My husband and I, due to circumstances well beyond our control, are cool again. And by "cool," I mean "cheap." Reduce, reuse, recycle, repurpose -- these are words that have, like so many other terms of necessity, recently been gentrified. And this makes us solidly and undeniably hip.
It all started in a crumbly brick duplex, not far from the O.S.U. -- yes, Go Bucks -- campus, thirty years ago. Back then, we were cool because we were young, not because we had to eat creatively-disguised permutations of spam to get my husband through vet school on my $11,000/year job. Back then, having functional collagen unquestionably trumped bed-sheet window treatments and starch-and-sauce progressive dinners with fellow students to make us cutting edge.
[Sidebar] We all managed a road trip to Aspen one year, bunked, en masse, on someone's older brother's floor, and sprayed our jeans with waterproofing. There were eighteen of us, safety in numbers, sticking out like crabgrass in the Chemlawn of beautiful people on the ski slopes that spring break.
In the intervening years, however, our former friends in frugality moved on while Jim and I remained mysteriously unevolved. We just kept improvising with hammer, wood stain, darning needle, and later, with blender and breasts (mine) for baby sustenance, while everyone else bought furniture "sets" for their dining rooms, living rooms and bedrooms. I chalk this off to inborn obstinance and an almost unhealthy rugged individuality we both seem to possess, which, by the way, I think is almost as unlikely as two carriers of any other rare congenital disorder finding each other and procreating. Heaven help our kids.
Then, in the ultimate defy-the-Material-Man gesture, we converted our barn into a house and moved into it.
It was a few years after that when the world caught up to us with its avant-garde plan for the new R-word lifestyle. Hence, here we sit in the middle of everything, involuntarily trendy. Yuk. After thirty-some years of bucking the system, we're not so sure we like being fashionable.
So that's the explanation for our unexpected slide onto the cutting edge, where we are more than a little uncomfortable. Of course, our own kids will never view us that way -- e.g., when Jim scoured the internet to replace his 10-year-old car with another of the same age and model because he liked it so much -- but what does their generation know about using old, outdated stuff besides what they read in Art Culinaire? The day we stop embarrassing our kids is the day we hang it all up. Shabby-chic? Please.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go make soup out of last night's leftover tuna noodle casserole.
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