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8
MY
ROUSES
EVERYDAY
SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER 2015
the
Savings
issue
I can no more tell you why I started saving
egg cartons than why I saved sugar packets.
Maybe you can afford to pay a shrink to
figure out why you did what you did when
you were a kid, but I look back not in anger
or sorrow. Puzzled would be a better word
for it.
So, yeah: Egg cartons. Don’t ask why. I have
no
idea.
They were cardboard back then,
not Styrofoam. There were
eight of us living in the house,
so we went through a lot of
eggs. A lot of eggs. (We ate hot
dog omelets for brunch every
Sunday; that’s how much we
loved eggs. And hot dogs.)
So, you know how when you
buy a really cool gift for a kid, what he ends
up playing with isn’t the toy but the box
it came in? That was me with egg cartons.
They were fun to stack. I played with them
like other kids played with building blocks.
I piled them into towers. Built castles.
Toppled them and built them all over again.
And this would be a poignant story if we
were poor and this was how we made do
as a family but — not only could we afford
proper building blocks — we
had
proper
building blocks.
They just didn’t interest me as much as egg
cartons.
Go figure.
My bedroom at the time had two closets, and
one of themwas filled— literally,
filled
—with
egg cartons. And then came a point — I can’t
exactly recall when or why — that I decided
to expand my interests. In the business world,
I guess you would call it “diversifying”.
I had my sugar packets. And I had my egg
cartons. And I loved going to the grocery
store with my mom.
I
loved
going to the grocery store with my
mom. All those aisles, all that food, all
those bright colors, everything stacked and
organized and tidy and just so.
And that’s when I decided to open one of
my own. A grocery store. I already had a
good start — eggs and sugar. So I went on a
dry goods extravaganza.
I knew enough not to save dairy packages
and such, but I began to save our cereal
boxes, cake mix boxes, saltines, Nabisco
cookies, Pringles containers — which were
new at the time, and their cylindrical shape
was very alluring to a kid so enamored with
empty dry goods containers as I was.
Coffee cans, spaghetti boxes, Saran Wrap,
Reynolds Wrap (a personal favorite, since
my middle name was — well, still is —
Reynolds).
I even secreted off, from time to time, when
my mom came home with a trunk full of
groceries and would not be likely to notice
— full, unopened rolls of paper
towels and toilet paper, because
I really like the way they stacked
on top of each other.
I was then, as I am now,
enamored of and beholden to
symmetry. I abhor things out of
order or place. I think it’s called
OCD these days.
Back then — and still now, I
guess — the term for it references the lower
posterior region of the human physiology.
If you know what I mean.
And I think you do.
And so I amassed an enormous inventory of
boxes and containers in my bedroom. I kept
them in the closets, in my drawers, under
my bed. I lived in a big house with five kids
and a live-in nanny, and I was the youngest
and generally ignored and left
to my own space and devices so
…nobody knew about it.
Except my friends. On
Saturday mornings, when all
my older brothers and sisters
would scram out the front door
and head off to their friends
and various activities, I would
invite my best friends over, and before they
arrived, I would open my closet doors and
dig under my bed and gather all my stuff
and — open a grocery store!
Every Saturday, I would inventory and stack
and arrange all my packages and containers
and have my friends come over to shop.
I was in a state of pure bliss. I was in heaven.
I was the happiest kid in my town. I had
what every normal red-blooded American
child wanted at age 10: I had my own
grocery store!
“And that’s when I decided to open one of my own.
A grocery store. I already had a good start — eggs
and sugar. So I went on a dry goods extravaganza.”