The Seven Deadly Virtues

by Jonathan V. Last

  Also, it’s for you, my child.

  In the basement, under the stairs, there’s a plastic box with plastic bags, numbered by year. Disney tickets, Happy Meal toys, plastic wristbands from the place where we went on winter days when she was four. Someday, if she wishes, she can hold her childhood in her hands, and imagine the events that made me set these things aside.

  And then sell them.

  Because my daughter grew up in the digital world, every Proustian madeleine is a series of ones and zeros on a frangible platter. Her creations are literary and artistic; she has written a novel, made movies and animations. And as she grows she disavows everything she’s done before. She’d trash the lot if she ever cleaned out her computer. She has no idea that every so often I peek at her computer, find the best work, and print it off. She has no idea that I have saved our text messages in a long scrolling file of quotidian conversation. It may mean nothing some day, and I don’t blame her if she discovers the cache of memory and sighs with annoyance: What I am supposed to do with this, exactly?

  That’s the question, isn’t it?

  Sometime around 1997 a New Yorker died and left some cufflinks from the World’s Fair, and the kids went through the drawers, sighing, wondering why Dad kept all this junk. They had no idea that he bought the cufflinks because he’d had the best day of the summer with a pretty girl from up the block who hadn’t given him a thought until he got that job at Alexander’s and fixed himself up right with a new suit and sharp shoes. When he asked her to go to the Fair she said Why not? to herself and “Why not?” to her girlfriends. “It’s not like he’s so hard to look at.” They took the subway. They saw the robot who smoked cigarettes. They went to the Wonder Bread pavilion and had samples. They ate at the Swiss Restaurant. They walked along the lagoon at sunset and watched the fireworks and she gave his hand a squeeze, and he was over the moon. When they were waiting for the subway he saw a stand that had souvenirs and bought her a hair-clasp with the Hemisphere and Peristyle, and she said he should get those cufflinks, too. They were smart.

  Handshake and a cheek-smooch on the Brooklyn stoop. He went home and threw the cufflinks in the drawer and never wore them. Now and then when he went through the drawer he’d come across them, and wonder who would wear those things today, the Fair all gone and forgotten. Huh. Who was that girl? Frances. He’d pick them up and look at them and remember her legs and her smile and think, Ahh, she wasn’t for me. But he never told his wife about her. A guy’d be crazy to do that.

  And so they ended up on a table in a parking garage on a Sunday and I bought them.

  Note to future matchbook historians who wonder how a foil-covered matchbox from Haugen’s Ice Cream Parlor in north Fargo survived from 1976: I dated a cheerleader in high school. Briefly. She wanted to meet there to give me the heave-ho. The waitress asked what she would like to order, and she declined. “This won’t take long,” she said. I pocketed the box on the way out. In those days you helped yourself to matchbooks when you left. If the meal was bad it wasn’t a total loss.

  I’d collected matchbooks for a while, but that was the first time I took one because my heart was broken. It makes me wonder if every matchbook I have from someone else’s collection was saved for the same reason.

  The matchbooks from childhood were stored in old Butter-Nut coffee cans. I use them now to hold backup DVDs of writing, photos, and … well, scans of matchbooks and plastic cards. Can’t toss them: This is what Butter-Nut looked like in 1972.

  A few of these must still survive, filled with screws in Dad’s workshop, or treasured in a collection of vintage cans. This one happens to hold the bytes that describe my life in the years after my mother died. There’s just no way she could have known when she reached for the can at the SuperValu one morning that it would sit in a closet in the impossible year of 2014, holding the digits that described the granddaughter she never met. I have no idea what my mother was thinking at the time, or worrying about, or whether Paul Harvey was on the radio thundering about Head Red Brezhnev the moment the opener bit into the soft metal, the pressure escaping with a fragrant whoosh. It’s possible forensic technology could pull her prints off the can.

  If someone offered me ten bucks for it tomorrow, he could have it.

  Too much meaningless meaning, really. It’s just a can. If it needs an intermediary to explain its importance, best to let it go and stand on its own merits.

