As soon as I start writing, I am no longer an essayist but a Food & Wine writer, I know immediately that isn't right either. This is not a new chapter exactly. Nor is it an abandonment of the previous chapter. It's simply a continuation in a life story that does not always have clear delineations between then and now. It saddens me to think I might no longer be the essayist behind amyccollins.com, but realize also the potential for this thread to continue on the next page, with a honed subject and more room to exercise quieter passions, food and wine. Quiet no more. I've re-kindled the passion and proudly picked up the spoon. Follow me to Pig&Vine: Food Wine Stories.
I expect essays will pop up among the wine reviews and recipes I post there, mostly about food and those behind the produce and creation of life's edible bounty. Though I wouldn't be surprised if some of those essays touch on the philosophy of creativity and existence. It is, after all, a blog by me.
I'm incredibly excited about this new project. My whole life I've been hungry, thinking about the next meal as soon as the present one is complete. And many years ago I fell in love with wine, too. I love the mix of science and art involved in making wine, and discovering it as well. It's a perfect marriage really; logic and heart. How funny to have suddenly seen the natural path for me to begin blogging and writing about two things I do everyday, have done, everyday for years now: eat and drink. And more recently: cook and drink.
I want to thank all my loyal readers for your support and continued reading, enthusiasm and support. I hope you will check out the new project, and if you like it, subscribe by email or RSS and share the site with your friends. It is a brand new blog with only 3 posts, though I expect it to grow quickly as I have a slew of wine notes, recipes and ideas (always ideas!)
The roast itself was simple. An inexpensive cut of meat, a brisket, a shank, cooked all day in a large black pot I’d later learn to call a dutch oven, with russet potatoes, skin off, and carrots, a little water, a little salt. Maybe there was an onion. On the plate the brown gravy oozed over ribboned beef and dripped from an earthy-orange, once round piece of carrot so soft my eight-year-old hand could easily mash it with the back of a fork. Every bite was tender and warming, glistening with bovine fat. It was delicious. We were happy and sated.
This was End’s meat.
I must have had this dish in my childhood to have imagined it so clearly, so distinctly a classic American pot roast. I’m sure my mother put this meal on the table more than once. It is still, though I’m well aware now of the ubiquitous idiom, what I imagine when I hear the phrase, make ends meet.
Probably I heard the phrase long before I read it, and so in my childhood imaginative mind end was personified. And he loved his meat. It’s not that I did not understand the meaning of the phrase; to make enough money to live on, to make enough go around, to be sure there was sufficient food on the table for everyone. It makes perfect sense to have switched the meet for meat. I was an active, skinny, always hungry child.
But who was End? The best I can figure, End was the end of the day, the end of the week, the end of toiling and scraping, the end of a means to an end. That end also being dinner, naturally. Like a poet, if you’ll humor me, I was personifying the day. End’s meat. The end of the day is here and we will celebrate with a reward of meat, pot roast specifically.
I blame this misconception completely on my lack of reading as a child. I’m not sure I was a particularly good reader, which may have been a factor, but while my two sisters could sit quietly entertaining themselves with story books, I needed to move around, lap the yard once more, ride my bicycle to the creek, call a girlfriend to play. I was curious about the world out there. And I loved to talk to people. One friend would go home and I’d want to invite another right over. My mother worried I’d grow up codependent. In any case, I was not a reader, by choice, until I reached college.
I love to read. Fortunately, as a writer, it is also part of my job description. I love nothing more than to spend the afternoon hours stretched out in bed reading. I’m a slow reader. I savor every word, stopping to think, often losing myself in a thought or story of my own, and have to re-read the page. Yet, it’s still strange to see these words linked together; make ends meet. It startles me.
The idiom has been used for so many decades it is difficult to pinpoint from where it originated. One theory is accounting based. The expenses and income columns must meet at the end, the first not to exceed the later. Thomas Fuller wrote in The History of the Worthies of England, published after his death in 1661, “Worldy wealth he cared not for, desiring only to make both ends meet; and as for that little that lapped over he gave it to pious uses.” I like Fuller’s small joke here. And now I see Mr. End lapping up that oiled gravy with a dense chunk of white country bread, or sliced Wonder. Other theories suggest the term comes from tailoring or dressmaking, allowing only enough fabric to fit the body, making ends meet. I have not discovered an edible reference to the phrase except in my own history.
