We make our morning coffee in an 8 cup Revere Ware stove-top percolator. We have a number of electric percolators, some of them quite old, all of which 'work' in that they will percolate a pot of coffee. The only problem with them is that they don't stop when the pot is done -- even if they are supposed to. No, they keep right on percolating away, just like the stove-top one will do if we don't turn the gas off. We prefer the reliability of the stove-top model and have used it daily for years now.
So the electric percolators wind up on display. Or in the appliance cupboards. We have a couple of very fancy ceramic electric percolators from the '20s or '30s that we keep out on tables to see and admire, and several chrome ones from the '30s that are on high shelves to collect dust (we don't get up to them to dust very often...😋) There's even a nearly new stainless steel electric percolator we don't use because the coffee it made was almost undrinkable -- some off-flavor seemed to be baked into the stainless steel and could not be removed.
We also have a pair of Silex glass vacuum coffee makers we sometimes use. They came with a dual electric hotplate -- one to perc, one to keep the pot warm -- and it's a convenience when we need to have a continuous supply of coffee. Then there are the French presses (I think we have two or maybe three), and the Italian moka pots (two or three of those, too) that we rarely get out and use. But the options are there!
Note: no espresso machine, no Mr. Coffee or one of its clones.
When I was growing up, we never had coffee in the house. My mother said the smell of it made her sick. So for me, coffee was an acquired taste. I learned to like diner coffee -- sometimes very weak, sometimes very strong -- at first with lots of cream and sugar, then over time I came to prefer it black. I never really understood the ritual appeal of Starbucks and such, and I don't like their coffee. But some folks do, and that's fine with me. I'm not a fan of flavored coffees, but we have a bag of "chocolate-piñon" coffee beans in the freezer, just in case I get the hankering...) Mostly we just drink standard grocery store brand ground coffee made fresh in the morning in a Revere Ware 8 cup stove top percolator.
Simple old things. That's the ticket.
-------------------------------
A contrasting view of morning coffee that gives me the willies:
Well, we're told that's a Crisis... again. It's come around again after fading a bit during the pandemic's worst days -- which we're supposedly actually still living through despite vaccines and such. But we're told people are on the move, all over Europe and forgathering in Latin America for more "caravans" to the USofA.
And I've pondered some of this in the context of my own migration to New Mexico from California, as well as in the context of my German, Irish, and English ancestors. What impelled them and what impelled Ms Ché and me on our journeys?
Simply: why?
Though I was told no stories of it growing up, the Irish Famine was clearly a factor and probably the main one in my Irish ancestors' decision to emigrate to the United States. The whole family left at once in 1849, all except my great-grandfather who stayed behind for some reason while his parents and five of his siblings took ship to -- surprisingly -- New Orleans and then made their way upriver to Ohio where a relation had been since 1835 or so.
My great-grandfather doesn't show up in the US records until 1856 when the family and their relations had moved to Iowa -- with no clear indication of when he arrived. Part of what struck me about this is that the most of them arrived during the California Gold Rush, but they didn't go to California, though it would later become the home to all their descendants (none are left in Iowa) including my own self.
So far as I know, none of my Irish ancestors' descendants are left in Ireland. Or if they are, they aren't in County Offaly or Tipperary where my Irish roots were planted.
I can understand the Famine impelling them to leave Ireland. But why would they not go to California right away? Clearly it was a longed for dream destination. But it's a question I can't answer.
They went to the United States because they could; there were no restrictions on emigration from Europe at the time. They encountered sometimes extreme levels of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic discrimination once they got here, but that wasn't the same as prohibition from entry. I'm pretty sure they were driven out of Ohio by the Know-Nothings back in the day. But they put a brave face on it ("There were better opportunities on the Iowa frontier") and made a success of farming and later the law.
