throw OUT more food than we eat. If the apple has 1 small bruise, the whole fruit is trashed. In my house, we cut the bruise out and eat the rest of the fruit, since each one costs $1. The plastic containers used in the processed foods we now eat fill up a whole trash can alone! Styrofoam from restaurant doggie bags take up another. A family of 6 can eat heartily from one family’s trash alone!
We were indeed Green back in the old days, and now we’re Blue because we’ve hogged up all the planet’s resources & have nobody to blame but ourselves. Who, I ask you, would know better about saving energy than us old-timers?
Nobody. That’s who.
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