How many misthreaded ideas live comfortably in my mind? How did I come to create a being, an independent entity, from two nouns? How I’ve managed to keep this secret for so long! And why does this vivid misconception exist, determined and obstinate, without even a feigned apology for being wrong?
It must be that I’m so very fond of meat.
Crafting the Personal Essay by Dinty W. Moore throws up a list of prompts for writers interested in pursuing the memoir essay. Eight questions are to be answered from the gut with a single word or thought and saved for later, when scouring the annals of one’s life for material.
This essay was a response to Question #2: What as a child did you totally misunderstand, but now as an adult see very differently? [more or less, differently]
Crafting the Personal Essay by Dinty W. Moore throws up a list of prompts for writers interested in pursuing the memoir essay. Eight questions are to be answered from the gut with a single word or thought and saved for later, when scouring the annals of one’s life for material.
Question #1: What are you most afraid of?
Failure. I’m terrified of failing. But second, I’m afraid no one really likes me. And sometimes I’m afraid my mother, roommate and lifestyle provider, will up and die and I will be, heartbroken of course, but also broke and flailing, incapable of taking care of myself, and living in the gutter because, 1. I’m a failure and 2. No one likes me enough to take me in, or give me a job.
These are irrational fears. I’m well aware. That doesn’t stop the all powerful mind from spinning possible outcome tales, though, does it?
I’m kind of an anxious person. Not medication laden or life disrupting anxious, though a natural supplement promoting calm wends its way into my diet. And I run, which I find helps immensely if only because when I run hard enough and far enough the fatigue is so great it leaves little energy for worry. Minor hangovers and that glorious, elusive, in-between buzz, not-quite-sober and not-quite-drunk, nearly impossible to obtain on purpose, numbed fatigue has the same calming effect for my type of anxiety.
Sometimes I worry that my house will catch fire in the dead of night and I’m the only one to escape. I stand naked in the middle of the street watching my life go up in flames while the neighbors circle around and pray over me, effectively drowning out my curses at God and the Universe, my little naked fist pounding the starry sky.
Sometimes when driving over a bridge I worry my hands will stop working, or sprout a sick, morbid-humored mind of their own and let go of the wheel. There I go, over the side, never to write another word again.
Sometimes I think everyone’s talking about me just before I enter the room, and then again as soon as I leave. I think they only pretend to like me and when I’m invited places it’s with a feeling of obligation , which I can’t rationalize because I don’t work for or with anyone, I’m no one’s in-law or girlfriend and I don’t really have anything anyone would want (like money or fame).
Sometimes I think people are talking about me while they’re talking to me. This happens when two or more people (not me) exist in two or more dimensions at once, and so are able to carry on at least two conversations simultaneously, one with me and one about me. This phenomenon can be explained with quantum physics, I’m fairly certain.
As a kid growing up in sunny, humid Florida I was deathly afraid one of those 4 inch eastern Lubber grasshoppers would jump in my hair, get tangled up and I would inadvertently smash him into my scalp, thinking it was just a rush of wind mussing my curls. Or worse, a flying cockroach (palmetto bug is too sweet a name) might attack my face, and again, I would reactively smash it to bits, tannish, indistinguishable guts sliding down my cheek.
But I’ve grown out of the bug fear. More or less. Which just goes to show all fears are tangible creations we can beat back and dissolve away with just a little positive thinking. Of course there are always new fears to entertain. For example, I just read a funny collection of essays by Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck, and in the very last essay, a copy of which I found here, talks about how life after 60 is sad. I’m a very positive person, happy and excited about life, but now Nora has given me reason to fear getting old. I’m depressed just thinking about it.