As for the German side of my ancestry, I'm not at all sure. I know very little about them. My German great-grandfather left his little town in Baden-Wurttemburg when he was 14 -- 1854 -- after two of his brothers had already left. He arrived in New York when he was 15 (taking almost a year from the time he left home till the day he arrived in NYC.) He apprenticed to a bookbinder in Brooklyn until 1863 when he moved to Iowa, got married to another German immigrant and lived among his brothers there. He took work as a carpenter on the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, a job he held till he died in 1901.
One thing I discovered was that there were still people with my great-grandfather's last name in that little town in Germany, so it's likely the whole family didn't emigrate to America the way my Irish ancestors did. What I found was that my great-grandfather, his parents, and two of his brothers all emigrated at various times from 1852 to 1856 or '57, but other relations stayed behind and their descendants are still there. Why the ones who left did so, I don't know. The situation in Southern Germany was unsettled to say the least after the Revolutions of 1848, but how that affected my ancestors and whether it was a motivation for them to leave I don't know.
Unsettled or deadly conditions at home and the opportunity to emigrate to somewhere else appear to have been the motivations for my ancestors to leave their homes in Europe. It wasn't adventure and conquest -- such as it was for many British emigrants during the Colonial era.
I've been able to trace my mother's British ancestors to arrivals in New Jersey in the 1640s. That was a surprise. There was no hint from her that she had ancestors that were practically on the Mayflower -- and in fact, if some of the stories I've found being told are true, she may well have other ancestors who were on the Mayflower. The impelling cause of their emigration from England is not entirely mysterious. Religious animosity and civil war seem to be obvious. Together with opportunity to live somewhere else, why not leave?
But the opportunity to emigrate in the 1620s and 1640s was risky to say the least, and if one survived, it was the opportunity to live rough. Colonists until the late 1600s and well into the 1700s were largely a miserable lot. Most lived rough on a frontier where the Natives were no longer inclined to welcome them.
So why would my ancestors take that kind of risk and endure such discomfort?
I didn't know anything about them until did all that research in the Ancestry archives.
And that gets us to current events and the masses of migrants all over the world, many impelled by wars and social disruption as well as the acceleration of climate change.
Many seem to see no other choice but to take the risk and endure the discomfort -- and if it comes to it, lose their lives in the attempt.
Dreadful. But it's happened before, and it's happening now.
When my ancestors went abroad to America migration was celebrated in song and story. Not so with current migrants whose suffering and deaths are a "tragedy" -- but apparently unavoidable. There is no welcome for them. Anywhere.
Like the Jews trying to escape Pharaoh or the Nazis. Nope. Can't come here!
For the millions on the move today, there is no welcome anywhere.
Still they come, still they try, still they long for succor.
And some, a very few, will succeed.
As for our own migrations to California and from California to New Mexico, that's another story I think I'll leave for another time.
There's much dooming and glooming about the current political and economic landscape for a variety of reasons. Inflation, congressional gridlock among them.
Well, I tend not to panic over any individual circumstance or event, but I've begun to wonder.
I live out in the country, right? Miles from anything. We don't have home mail delivery, have to go to the post office to pick up mail. Electricity and natural gas service is available but costly. In fact, the gas association has raised our monthly bill by 80% because they anticipate their costs for gas going up that much. They'll make an adjustment up or down next June. Meanwhile we pay.
Gasoline prices went up from just under $2.00 a gallon all last year to almost $3.50 for a while, then inched back down. Yesterday, I think the posted price was $3.25, and in town it's down to about $3.00.
Food prices have increased a lot at our local-ish grocery store, up 30% last year on average, and another 25% this year. Some shelves have been bare since the start of the pandemic. Supplies don't arrive. When they do, they are less than ordered.
The local-ish Walmart in the next town over burned a couple of weeks ago (suspected arson) and there is no date certain for reopening. There is a kind of panic over it because their pharmacy is closed, and patients have few options. The pharmacy closest to us closed just before the fire at Walmart and my prescriptions were transferred to a supermarket pharmacy I've never used. So were a lot of the Walmart pharmacy's prescriptions. I've heard that service is terrible to say the least. This is literally thousands of patients added all at once.
