Recess!

A Latinate root is a Latinate root, but tell me, where's the recess in recession? Where's the fun? The joy? The rest? The other word works better: Depression. Depress. My parents used to tell stories about that other Depression, the one when they wore burlap underwear and played with rusty tin cans and slept eight to a bed and ate flour with bugs in it. "Bugs," my father used to say. "Goddamn bugs. And I ate them. And I liked it. God damn bugs." I hear him now, my father. "Where the hell are you going to be when the bottom falls out on you? You people don't know what it's like to go without." It was all static and cliche back then, my crazy father ranting about waste and folly and the price of haircuts and Campbells soup. "Who needs soup in a can? Make your own goddamn soup." Crazy. Well then. Every day it seems now I'm giving something up, choosing between this essential and that essential. How about you? What are you giving up? What will be the last to go? What matters most? What matters least? What's the difference between need and want, that ever-American question? "Where the hell are you going to be when the bottom falls out on you?" I think, if my father were alive, I'd tell him maybe the answer is I'd be right here, typing this, trying to make a little sense of what's happening, sorting out the choices one by one. Documenting and sharing, when I can, whatever it is I'll learn when I learn it.