Now my mother, roommate and lifestyle provider, is over 60 and she’s not depressed, at least she doesn’t let on if she is. Nope. She’s fun and funny and up for anything even when I’d prefer she be oldish and stodgy and want to stay home while I go out with “the crazy kids”. She’s youthful, if that’s an appropriate word, and silly. I love silly. But when I’m her age she’ll either be gone or near 90 and completely senile. I’ll be hitting on men in their early 40’s, thinking I’ve still got it, while onlookers whisper, or step into the neighboring dimension, “bless her heart. Even her cooking’s gotten so salty you can’t eat it.”
Grasshoppers are out. Aging is in.
Honestly, these fears and anxieties take up very little of my time. They flash through my head, like film scenes or novel excerpts; all material. The things I spend most of my time being anxious about are whether or not I’ve chosen the best tasks for the day, or if I’ve too many things on my plate, or if I should just give up this creative, writing life and go sell insurance. I find it very difficult to pour myself into a project without thinking about all the other projects I need or want to be doing. These are the things I worry about to my mother. And that so and so probably doesn’t like me anymore, if they ever did. She complains she has to live with me and my anxieties. “You?!” I demand, “I hear it all day long in my head. I can’t escape it!”
It’s a regular running with the bulls in there.
Eventually I tire out on worrying, sometime mid-week, and get to work producing something really great or funny or clever or delicious, because my fears are not Mount Everest, and there are traces of rational thinking in that sinewy cranial tubing.
To fear is counter productive. Except when a scary dude follows you to your car.
I’ve failed many times already. I know what failure looks like and I know how to overcome it, usually by trying again. I also know that failures are forgotten when enraptured with the possibility of new success at hand.
Most people like me. Some people like me who I wish would not like me, and those who do not like me I’ve probably given good reason for. And I didn’t like them first anyway. Pining for things or people unobtainable has never been my thing. I could use more hugs, though. Couldn’t we all?
To fear death, of any kind, is so human, and yet the most irrational of all irrational fears because it is the only certain one.
With a magical powers Rational Thinking Cape around my neck, I realize most of us harbor these same anxieties, in similar forms, to some degree. It’s that damn expansive consciousness. How can we not imagine the worst when we’ve already seen evidence of the worst done? In the news, in the lives of those we know, and don’t know, even in our own histories, we’ve felt and experienced the realities fear suggests. Or maybe it’s not We. Maybe it is just me. Nora took super saturated bath oil baths to make her feel young, silky soft skinned, and one supposes, better about her position. Having reached the end of another essay, anxieties aside, I’m awarding myself an afternoon of reading in bed, among the silky soft sheets, where I feel relaxed and worry-free. I don’t even care what you say about it.
Everything is always harder than you think it’s going to be. It was seventh grade before I learned to make the rabbit go around the tree and into the fabricated hole of my second shoe lace. I’d been looping and crossing bunny ears for so long I’d forgotten it was the simplified version, the little kid’s way. My sneakers never complained.
I never thought it would be so hard to quit this column.
The weeks drag on now. What happened last Monday seems a month ago, and hazy. A morning fades into afternoon melts into evening. I go to bed, I get up again. It’s like that Monday deadline was my anchor and now my ship has become unmoored. I float from weekend to weekend, far from shore, my feet slipped lazily into worn, soft loafers with the heel mashed down, no effort at all.
“I’ve missed it,” I recently confessed to a reader I didn’t know was a reader. She commented on an essay from a while back, the one about running. She said I’d really nailed it. Of course I mentioned the column had been retired. She nodded in concession and I was suddenly embarrassed to be having the conversation. We talked mostly about running, about how hot it had been, how humid. We’d both been out that morning and both wilted in the Alabama summer. I’m off my running game, discipline gone to shit.
But this morning was different. At 8:30 the temp was in the 70s and the humidity was low. I’ve been running a good 45 seconds slower than my pace before those ridiculous 100+ degree days settled in a few weeks back (and for more than two weeks I didn’t run at all). This morning I was on my old pace, a little faster even. My muscles had not forgotten! And I can still tie a shoe lace; rabbit, tree and hole.
Writing and running have to be practiced regularly if one wants to improve and gain strength. Omitting either for too long leaves a person sore and inflexible.