In fact, Walmart had become a kind of regional supply depot, and without it, the surviving local businesses are strapped. They don't have the personnel or supplies to meet the local demand, and for some things you will have to go into Albuquerque -- which is quite a distance if you're shopping.
I wish I could say online ordering is reliable. It's not. If you need something and you order it online, be prepared to wait, weeks in many cases, or be prepared to be told it's not available -- after you order.
It's a crapshoot.
People aren't panicking yet, but there is a lot of tension. Out here we're used to making do and doing without, so the tension isn't as high as it might otherwise be (except among some of the elderly who are very worried about getting their prescriptions.) But I went into town (Albuquerque) to try to stock up on cat food (a precious commodity and sometimes hard to get out here) and tensions were high. Of course it's holiday season, and that's always tough for many people, but this seemed tougher than usual.
I see that some of the media is deliberately ginning up the tension, too. They're running false stories about inflation, for example, saying that prices for essentials have more than doubled in the past year, gas prices are through the roof, so on and so forth. It's not true, but people feel like it is, partly because that's what they hear on the "news" and partly because they are paying more. Shortages are flogged constantly, but from our perspective out here nothing really essential is in short supply. What is in short supply we've been doing without for a long time and probably don't need.
But... this is "ratcheting." Things are getting harder and harder to get, and prices are going higher and higher. The pandemic is not abating but is coming in wave after wave. Illness and deaths continue to mount, and as medical care and medications are harder to get, people are "falling through the cracks."
I've speculated that the death toll as a consequence of the pandemic -- both from Covid and from neglect of other illnesses -- has easily topped 1,000,000 in this country, god knows how many world-wide.
Personnel to work in various low-paid and poorly paid positions are scarce. Employers have resisted raising wages, but they have no choice if they plan to continue operating. Some of course won't.
Thee paradigm is still shifting but we're entering uncharted social, political and economic territory.
Meanwhile, authoritarians of all stripes are marshaling their forces.
Since returning from California last month, I've spent a surprising amount of time in reverie of the coastal sojourn, particularly the time we spent (it was only part of one day) in Monterey, Pacific Grove, Carmel and Big Sur.
When I was a kid I liked going to the ocean (usually at Pismo Beach) but then when I thought about it, I really didn't like it at all. When I was a kid, the beach was always 1) crowded; 2) cold; 3) windy; 4) foggy. It was fun... but. And then on those few times when the sun came out, I got a terrible sunburn because I'm a red-head, no melanin to speak of, no possibility of a tan. So any joy connected with going to the beach was countered by the hazards -- at least the hazards for me.
Yet this time, the hours my friend and I spent at the Pacific Ocean -- at Pacific Grove, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the beach at Carmel-by-the-Sea, and along Highway 1 at Big Sur, including a stop for a late lunch at Nepenthe -- were as the saying goes Amazing.
In my reveries, I go back to one or another stopping place along the way, one or another vision of the ocean which in many places was sparkling aquamarine blue rather than the dusky green it usually is, one or another high place overlook, and it's both comforting and magical. So many times I'd been to the beach previously, but nothing was like this.
And one day, I was cruising real estate listings for Pacific Grove (a place I particularly liked, given Ms Ché's and my long history of adventures in Monterey -- going back to Monterey Pop, 1967) and I happened across this:
(Note, the video is 14.5 minutes long, and I recommend muting the narration and just taking in the house and guest houses and the views au naturel as it were.)
The point is made that this place was featured on the cover of the July 1938 issue of Sunset Magazine, and it hasn't changed much since then. In another video, the real estate agent says that the property was subdivided from the Post Ranch of long ago, and this was one of the first retreats built in The Coastlands which has become a popular summer and winter retreat for the very well off.
