London Calling

In order to prepare for tomorrow, I had to get rid of yesterday.

Not all of it; there’s only so much timeline cleaning a person can handle, especially on a single day. But I did put a large dent in one particular area: thirty years of receipts.

 

I take no pride in the acknowledgement that, somehow, I had receipts going back that long. There has been no systematic method. Slips of paper, of diverse sizes and colors, have just accumulated.

“You saved receipts since the 1980s?” My wife was a bit incredulous.

Yes, but no, not really. The bits of my spending past have piled up in clumps. They are more “period pieces” of expenditure. A couple of years stuffed into a manila folder labelled receipts was here. An envelope with evidence of an overseas trip in 1992 was there. And of course there was the bedside drawer with miscellaneous financial fossils scattered about from a decade or two. No specific rhyme or reason for what I had. Just evidence of purchases in a life – large, medium, and small.

I looked through them all, not because I needed to. I didn’t. The smart move would have been a mass shredding. I was not smart, instead curious to take a trip through time via segments of my spending history.

“Here’s one from that hotel in northern Australia,” I announced to my wife.

She looked up from her book. “Was that the time we swam with the crocodile?”

I’m not sure that I want to remember that time. My recollection is that we thought the crocodile was a joke before we got in the water. Later, we learned that there really was an old guy with scales in what was supposedly a freshwater spring. “Friendly though,” a gap-toothed game warden had said as we hurriedly dried off.

Back to today. Fresh from my journey through hundreds of purchase price documentations, I would offer the following observations:

#1. Humans horde. We gather things to us and we stockpile documentation of that gathering. As evidenced by the timeline of my receipts, somewhere along the line of my life I stopped worrying about keeping things – goods and documentation – “just in case”. That somewhere, sadly, has been too recent.

#2. We waste. A piece of paper documenting a soda, or sandwich, or a Starbucks cup of tea? Really? Some tree paid dearly for that paper record. While part of me wants to believe that I got some extended value out of that tree’s donation by holding onto the paper for a decade or longer, most of me knows that it was wasteful from the start, regardless of the purchase price.

#3. We buy a lot. And a lot of that ‘a lot’ we don’t really need. It’s embarrassing to look at how much I sometimes spent on things that weren’t used very much, or were forgotten, or didn’t last. It’s worse to look at how much I spent on things that were simply excessive. The jacket that was pricey and I wore just a few times. Or the pieces of exercise equipment that collected more disuse dust than exertional sweat.

#4. We are forgetful. Although I preach a practice of frugality to my children, and I shake my head at the things they want or actually buy, my own record proves me equally unfrugal as I sometimes think they are. Selective amnesia seeks to rewrite my personal history of acquisition and expense.

#5. We can be delightfully extravagant. Over time, I have made purchases for others that they no doubt didn’t need. But I happen to know that those gifts were truly enjoyed. Sure, some of that extravagance was aimed at my family and me. It’s reassuring to know, however, that a fair amount of it was also intended for others. Or, even when it was not, a fair amount of it was later given away to others, either friends, colleagues, or as donations.

Was it all necessary? No. I’d have a difficult time defending many of the purchases. Who was that guy (i.e. the younger me) spending all that money? And why was he doing that when he barely had any money at that time? He seems like someone from another world, a different lifetime.

There is good news. I am slightly less chastened to know that some purchases were quite utilitarian – with value far outpacing expense. An example is the wireless doorbell that I purchased onw weekend for my father. It was shortly after my mother’s death and Dad, who was paralyzed years previously following an illness with polio, wanted a way to get family and caregiver attention when he was in bed. A bell didn’t work; his home feel like a school yard. And cell phone calls from one room to the other didn’t work because the person not with Dad didn’t always have his or her phone. So the wireless doorbell, rung from inside the condo, was a great solution.

The receipt I found for the wireless doorbell (an “intercom”) was for its return; version 1 had not worked to Dad’s satisfaction. Although I could not find the receipt for version 2 (the real deal), the return receipt for version 1 reminded me of the whole doorbell escapade. And that made me laugh. Dad got lots of use out of the bell. It had two settings: a single tone or the melody of London’s Big Ben. Mostly, he used the single tone. Every once in a while, however, we would hear London calling. Which was funny. Because Dad’s name was Ben.

You never know how far one small purchase will go. And who knows? He may be ringing a bell or two still.