Writing is a muscle. Smaller than a hamstring and slightly bigger than a bicep, and it needs to be exercised to get stronger. Think of your words as reps, your paragraphs as sets, your pages as daily workouts. Think of your laptop as a machine like the one at the gym where you open and close your inner thighs in front of everyone, exposing both your insecurities and your genitals. Because that is what writing is all about.
How easily my writing muscle has taken to this essay. Muscle Memory, with the workouts under belt, pages written, astonishes the cranky writer not writing.
Truth is, I just miss writing this freaking column! I miss the tap, tap, tap of the keyboard. I miss the audacious, presumptuous act of publishing my thoughts online, daring one single human being to read it, to like it, or, the Gold: to actually relate. But, that’s what writers do; expose insecurities, turn their insides out and hang them on the line in the front yard, next to the rusted chevy on cinder blocks, baggage no longer functional, yet still sitting around. It’s honesty that connects us, makes us feel less alone, less alien. That’s why we read. That’s why we write.
The next project, the grand, very exciting next project teased in the Goodbye, Monday column is taking too damn long to come together and I need my fix. As great as the next project might be, nothing will ever be exactly like this project, which, turns out, I love.
Like a true addict I’m not thinking about tomorrow, or next Monday. I’m not thinking about where this column is headed or what might come of it or even the point. Expectations are low to nil. Not even sure what needs to be accomplished this afternoon, or what’s for dinner, or which job I should apply for next, because right now it’s all about getting high. Writing’s in my blood and it won’t quit.
Changes have been made to the design of this blog. An easier reading font, format and a link to a photo collection, (camera icon to the top right). If you're reading in email, please take a look. I'd love some feedback.
I met Tim Stevenson in 2008 when I first moved down the street from him and his wife, Carol. Since then, I've had the great honor to take art classes under his tutelage, read this book in it's original long-hand version, be continuously awed by painting after painting, and sit for hours and hours talking creativity, the difficulties, the inspirations, the meaning, significance, purpose of a living a creative life. He has been a mentor and a friend, and helped me learn how to trust my own creative impulses and allow myself to produce, not just work, but good work.
One does not have to know the man to glean this sort of inspiration and motivation from his earned wisdom. Chasing Light feels like a conversation with a friend, a caring mentor, who wants nothing more than to demonstrate we are not alone in our creative yearnings. With 75 paintings, stunning and jumping from the screen, he has intertwined passages, some only a sentence long, of insightful reflection only a dedicated veteran could confidently profess.
As a lover of books about writing, much of them dealing, of course, with the plight of the artist, this is one of my all time favorites, right up there with Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird and Stanley Kuntiz's The Wild Braid.
Chasing Lightpromises to inspire.
Get yourself a copy of Chasing Light. You'll be happy you did.
**As stated in my GoodReads review above, I have a personal interest in the success of this little ebook, which I hope to see in print some day. I had the pleasure of working with Tim on the editing of the text and the design and implementation of the ebook. It looks damn sharp, if I do say so myself.
Tim wanted to go grassroots on this (selling off his website only) so it's presented as a PDF, which means you can read it on any ereader - Kindle, iPad, Nook or the PDF reader on your computer. If you go with the later, I recommend downloading the free Nook reader for your desktop. It looks super sharp in that platform.
This is officially the last column on AmyCCollins.com.
Sorry to be a little dramatic about it, but I thought I'd cut to chase.
AmyCCollins.com has been around since 2008, started first as a travel blog, back when I thought I'd be a travel writer. Then it became a random essay sort of blog, with many features about food and local purveyors and a go-to web address for published clips, supporting my freelance writer career. Gradually it became the once weekly column it has been for over two years now. Every Monday, a column, on whatever was present and calling at the time.
Mable was born here via cartoon friday. She has her own blog now, her own shop, her own brand, and she's doing just fine.
I've written this Monday column for two years and two months, a shallow commitment, maybe, but when it comes to jobs and relationships, that's a long time for me. And this blog has been both a job and a relationship.
While I'm super excited about my next project, I can't help but feel, surprisingly, a little sad to say goodbye to this one. As usual, that surprise is naive (after a certain age, aren't all surprises naive?) This blog has helped me learn to sit down every week, to put the fear and doubt aside and put together some semblance of cohesive thoughts on life, living, human existence. It has taught me in many ways to write, that thing I most wanted to do. It's sort of like a first boyfriend. You never forget the first.