I don't watch the video as a real estate listing, because of course, I couldn't afford to buy something like this. No, I watch it as a historical tour, something that really appeals to me. I wasn't around in 1938, but this is the kind of place along the coast I was aware of certainly and probably spent some time in when I was (much) younger, and it was the kind of place that hippies and pre-hippies liked to snap up if they could get their hands on them.
Obviously, from the video and from the listing photos this place has been stayed at, lived in and well-loved for many years. It's a little run down, a little jammed with stuff, a little homey and a lot real. This is quite different than the newer places that dot the coast, the architect's dreams, perhaps the nightmares of the owners and residents. Some of them, I guess, are nice enough, but I wouldn't want to live in them.
This one, I most certainly would move right into and feel right at home, though it would probably take me a couple of weeks or more to figure out where everything was and check out all the nooks and the crannies and the many vistas on the 2.5 acre site. The newer guest house is pleasant enough, but I would want to spend my time at the original "cabin" that still feels like 1938.
The listing says the "cabin" is 2 bedrooms and 2 baths, but you don't see that in the video. One of the original guest houses has two bedrooms as well. The newer guest house, though, only has one bedroom, a very large one, with extraordinary views of the ocean.
This location is very high above the Pacific, so you can't exactly walk to the beach, but one of the things I like about it is that you don't feel impelled to walk in the sand by the roiling surf. It's not all that far away, but it's a journey to get to the water, one that I could easily see taking in a 1941 Buick convertible if I had one.
No, this is a place I can see myself just hanging out, vegging, reading, meditating, watching, enjoying, having friends over as well as being alone, fussing with the plants and imbibing the oceanic ozone.
I think I'd never want to leave.
The cabin and original guest houses sold for $3.2 million; the newer guest house sold separately for about $3 million. I don't know what has become of the property since the sale, but I sincerely hope the 1938 portion has been preserved pretty much intact. It's not for everyone, of course, and people with that kind of money tend not to be particularly respectful of the past. The cabin was obviously old and needed maintenance, but I can imagine someone with lots of money and not much sense buying it as a teardown and building something super deluxe and modern. If it happened it would be very sad.
There's an unwritten story of these historic coastal properties in California, what they were like, how they came to be -- and certainly the story of what's become of them is mostly untold. Many are gone as if they never were. The few that have been preserved, like this one until its sale, seem to be from another world, not just another time.
While I have plenty of mixed memories of being at the ocean during my life, I would happily spend my remaining days looking out at the ocean from this place 🤩
(Note: I've been working on this post for some time now. Let's see if I can finish it! 🤪)
I recently got out my ancient copy of "Living Poor With Style" (1972) by Ernest Callenbach and I was shocked to realize how strongly this book and the ideas in it influenced my life, and how strongly it still does all these many years later.
Re-reading it, I'm also intrigued at how much and how little has changed since publication. The United States is still a cancer on the Earth, sucking up and squandering resources to no discernible object, devastating people and societies at will, enforcing consumerism on a largely pliant population, and pretending to hold the moral high ground while Americans still have no universal health care -- among so many other deficiencies. Yet in 1972, it was possible to live reasonably well off the fat of the land if you knew how and were willing to take the risk of failing.
Now? I'm not so sure that one can live well. One can survive, perhaps. Though it is getting harder and harder. Much of what Callenbach suggests a poor person can do to live better is as useful today as it was 50 years ago -- and more -- but many of the public support programs he advises taking advantage of either don't exist any more or have been so transformed and bureaucratized that they might as well not exist for the vast majority of people.
In 1972 it was possible to live poor and reasonably well if you were clever, skilled, and adaptable. In 2022? Maybe not.
The ideas Callenbach presents, however, have formed the foundation for many movements we see today, from ecology to minimalism.
The title of his book changed through many reprints and revisions from "Living Poor..." to "Living Cheaply..." in part, I think, because of the negative connotations of "poor" among his largely white middle class readers. Even in the early edition I have (it's like the third printing of the original 1972 Bantam edition), he acknowledges that the offspring of white middle class families are the primary drivers of the search for "alternative lifestyles," and living poor or living cheaply is one of them or is actually a constellation of them.
