My mother grew up in an orphanage, and my father grew up in the bayous of Louisiana. Both their childhoods spanned the Great Depression. That harshness of that experience did not fade as they slowly clawed their way into a materially sufficient lower middle class. Not wanting their children to go without the way they’d had to, my parents raised us with a go-with-just-enough philosophy. A lot of it stuck.

   My mother helped usher store brands and generics into social respectability. Ann Page (the A&P store brand) graced our cans of pork and beans and green peas, not Van Camp’s or Green Giant. My father bought our first new car “stripped,” as he instructed the salesman. Two-door, black tires, no radio or air conditioning. Brand new off the lot, it looked like it had already been vandalized. He would make us kites out of bamboo strips, newspapers and a paste made up of flour and water. (The cockroaches loved that paste, as we’d wake up to find them gnawed on after putting them away for the night.)

   In the kitchen, nothing was wasted. Leftovers were the main course of our daily dinners. Leftovers left too long became gumbo. (This is why most gumbo recipes seem “made up.” To follow an actual gumbo recipe, you’d have to know what the cook was trying to clear out of the refrigerator.) Some weeks there’d be so little garbage to put out, that we filled the garbage can with grass clippings, so the neighbors wouldn’t think we didn’t have enough to eat. (I might be making that last part up.) I remember as kids being driven out to the railroad tracks to collect loose bananas that had fallen to the ground when they were being unloaded. (I am not making that up.)

   Our impecunious approach to home economics extended into the bathroom, where a bar of soap was treated as if it had the value of caviar. When a bar reached a thinness that made it almost impossible to hold, my parents stuck it on top of a new bar, so that not one fraction of an ounce was wasted. When marketers sought to increase soap sales with buy-three-get-four packaging, it was like buy-three-get-five in our house.

But it’s in the shower where I have to be most vigilant. If I’m not, the last sliver of the soap will be tossed before I’ve gotten the chance to suds-weld it to a new bar. 

   As I say, some of this stretch-the-soup mentality rubbed off on me, and Carol has been, uh, amused at some of my – how does she put it – “thrifty” ways. (I know. She means “cheap.”)

   In the kitchen, she often uses a line from the father in Everybody Hates Chris. “You plan to use this three cents worth of tomato, or can I throw it out?” She’s amazed at what I can still squeeze out of a tube that she was certain was empty. But it’s in the shower where I have to be most vigilant. If I’m not, the last sliver of the soap will be tossed before I’ve gotten the chance to suds-weld it to a new bar. 

   And you should see what I’ve gotten her to recycle in the four years we’ve been together.