I've written on so many subjects I can't even begin to categorize them all. In short, this blog is a collection of essays. Hits and misses, most of these posts have been written in a matter of a couple hours, first drafts at best, with minimal (too often too minimal) editing before hitting publish. It wasn't that way in the beginning. When I first started writing the trip was laborious and torturous. I'd spend an entire day working on a column, and half that day staring out the window or searching the Internet. After a while I stopped worrying if my posts were "good" or "valid" or "liked". I stopped worrying whether or not anyone was actually reading. It became solidly an activity in love and passion, a commitment to produce and practice what my soul has pushed for all my life.
Is it a mistake to forget the reader? Not always. Sometimes the readers are silent. Sometimes the unseen and invisible readers take the shape of imagined naysayers. Even as I prepare to launch my new writing project hateful conversations form in my head, you can't do this bounces around, spoken by a perceived nemesis, though I realize it's only me telling myself I can't. If nothing else, this blog has taught me I can. We all can.
I have much thanks to bestow on the many, many readers, loyal, regular and occasional, silent and spoken, for being there along the way. If Thomas Merton is right, that our failures are all our failures, that our successes are all our successes, then this column project is your success, too. Thank you. And congratulations.
So what's this crazy, exciting new project? you ask.
Well, it's many things.
Its is a writing project, more focused and more defined than the one we're saying goodbye to today.
It is a place for me to mash up all my interests. Like you haven't done that already? you say, sarcastically. No. I haven't. Not exactly. Not in the way I now imagine.
It's going to be a greater challenge and a deeper commitment, a branching out and a growth from the present, now past, project.
There will be more features and more frequent posts than just the once-a-week lengthy written word, though for you avid readers, that weekly post will remain, in a different form, just not on Mondays.
There will be lots of gorgeous photos, and at some point I expect, illustrations.
There will be a STRONG emphasis on FOOD. + Wine.
I hope for a more open environment, more give and take, through commentary, shared experiences and guest bloggers.
I hope, during the learning process, as with all new endeavors, that it will get better and better with each week, each post, and that I will continue to hone my craft and learn more about myself and this crazy world we're in.
And I hope you will join me there.
The next couple of weeks will be dedicated to blog design and feature refinement as the initial structure of the project continues to come together. I'll keep you posted and let you know when we're up and running.
Cheers, Peace, and all the best to you,
P.S. If you're thinking, oh shit, I missed a few posts I'd really like to read. No worries. The archives will remain. Come by anytime and read your heart out. Heck, send me a note and share your thoughts! (especially if it's praise, that's my favorite kind of email).
I recently purchased one of Target's awesome 4 movies for $10 they call "4 Film Favorites.....Collection." I bought the Dirty Harry collection. I had never seen a single Dirty Harry film - that's not to say I might have at one time or another happened across a replay on television, late at night or mid-afternoon, and quickly switched the channel, presumably for something more engaging. Clint's role as Inspector Harry Callahan is so iconized, the line, "you've got to ask yourself one question: do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?" is so cliche everyone on the planet, OK, maybe everyone born before 1990, knows the line, knows Clint Eastwood uttered it, despite having never seen a single Eastwood movie, without knowing he was playing a vigilante cop. And so I thought these are movies I should see. I need to know about Dirty Harry.
In short, I loved them. The movies are horrible by film making standards, B-grade films made quick and cheap with acting at a minimal passing level. The scripts are mediocre, some better than others, the dialogue often stale and stilted, completely contrived. The camera work is loose and shaky, which I also love, as it lends an heir of authenticity, of dated, muted colors, analog and edgy, reminding me of Land Camera photography (which I wrote about here a couple years ago) - a new technology at the time. There's a lot of violence in these films, and in the first three, every gun is a revolver or shotgun - no automatics, no machine guns until the 1983 Sudden Impact, where Harry introduces his prized .44 AutoMag.