You don't need so much stuff, for one thing. Let go of it. You don't have to eat out, you don't have to have a car (if you're in the city), you don't need a lot of living space. You can do without a lot of what you've been conditioned to believe you must have for a happy life. You can disconnect from all of that and still live well -- though your friends and family may think you're crazy, especially if they're still immersed in consumerism.
The one thing I'd say about his approach is that though he calls on community, he's addressing individuals. This is what you, personally, can do to live well without a lot of things and money.
I look around and realize that, yes, I've lived very much that way for most of my life and am doing so now. The only caveat is that we have a LOT of things, most of them accumulated and not disposed of over a lifetime (or several lifetimes as our things include many of the things of others who have passed on.) Some would consider us hoarders because we've kept so much stuff over the years. I brought the final bits of stuff we'd been keeping in California out here to New Mexico last month, and we're slowly sorting through it, disposing of some but keeping much. Keeping for what, though?
Most of what we have is old. Older than us. Our house is over 100 years old, and much of the stuff in it is nearly as old or older. Many things we've had for decades. But much of it was old when we got it. What's newish is almost entirely a few appliances, electronics, minimal clothes -- and some books and art.
We have a 14 year old Subaru that we bought used and a 25 year old Chevy van also bought used. They're "new" in our view. We don't drive nearly as much as we used to, and the van really is superfluous, but we keep it and I sometimes drive it. It's a convenience in a pinch, for example when the car is in the shop or when we need to transport something large/bulky that won't fit in the car.
I've bought some tools/equipment necessary or helpful to growing things and taking care of our little patch of ground. But I also do without. For example, we don't have a wheelbarrow. Seems strange, but I make do with a wheeled garbage can that serves the purpose just as well if not better.
Many other examples of making do could be given, but the point is that much of what needs to be done can be done without things you simply have to have in order to do them. And very often, things that can't be done without this or that tool or equipment don't really need to be done.
"Living poor..." is a lifestyle of survival if you will. Callenbach was adept at it, but he didn't need to live poor because he lacked money or any other benefit of and upper middle class white male life during his lifetime. He wasn't forced into and kept in poverty the way so many Americans have been. He recognized the truth of their plight even in the early '70s, though, and in seeing that truth, he offered what he could of solutions; advice and ideas he thought would be helpful.
At least for me, and I suspect many others, they were.
Whether poor people today need or want them, I can't say. Much of the practical advice he gives is second nature to someone who's been living poor for a while. A good deal of it no longer applies because of cultural, social and economic changes since the '70s. And the number of abjectly poor people living unhoused on the streets has grown exponentially. His advice won't and can't help most of them, because "Living poor..." in the Callenbach style requires shelter and access to so much of what someone on the streets doesn't have.
We've seen one failed attempt after another to rectify forced impoverishment over the decades; "nothing seems to help" for long or in many cases, at all. In my view, most of these activities aren't meant to seriously address the problem. They are meant as job creation for surplus sons and daughters of the higher classes. They cannot solve a problem they seek to perpetuate to ensure their own well-being. This is not unlike the situation of the monasteries of yore. Yes, some did good works, but that wasn't the point of them.
Meanwhile, I can and do recommend Living Poor With Style (if you can find the original publication not one of the later revisions) as a window on the history of poverty in this country. It's not a complete picture by any means, but it serves to illuminate what people could and did do to alleviate poverty themselves. It became something of a guidebook for disgruntled middle class folks who sought to simplify their lives by "living poor" without necessarily being poor (which I suspect was Callenbach's own position.) And it proved inspirational to any number of alternative lifestyle and ecological/utopian ideals we see in operation today.
I have a modest collection of books, magazines and pamphlets published during and in the aftermath of WWII. I think they are better windows into US society as it was back then than most of the movies that were made during and immediately after the War.
