True Grit

When I was young, my parents were missionaries. My father was with The Navigators and worked on college campuses holding bible studies. Employees of The Navs raised their own support, so we were usually on a tight budget.

My dad was and still is the King of Making Do. He could live in a hole in the side of a cave, making fire from his glasses and eating slugs. Think Tom Hanks in Castaway. So living a frugal lifestyle comes naturally to him. For many years all I knew was generic brand food, thrift store clothing and secondhand books. (Of course, I never gave any of that a second thought because, while my father was the King of Making Do, my mother was the Queen of Finding The Best Old Things And Making Them Seem New.)

While other kings brandished shining swords and gold scepters, my dad had his own weapons of choice. One of them was the S.O.S. pad. (The other two were duct tape and a caulk gun, more on those later.)

My dad could perform miracles with an S.O.S. pad. He could take a stainless steel pot that had been tarnished, burned and buried and make that sucker shine like the top of the Chrysler building. My memories are filled with visions of my dad hunched over the sink with a pan and a brillo pad, scouring that steel into submission with elbow grease that would make him a strong contender in a lumberjack competition.

He did the same with electric stove burner drip pans. My mother never covered hers in aluminum foil because my dad kept them as sparkly as a new nickel. He spent hours making sure those things never looked scorched or rusted.
Naturally, as a young girl with no knowledge of cost, I assumed these things that my dad spent so much time toiling over were valuable and expensive. I figured drip pans must be something we couldn't afford more of, so we had to work hard to keep them nice.

This assumption lasted quite a long time. So long that, in fact, when I moved into my current home 10 years ago, I spent many a day scouring my own drip pans. The stove that came with the house had old drip pans in it, and I tried my hardest to scour them to like new condition. I mean, my husband had just drained his savings to buy us this beautiful house, there was no way I was going to ask for new drip pans too!!

After a few months of trying to clean those old pans, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and put out the money for new pans. I made a trip to Walmart, hoping they'd have the cheapest price on what I was sure was a fairly costly item. I walked down the kitchen aisle and saw some hanging on the rack, the price tag reading..........

.................ONE DOLLAR AND NINETY FOUR CENTS????!?!? ONE DOLLAR AND NINETY FOUR CENTS??????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! FOR TWO DRIP PANS???

IS SOMEONE KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW????????

All I can say is that I wanted to take those two drip pans and beat my old man about the ears with them. While my extreme, violent reaction may have been due to the fact that I was newly pregnant and very hormonal, most of it came from my naivety slapping me in the face. Duh Suzanne, it's never about the money with Dad. It's about the pride taken in doing a job right. It's about personal responsibility, cleaning up your own mess with hard work. It's about never taking the easy way out, but building character by experiencing both the pain and the pleasure of maintaining something that you value.

That's my dad...life lessons taught in suds and water.