Filmed in 1971, '73, '76, and '81, the style of clothing, the cultural trends in slang and attitude, serve up a feeling of nostalgia, though I was too young (or not yet born) to have tangibly experienced it. The cars are all huge, long sedans, which I also love, the paint colors coppery-gold or deep blue, bench seats up front, no seat belts in sight. And in contrast to Steve McQueen's 1968 Bullit, Dirty Harry demonstrates a whole new edgy cop character, raw and unapologetic, who looks like a cop (unlike the mod styled, sleek Bullit).
It was Sudden Impact where Harry first dropped the line, "go ahead, make my day." On the outs with his San Francisco police chief, again, he's sent first on "vacation" for a couple days and then to San Paulo for a stint, where he inevitably winds up tracking and solving a string of revenge murders committed by Jennifer Spencer (Sondra Locke), artist as vengeful serial killer. Sudden Impact is also the film Harry's partner, Horace (Albert Popwell) tries to push him into getting his shit together, to quit bending the rules and breaking the law before he loses everything, taunting him by calling him a JAMF.
"What's a JAMF?" Harry asks.
"A jive ass mother-"
"-forget I asked," Harry scowls.
In the first few Dirty Harry films we learn that San Francisco is a dirty city filled with one-dimensional crooks whose only motives for killing are pure evil. We learn Harry's wife passed away from cancer, obviously too young, and he's alone, and so we surmise, angry at the world, possibly angry with God (though there is no evidence of belief), and most definitely fed-up with the bureaucratic bullshit that fails over and over again to stop crime and evil in Inspector Callahan's beloved city. In a constant grimace, tight-jawed and clenched teeth (more severe as the series of movies goes on) he delivers devastating lines to cornered criminals, like a father to a misbehaving child, and equally abusive one-liners to his ladder-climbing superiors.
Harry's unethical approach lands him squarely on the not-good side of right and wrong. His methods of fighting crime usually end with the pursued dead before questioning. Trouble always finds him (and his partners ALWAYS die, excepting Chico Gonzalez in Dirty Harry, the original series film, who retires to teach college.) Even Tyne Daly (Tyne Daly!) as Kate Moore in The Enforcer, after successfully shooting the bad guy in an abandoned room at Alcatraz and rescuing the kidnapped Mayor - all in a skirt and sensible heels, no less - has to take a few bullets in the chest, if only to perpetuate the stolid, unmovable and unmoved, solitary soldier: Dirty Harry. Though we do catch a glimpse of remorse in Callahan's eye when he squats at Kate's expired side.
But when Harry kills he kills with a good motive - to protect the innocent citizens of San Francisco and to put evil away. When your characters are thin and transparent, this works. Unlike the deep, complicated characters of Christian Bale's Batman, eschewed by Gotham for his violence and seemingly ineffectual timing, against the very ugly, completely, if not a bit more complex, evil Joker (Heath Ledger), Dirty Harry represents more than just a grumpy bastard with a really large handgun.
A quick note on violence: In Batman the brutality is so real, so intense with Hollywood's computer boosts, the realistic sound of two legs breaking beneath a fall flipped my stomach. In 1973, when the bad guy put a bullet through the forehead of a foul, murderous pimp in Magnum Force, I flinched with sufficient offense. I don't need anything fancier than that.
Harry's focus is single minded. His only enemies are the criminals on the street, committing physical, violent crimes, and those in government, or at headquarters calling the shots, with their own political well being in mind. It's these office scenes that have us truly loving Dirty Harry, when he calls a spade a spade, when he acts, repeatedly, surprised that he's been re-assigned, his classic grimace dropping an inch lower, the eyes narrowing to disapproving slits, "that's bullshit," he clips. We've all wanted at some time in our lives to speak so plainly, so inappropriately, so rudely, to an unjust authority in our own lives. Harry does it, and he doesn't care what the fallout is. His mission continues true.
That's what makes Dirty Harry a BAMF: a baddass mother f-----.
He's got the attitude, and the good heart, however slanted, however cheesy, however violent and pitiful in execution. We love Dirty Harry. And his Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world. He never misses a shot, never balks, never hesitates, never worries. He's unafraid and he's confident. He owns his purpose.