To hear lots of us gabbing these days or to see and read the posts on social media, you'd think we are living in the Worst of Times and Doom is on the perpetual horizon, but you'd be wrong.
The thing that is most striking to me about the material from the War years and immediately after was the overall positivity and futurism it featured. Yes, things were bad, life was tough, conditions were harsh, and yet... "When Tomorrow comes..." ran many refrains, so much of what people were suffering through during the War and prior to it during the Great Depression would be gone, poof, as if it never was. "When Tomorrow comes..." Life would be better -- for everyone. Friends and current enemies alike. We knew how to fix things so that the world would not descend into this kind of madness again -- and the War was definitely considered madness, something deranged and unnatural, but something that had to be done and had to be won, and we (the Allies -- aka United Nations) would do it come hell or high water or both at once.
We might be sacrificing now, but it was for the right reasons, and the hardship Americans were experiencing was light, nothing compared to the Brits, the French, the Belgians, or bless them, the Soviets. The US might be rationing meat and butter, but at least there was meat and butter. Tires and new cars might be unavailable, but there were still rattle trap jalopys to be had, and if you were handy with tools and didn't drive very much (which you couldn't do anyway due to gas rationing) you could keep it running indefinitely. Same with your newer car if you had one. If you got a blow out, you fixed it. If your tires were bald, you were careful. Etc.
People lived rough in many cases, families confined to tiny trailers, tarpaper barracks or shacks, rooming houses that once were mansions, or doubled-tripled-quadrupled up in city apartments in buildings that were falling apart and for which there was practically no maintenance available due to lack of materials and supplies.
People made do.
Jobs were plentiful, there was that, and everyone who could was either working or in the military. One thing you couldn't help but notice is that private companies -- many of them the same multinationals of today - - were the bulwark of the War effort. They manufactured and supplied everything to the military and the civilian markets. And they were fiercely regulated by government.
At the time, people made jokes about some of the regulations -- they seemed absurd or were impossible to meet -- but they appreciated that tight leashes were kept on the corporate overlords of the day.
Those leashes have been loosened to such an extent that there is no longer any but the most tenuous "public interest" -- only corporate interest, and particularly finance interest, in the current political economy.
And there is no futurism or even any concept of a Future to dream of and aim for and realize.
Many years ago now, I wrote a piece on what was then a 75 year old Toastmaster toaster that I'd rescued from the Goodwill discard bin and fixed up to use every day. It's by far the best toaster of the half-dozen or so we have these days. It was in storage in California for the past 9 years since we moved to New Mexico and it was one of the odds and ends that we had delivered here when we cleaned out the storage unit on what was probably my last trip to California last month.
And we've been using it to make toast pretty much every day since it arrived here.
It's a remarkable yet simple machine that in its day was very expensive. It's heavy -- certainly heavy compared to any toaster on the home market today. The cord is fabric wrapped and very sturdy, but when I picked the toaster out of the Goodwill bin the plug had been cut off and I had to find and attach a new one. It works fine now.
This toaster seems to work a little differently than more recent ones, and truth to tell, it makes better toast. Here's how I think this toasting miracle is accomplished:
The bread goes in the slots like any other toaster, but you have to push hard on the black lever there to make it go down, wind up the clock work and start the electric heating elements. The heating elements are encased in mica rather than being exposed, and they start to heat slowly rather than all at once. During the toasting cycle, the clockwork ticks cheerfully, and the lever slowly rises as time passes, but the toast stays in place till the end of the cycle. As the timer counts down, the heating elements get hotter and redder, till at the end of the cycle, they are cherry red and then the toast pops up done perfectly.
This perfection is, I think, accomplished by heating the bread before toasting it, and only toasting the outside of each slice at the very end of the cycle rather than toasting the bread through and through during the whole cycle -- which can dry out the bread and make it crispier and harder than ideal.
At least that's my theory of what's happening.
All I can say further is that the toast we make -- again -- in this toaster is good. Better than the toast from any other toaster we have or have ever had.