  That’s the hard part of trawling through the antique store; nothing has an advocate anymore, and the story starts fresh when you buy it and take it home. Sometimes. I found a drawer of old love letters from the forties, neatly typed on government stationery. I took a seat, Googled the names, and came up with their obits. Bought ’em, scanned ’em, put ’em up on the Web. One of the letters had place cards from a dinner the couple attended before they were married. She saved them for a reason.

  I had to screen-cap the obits, though. They’ll drop off into the limbo of 404 eventually. Same with my site with the matches and family photos, of course, but you can only hope it gets scraped by some dispassionate automated harvesting mechanism. So the couple’s love letters float on and on until they unravel in the churn of expired domains and sundered page links. It would be hoarding to keep the letters; it would be folly to think anyone who went through my stuff someday would care.

  On the next trip to the antique store, I put the ones I’d bought back in the drawer with the rest.

  Nearly everything I’ve collected in the last twenty years I could sell tomorrow. Once I’ve scanned it, it’s dead weight. I love the heft of the old Life magazines, solid and pliable as a seal’s flippers, and I’d sell them off except that someone would cut them up and sell the ads. Fifteen years ago coming across a cache of Life in an antique store was like stubbing your toe on a pirate’s chest; now the entire run has been digitized and put up for free by Google. For collectors it’s like being an old man in a spaceship that took decades to reach another star system, and when you get there you find it’s been colonized by people who invented light-speed drive a few months ago. The worthless currency of foreign lands, the matchbooks, the postcards—the objects themselves mean little. The scanned versions that reside in the cloud of the Internet mean more: By researching the stories behind the images as best as I can, they have a tale to tell again.

  An admission: If the house were on fire, it wouldn’t be the postcards or magazines I saved first. It would be a few items from the shelf in the closet where the remnants of middle-period childhood sit. A pink plastic drinking glass the Welcome Wagon brought when we moved into our new rambler; it was the hated receptacle for the Warm Salt-Water Gargle prescribed by Dr. Mom when we had a sore throat. And a spy-pen that had a built-in microscope. (Up to 2X!) A vial of gun oil for my Daisy BB rifle. Membership cards for the Cub Scouts, the Fargo Public Library, the Merry Marvel Marching Society. Items from the sweet spot of childhood …

  And my grandmother’s hat-pin box. I didn’t know it was from the 1893 Columbian Exposition until I took Brasso to its tarnished finish. Inside is a thin ribbon of gold, which was removed from the bridgework of my great-grandfather after his death. My daughter thinks this is TOTALLY DISGUSTING. But I put the box in her hand and say: You’re holding something from a man who fought for the Union. He lay on the battleground left for dead, but got up, healed, headed north, and split the sod. He is the reason we’re here.

  Everything can go in the cloud but that. Over this gold his breath passed, his words moved.

  A few years back in Fargo I found a scrapbook that belonged to Doris, the woman my father married after my mother died. They grew up in the same rural community, so many of the characters that appeared in my mother’s scrapbooks showed up in Doris’s account of North Dakota in the 1940s. But she’d been an import, brought to the prairie after the war. The book had pictures of childhood and one stood out: a squinting little baby on the steps of a Brooklyn brownstone with a concrete planter on the stoop. I asked Doris if she remember
ed where she lived, and she did; a few keystrokes on the laptop to call up the address on Google Street View—and there it was.

  The planter was still on the steps, seven decades later.

  I should have bookmarked it. I should have copied the picture and sent it to the people who lived there now. I should have done my part to weld the tiny image from the FDR days to the twenty-first century. But it doesn’t really matter. The look on Doris’s face when we found her childhood home on the computer was all the story needed to end. Now and again, tinder and flint meet, and that’s enough.

  Simplicity is a virtue, but it’s often misunderstood. People take it to mean that stuff doesn’t matter. We tell ourselves that it’s virtuous to divest, lest we become hoarders. The thing about hoarders, though, is that they think they’ll need their stuff someday. They have it backward. The stuff needs us to tell their stories. Just once. Before they pass along to the next set of hands.