Here's a little scene from Dirty Harry, 1971, interrupted, as is the custom, while eating a hamburger, to put down some bad dudes, total chaos notwithstanding:
Everyone should read this book: Wal-Mart lovers, enthusiasts, conflicted shoppers and haters.
I picked up this book because I hate Wal-Mart - I despise their business practices, the way they destroy small, local businesses and confuse the economy by creating a screen of bargains for the people, when it's the people who are ultimately getting robbed, that profits earned at my local super center Wal-Mart do not, after sales tax, stay in my community, but go back to Bentonville, Arkansas and into the pockets of the 6 Walton family heirs (with a combined worth of $93 Billion) - and because Wal-Mart is attempting (apparently without any serious trouble) to build a second super center store in my little town of 36,000, in a location, no less, that would promise an overflow of traffic and congestion, and potentially dig up an unmarked 19th century cemetery.
We do not save money at Wal-Mart. Statistics prove the average American family saving somewhere around $900 a year by shopping at Wal-Mart actually has less than $500 in savings. In other words, we just buy more stuff.
I've heard personal war stories of Wal-Mart edging out a supplier's sales rep in order to get a lower price. We've all heard about the low wages, the difficulty in getting a full-time position, hard-to-get health insurance, sweat shops, locking workers in stores overnight, hiring hundreds of illegals to clean their stores (because their contracts are, of course, the cheapest) and overall cheapening of America by selling poor quality items made overseas. And yet we Americans still shop there, still vote with our money by supporting what Fortune Magazine has declared for 7 years running as #1 in America's top 500 businesses - that's gross sales.
From a gut instinct I do not shop at Wal-Mart. It's simply too big. No for-profit entity should be so large and have so much power that they literally by-pass their suppliers, reach into their supplier's [overseas] factories and dictate how a product is made, how fast, with what materials and at what cost, especially when that cost is the inhumane treatment of workers. I hear people complain all the time about Wal-Mart, but admit to shopping there anyway. "There's no other option!" they say. Or "no one else carries the product I like." We've been trained to think we have no other option, that we are getting robbed by paying the other guy a dollar or two more for an item. Or that we can not live without what that certain product.
In The Wal-Mart Effect Charles Fishman suggests we consider those everyday super low prices and ask how they got so low. Who's working 16 hour days for .40/hour? Who's not allowed to use the bathroom during their 16 hour shift? How long does that product even last? If you have to buy another next year, haven't you already spent more than if you'd just paid a little more for the product that lasts? What pollution is being committed as a side effect of that everyday low price? How safe is the factory where the products are made?
Keep in mind, not one of those overseas factories would be legal in this country. We would never stand for it.
If the tables were turned and we were the ones working in factories that supplied Wal-Mart, with only a day off a month, a barely livable wage, in filth and unsafe circumstances, all to provide cheap goods to a country fat and greedy for more, how would we feel about ourselves?
We've allowed our desire to collect more things, our buyer's impulse and false sense that we deserve more, to replace our traditional sense of pride as Americans, Americans who believed a durable, dependable well-made product was more important than price. Americans who believed in 'American Made'. Most big box retailers practice very similar buying standards now, sourcing from overseas, but Wal-Mart is by far, by a huge margin, the largest offender. Wal-Mart has set that pace and dictated the practices for everyone (at $446.9 Billion, the next largest grocer after Wal-Mart is Kroger with $90.4 Billion in sales, Costco with $89 Billion is the next largest box retailer, with Target weighing in at $69.8 Billion in sales). And we buy it up.
So I'm coming off a little hard-ass on the matter. But I fear our complacency is our worst enemy. Complacency is what allows politicians to to conduct shady business, to allow government to make bad decisions for us, to send young men and women to fight money wars, to pollute the environment, to grow obese, to watch our homes slip away when mortgage lending gets out of control, to spend too much money on higher education that can't deliver what it promises because markets are over-saturated.
