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If I were raising children (or myself) then I would surely point out the insight gained if the child (or myself) stopped to think of the power of Little By Little.
Years ago I was a young soldier. This was after eight tracks and before compact discs, a time when a popular pre “video game” cover illustration—call it a “computer game”—showed a soldier in green fatigues with a space helmet and a mop. You played by typing in your responses, like one of those pick your adventure books, only with a snarky computer answering. Every payday I would head off to the base Post eXchange, or “Cannex,” as they called it in Canada: No, not to buy any computer games. With me would be a sensitive tank crewman, serving his six months as the general’s driver. He was smart, read books like me and played tennis with a Lieutenant. Probably the only one of us enlisted men on base who played a good game.
A couple years later a female acquaintance was to tell another young lady that she dated a fellow student “because he liked music.” Meaning sensitive? Maybe back then I was pre sensitive, or something, for I surely didn’t know as much as other young men did about songs and bands. I only used the radio. And I only listened if I had something else to do while the radio played.
So every two weeks I would stand in the store looking at cassettes where I knew the band’s name thanks to the Disc Jockey. What to buy? My buddy would point out that if there were, say, two song titles on the album that we recognized, then it could be worth buying. So even if I didn’t know any of the other songs I would take a chance. Payday came around every two weeks.
Flash forward a couple years and I have been released from the forces, and living with two bachelors, one of whom has his very own personal computer. We said “personal” meaning you could own one, rather than have it blinking away in a big room being used by the whole corporation. Meanwhile, our local community college had a single computer room, with a false floor to allow halogen tanks for fire safety: Many students would show up near midnight in order to find time on the machines.
The man with the computer, besides introducing me to his computer game of the guy with a mop, (stranded in a space station) saw my big collection of music tapes and pronounced judgement: “Wow, you sure have a lot of tapes.” Maybe I wasn’t a music lover yet, but apparently I had as many albums as anybody else. My turn to softly think, “wow.” Today folks talk of FOMA; well, I would have no FOMA when it came to music collections. (Fear Of Missing Out)
Flash forward a couple decades—or more, I’m older than I look—and I’m avoiding FOMA by enjoying the new fangled anime, via VHS, and “manga,” the term means “whimsy,” via comic books (translated) from Japan. The comic store owner was my age, and so he could advise me away from any continuing series, and steer me towards ones that ended: With theme, and catharsis. Yes, I realize animation in America is cranked out until ratings fall; you can show children’s cartoons in any order, like the original Star Trek. But in Japan, unlike in Hollywood, catharsis is OK, even if it means a dead teenage hero.
I like the series Rurouni (Ronin?) Kenshin. He’s known as “the greatest (known) swordsman in Japan.” At the end he goes to find his old (unknown) master who, like a Roman raising cabbages, has retired to making pots. Kenshin asks his sensei to guard the womenfolk so Kenshin can go off to meet his fate in Kyoto. I wish there was a diorama. I have no figurines of Kenshin and his pals, but I do have “sculptures,” with the artist’s name on the box, of other anime characters who have moved me. Some of them glowing with “kawai” or cuteness. I bought them faster than I could display them. I loved to bring in just one at a time to my Toastmasters club meeting, and have a little lady silently standing on my table throughout the meeting. I bought one “for a future meeting,” and another, and another, so that today some are even “still in the crate.”
My fantastic friends, the uncrated ones, line my shelves, and fill the top of my refrigerator. How cute. Now imagine each as a standing one hundred dollar bill. All those bills filling my room—proof that saving up is possible.
Like going to the bank every payday and buying a few Bank of England pound notes, until finally I have more than I need for a trip to London. My bank teller asked: Why do they call them “pounds sterling?” Because, I said, in my day you could hold them up to the light and see a line down the bill: real sterling silver.
And now, gazing upon my “pounds plastic” and albums and cute sculptures and flea market DVDs too, I know I have made myself rich. I would tell any child, and me too, not to despair but to instead start filling up that figurative piggy bank. As Aesop said, “Little by little does the trick.”
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Sean Crawford
Composed on a dreamliner,
Now feeling rich spending pounds in Central London
May 2022
Footnotes:
Regarding a cheaper pleasure, instead of being an extravagant decadent Roman: According to legend, not word for word accuracy, some senators wrote to a retired emperor to ask him to return to ritzy politics in Rome. He replied, “if you could see the cabbages that I have raised with my own hands, you would not talk to me of empire.”
Can starving students, pensioners and poor people on minimum wage save money too? Or is their only recourse, as some social work students asked their teacher, to be “grimly not spending?” The professor replied to her starving scholars, “No. Life is very grey if you don’t have something budgeted to look forward to.”