  The things we save are nuggets in a sieve, and when our hand falls from the handle they tumble into the river again. But for a while you can handle the physical object and conjure its story.

  CHAPTER 11

  Thrift

  The Un-American Virtue

  Joe Queenan

  AMERICANS LIKE TO THINK of society as the individual household writ large. This is especially true when they are in an ornery mood.

  “I can keep my financial house in order,” they argue. “So why can’t the federal government?”

  Well, the federal government can’t keep its financial house in order. It just can’t. It tried once or twice over the years, but things didn’t work out. It can’t keep its financial house in order because society is not, in fact, the individual household writ large. And society’s attitude toward the virtue of thrift proves it. Thrift—usually defined as the wise management of one’s finances, occasionally bordering on frugality—is reasonably common at the micro level, where individuals and families and even entire regions of a country may practice it on an intermittent, if highly selective, basis. But with few exceptions, the virtue of thrift is not practiced at the national level. Certainly not in this country. Not recently, at least.

  You can make the case that the Scots are thrifty, and the Swiss, and perhaps ze Germans, but you could not say the same for the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the Brazilians, the Russians, the Saudis, or the Chinese, much less for the farcical societies that abound in the third world. In their defense, most societies are not in a position to be thrifty. Thrift is a concept that denotes volition on the part of the practitioner; it is not merely an instinctive, knee-jerk response to adverse economic conditions. Poor, third-world countries are never actively frugal, not in the sense that they consciously practice frugality as a virtue. They are frugal because they don’t have any money. The words “destitute” and “frugal” are not synonyms. Nor are the words “flat-out busted” and “thrifty.” It should not be necessary to explain this.

  On these shores, the public’s attitude toward thrift is more nuanced. Backed into a corner, at least some Americans would probably identify faith, hope, and charity as virtues. They might even give a grudging nod to humility, in the sense that they view the practice of humility as a virtue in the abstract, without aspiring to being humble themselves. No, the closest Americans ever come to being humble is when they are polite. Americans do not believe that the meek will inherit the earth. They believe that Americans will inherit the earth. (The numbers seem to be in their favor.)

  Vis-à-vis chastity, qua virtue, a great number of Americans would be on the fence, in their chicken suits, as they would be with the puzzling, largely discredited, and now virtually obsolete virtue of temperance. Patience would be a nonstarter in this rambunctiously impetuous society. Ditto thrift. For as long as anyone can remember, Americans as a people have behaved in a bellicosely unthrifty fashion, spending money as if it were going out of style, as if there were no tomorrow. No, I suspect that most Americans are not even familiar with the concept of thrift while others simply abhor it. If forced to take a polygraph, I dare say our countrymen would refuse to identify thrift as a virtue. They might even deem it a vice. In a society that depends so heavily on the consumers’ purchasing power, the thrifty are sometimes viewed as quislings, spoilsports, turncoats, renegades, goldbrickers, party poopers, enemies of the republic.

  The American economy, the most powerful-yet-mysterious engine in the history of the world, is built around the idea of inducing lots and lots of people—both at home and abroad—to buy lots of stuff they don’t need, in order to create lots of jobs for other people, who will then buy lots of stuff they don’t need either. There is no room for thrift in such a pitiless (though generally rather entertaining) Leviathan. The concept of thrift derives from the maxim, “Waste not, want not.” But Americans do not honor this maxim. To them it sounds contrived and inane. To them it is a hoary anachronism, like “A penny saved is a penny earned,” or “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” Which is to say, it is a colorful Ben Franklinism with no relevance to contemporary life. “Waste not, want not” resembles Honni soit qui mal y pense or Dieu et mon droit, pithy expressions from our glorious past that no longer resonate in this grasping, fun-loving society.

  Economists are endlessly wrestling with the idea of thrift. In their view, a properly functioning economy must strike a balance between savings and debt. If people are utter spendthrifts and buy more things than they can possibly pay for, then society will eventually run aground. This is what happened recently to the Irish, the Greeks, the Spanish, and the Portuguese, all of which are voluptuously clownish societies. In each case, the public’s eyes were bigger than their stomachs. And now they (or at least ze Germans) will pay the piper.