Fishman does not argue that Wal-Mart is bad or good. He simply states we do not yet fully understand Wal-Mart, or how it's values that worked when they were 300 stores becomes grossly distorted and ugly when they are 3,000 stores, or 8,000. Fishman argues we are not asking the right questions. And that legislation has not yet been created to handle mega corporations like Wal-Mart, like Fanny Mae, like Proctor & Gamble, or Chevron or Exxon Mobil. Wal-Mart, by the way, is larger than both Exxon Mobil and Chevron.
Our dollar is our strongest vote.
It's a lot to ask to consider where our dollar is really going, into who's pocket, or how things work behind the scene. It's a lot to ask to consider what goes into our food, which ingredients and how it's made, where it's sourced. It's a lot to ask to consider the ethics of a politician, their background, their true character, before voting on an impulse, or emotional pull. Life should be easier. We should be able to afford not just the things we need but the things we want and we should feel good about spending that dollar, regardless of extenuating circumstances. We've been sold that right as much as it is a core American value. But life is no longer so simple. We are a complicated people in a complicated world. The least we can do is look hard at what has been revealed (however legal it may be, one has to question the ethics of the world's largest company when it refuses to contribute publicly ANY sales information, ultimately skewing the numbers on the state of the U.S. economy) and make a decision based on a larger picture, a moment longer and deeper than the one we are immediately standing in, the one where that unbelievably low price is truly unbelievable.
Ask, why?
Please, read this book, congratulate yourself for having been born American, for having been born into a country that allows choice, then exercise choice with an informed vote.
**May 21st, 2012, Fortune 500 listed Exxon Mobil as the top grossing company in the world with $452,926 Billion in sales. Wal-Mart was #2 with $446,950 Billion.
It occurred to me yesterday that I had not shared many photos of the garden lately. It's constantly changing - spring blooms already faded, late spring and early summer blooms have opened, and continue to open every day. Tiny vegetables have begun to crown: golden egg zucchini, white cucumbers, red burgundy okra. It's all very rewarding.
The reward could last all year, I thought. If I could only stay a little more on top of my planting schedule then crops might rotate more efficiently; always something to harvest. Meanwhile, as I wait for summer 2012 to appear and offer much anticipated bounty, I buy veggies from Marilyn Staggs at the local farmers market. Marilyn farms 9 acres, in town, organically, and I had the pleasure and treat of a visit to her magnificent garden over the weekend.
Rows and rows of beans, okra, squash, lettuce, cold hardy greens, muscadines, black berries, strawberries, eggplants and herbs cover the red dirt in a swath of lush vegetation. Varying plants and flowers and fruit trees grow from any and all perceivable spots, just the way I like to grow. And she tends it all herself.
Coincidentally, I've been reminded of the trend to replace lawns with gardens. Obviously a fan of both integrating shrubs and flowers with herbs and vegetables and front yard gardening (Southern Living - peshaw!) I have only to devise a physical plan. And now that the lawsuit has been dropped I'm free to think more seriously about how to cultivate our yard. NPR featured a story on Friday on edible gardens, centered around James Alvarez's Nashville lawn, replaced with knee-high buckwheat. Jeremy Lekich of Nashville Foodscapes, also mentioned in the article, runs a replace-your-lawn-with-edibles business. He's hoping to eventually cultivate edible gardens in low-income areas where fresh produce is hard to find, running his landscaping business on a sliding scale.
No doubt I've written about Edible Estates at some point in the last two + plus years of this blog (though I can't find a reference). The design firm created and run by Fritz Haeg implements such projects across the globe. Closer to home is the Edible Yard & Garden company, with projects in Decateur, Georgia and Asheville, North Carolina.
Needless to say, I'm inspired to re-landscape our entire yard, or at least one section at a time. It's a big project I'm dreaming of, one certain to claim a chapter of my proposed memoir, Bacon & Wine, though I can imagine it might demand an entire book, a sequel, if you will: Begging the Bugs for Food. Relieved to hear Marilyn battles the same insects I do, one wonders if abundance is the way to beat them. Plant more than they can eat.
I'll give the project some thought. Here's a little photo album from Sunday evening, manipulated with a new favorite iPhone app, VSCOcam, and further decorated in Photoshop.
**Many thanks to Cathe of justsomethingimade.com for the vintage labels used in these photos.
