Musings: Leftovers

Saving money is a habit as difficult to start as smoking is difficult to stop. The real problem is other people, who manage their lives with such efficiency that virtue, like halogen headlights, shines out of their ears. “Just do it”, they say, “it’s easy. Self-control. That’s all there is to it”.

They will show you how if you stop chewing gum (or smoking, or skiing or eating carrots) and if you start walking to work (or save aluminum foil, or eating carrots) that you will save a large number of dollars every year, with which you can go to Mexico every Christmas.

“And…”, they go on, “if you don’t go to Mexico, just put it into mutual funds….”. Suddenly they’ll have your whole life planned: early retirement, marital bliss, live to ninety and die very rich, with all your own teeth. If you give them the slightest encouragement they’ll have you eating parsley sandwiches, making your own shoes from recycled newspapers and sleeping on used construction plywood (“it builds character”). Most reformers want you to suffer. If you stop listening to them, and look at them instead, you invariably find that they live lives of self-indulgent chaos, that their roofs leak, they live on chocolate bars, can’t find their drivers licences and that debt collectors have a shift system going at their front doors. Their worst habit is knowing what’s good for you, and their sure knowledge that if you will just change your life then the world (their world) will be a better place.

I have been done good to in my time. My habits have been upgraded to vices, my pleasures reclassified to self-indulgences, and the satisfying mess of my life has been reconstructed by just about everybody who ever brushed up against it. Which makes me somewhat wary of advising others on the virtues of economy or frugality, and the resultant good time down the road. But there is undoubtedly a considerable pleasure in recycling dinner – or as we used to call it – leftovers.

I won’t mention the income tax man, who at this time of year lurks on all our street corners, and I will hold out no hope for you becoming rich by eating cold beans. But I will point out the joy of rediscovering a familiar flavour — it’s like a drink with old friends and a flip through the photo album — somehow better than the first time.

And then there’s the perversities, the odd tastes we had as children and were taught to abandon. A cold slab of macaroni cheese, gently fried in a little butter and sprinkled with lemon juice is so much better than the same slab, foil wrapped and micro-waved into a Xerox of yesterday, because the frypan gives it new dimensions, a little crunchiness on the outside, a crust of fried cheese slightly burned with bits of crisped-up onion sticking through. It’s different, another dish altogether