  But if people are too thrifty, spend too little, and keep too tight a clasp on the purse strings, a society can also run into problems. This is what happened in Japan over the past quarter-century, where the locals would enthusiastically produce fantastic cars and televisions to be sold overseas, but would not buy any of these attractive, lifestyle-enhancing items themselves. They would work their fingers to the bone to bring a ray of sunshine into the lives of anonymous foreigners, while languishing in the technological tar pits themselves. This sort of behavior often leads to drink. Thrift carried to such lengths becomes a vice, a faux pas, or at the very least, a deplorable habit.

  What are the characteristics of thrifty people? Basically, the thrifty are the kind of loners who like to hunker down, batten the hatches, take a breather, sit this one out. They lead lives of quiet, but relatively inexpensive, desperation. They honestly enjoy this sort of stuff. They are voluntary outcasts at life’s rich feast. To paraphrase the immortal Santayana, one of those luminaries who is only famous for saying one thing, those who cannot remember hunkering down in the past are condemned to hunker down in the future.

  Thrift, unlike, say, honesty or charity or perseverance, is a virtue that goes in and out of fashion. Whenever the economy craters and the Four Horsemen of the Fiscal Apocalypse begin to canter across the horizon, pundits start gasbagging about hitting the reset button and returning to “our core values.” Our lost values. Our forgotten values. But this is stupid. Our core values are spending money and buying stuff we don’t need. The entire hemisphere was discovered by rapacious conquistadors and cash-strapped sea dogs on the prowl for the lost cities of gold. It wasn’t the Little Sisters of the Poor who landed at San Salvador, much less at Jamestown.

  In short, this society hasn’t saved its way to greatness. It spent its way to greatness. It is a society that started maxing out its credit card even before credit cards were a gleam in Mr. Visa’s eye—and enjoyed every second of it. In doing so, we have merely imitated the Roman Empire, the only society to which our own can be fairly compared, for both good and ill. Two thousand years of overspending was the way the Romans did things, and not a single regret. No, when pundits say, “We need to hit the reset button,” what they’re really sayin
g is, “We need to go back to living like the Puritans or the Shakers. Or like me and my wife, who grew up in a dirt-poor hamlet in rural Vermont and were perfectly happy to make do with frayed hand-me-downs until the age of fifty.” Nobody in this society really wants to hit the reset button—nobody but the pundits and a few isolated naysayers and harbingers of doom. Hitting the reset button isn’t any fun. Nothing that pundits suggest is ever any fun.

  In essence, thrift is a virtue that resembles being very good at mah-jongg. You’ve heard about people who can do it, but you’ve never actually met any of them. The campesinos say that the thrifty are in the hills or the mountains or the lost arroyos or the snow-capped barrancas and will only return when the people desperately need them. In other words, the first Tuesday after never. Thrift is a virtue that people have heard about but have never seen practiced. “They do it over there, but they don’t do it here,” David Bowie once sang, referring to fashion, though thrift would have been just as good a target. You may have a maiden aunt who is renowned for her thriftiness, or perhaps an economy-minded distant cousin who was last heard from at a garage sale in Newfoundland in 1973. But you don’t know any thrifty people at the local level. Nor would you wish to. They would only tell you to turn down the thermostat and eat more day-old bread.

  Even when thrifty people appear in our midst, they tend to keep a low profile. This is because the thrifty are always worried about being confused with the cheap. The cheap person is the guy who goes to an expensive restaurant with friends and orders the priciest thing on the menu and then refuses to pay his fair share of the bill. The cheap guy says, “I only had a spritzer, not the chianti.” The cheapskate always stiffs the waitress. The thrifty person is not like this. The thrifty person is tight, but he is not evil. The thrifty person always pays his fair share of the bill when he goes out, but he never goes out. The thrifty avoid proximate occasions of extravagance by staying indoors. Cheap people are repulsive, whereas thrifty people are merely annoying.