“Turn off the lights,” he’d say—leaving me in the dark.

“Keep the heat at 62,” he’d say—turning the thermostat to the left.

“Don’t flush the toilet every time.” I’d ignore that edict, even if he did not.

My father was not a conservationist. He was cheap.

At least I thought so in the mid-1970s when being a dad meant you said these things. I was 6, with only a vague understanding of “stagflation” and gas station lines.

My father’s childhood was tinted by the want and worry of the Depression. His mother, my Nana, watched her Lincolns as any Protestant-turned-Catholic with eight children would.

Yet today, as we talk about trimming energy output in this limited-resource, post-millennium world, I can’t help but hear the echo of my father. And I flinch.

It’s not that I’m one for wanton waste. I recycle. I budget. I shop local. I buy organic yogurt and generic shampoo. I drive less. I even hypermile, coasting to stoplights.

Still, as a long-deferred recession looms, I rebel.

Maybe it’s the image of my father tucking restaurant ketchup packets into his shirt pocket. Or his search for the cheapest six-pack (Schlitz) to max out the number of cans he could down after a day of work (more than thirty-three years at the U.S. Postal Service, or 8,000 days, that is). Or all the times he told his Greek-American wife: “Pandora, you have champagne tastes on a beer budget.” My mom hated that.

His pleasures were indeed simple: smoking an off-brand cigarette on the back porch while gazing at his garden with its Jupiter-sized tomatoes. I never liked tomatoes as a kid, but I remember them lined up like trophies on the kitchen windowsill—starbursts of green on top, with a matte, homegrown finish.

When I look back now, it seems my father’s soul was shortchanged by all the cost-cutting measures, the constant curtailing of experience. Life is never long enough for cheap cigarettes, cheap beer, and three decades of a suffocating, poorly paid job.

It’s been nearly ten years since my father died. I have grown to love garden tomatoes. