Doomed to Repeat It

There’s a small stack of 2011 moleskin agendas sitting in the corner. Someone I know was planning to throw them away. It was such a waste of paper that I brought them home with me instead to be used as scrap paper.

These things don’t just magically appear in our world, after all – someone has to chop down the trees, turn their pulp into paper, bind the paper into agendas, design an eye-pleasing cover, ship the agendas to a warehouse and then to the store, unpack the boxes, make price tags, merchandise them, and then (hopefully) sell them.

That’s a lot of work!

As soon as the words, “I’ll take them,” dribbled out of my mouth I realized something:

I’m becoming my grandparents.

This isn’t a bad thing. They’re wonderful people. I’d just never thought about how many of their values I’d absorbed growing up.

My mother’s parents don’t waste a drop of anything. They used rotary phones until I was nearly out of high school. (And I’m pretty sure at least of of their phones still is a rotary.)  No one wastes food under their roof and inedible food scraps are fed to the barn cats. If you ever were to visit them and wanted to write a note they have a desk full of scraps of paper. Years ago when my parents needed  extra suitcases for a longer vacation than we’d taken before my grandfather dug some out of one of his storage rooms. They were forty or fifty years old but still worked great.

There are many differences between them and me but in this area we agree 100%.

Respond

I know I’m not the only who has caught myself acting like someone I know.

When was the last time you caught yourself doing or saying something that sounded just like something one of your loved ones would have done?

 

 

 

5 Comments

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5 Responses to Doomed to Repeat It

  1. Jesse

    I remember when Dad gave us the “eye” growing up that suggested it was in our best interest to stop doing whatever we were trying to get away with at that moment.  That look seemed to say more than any actual words he could have spoken…..I think my boy has came to acknowledge that same look 🙂

  2. Aaron

    I used to make fun of mom for being so rigid about littering. she’d always pick up trash that would be laying on the street or in some public place & she’d get mad if i threw any trash out of the car window. now, i’m just like her. i pick trash up when i see it & i like to recycle!

  3. My mother married late in life and is most likely of your grandparents generation — she’s 94 this year.  She also tends, like your grandparents, to be frugal.  I suspect the throw away culture we have today is more recent.

  4. Twyseschoch

    In the light of the of the multicultural world at my work (I work with people from a dozen or so countries, representing every continent except South America and antarctica) — EVERYTHING I do reminds me of how I was raised!  When I was in Northwest Ohio, lots of people were like me. Now I’m seeing just how much of who I am is from my parents.

    Lots of times at work I re-purpose something for our nurses station, instead of getting a new something from the supply room. This is definitely from my parents.

    However, many of our policies about infection control and food safety require that we throw things away that are not really trash – they are simply expired.  This bothers me, but it bothers some of my coworkers a lot more … they come from places that have almost nothing.  The waste in the USA is a shocker.

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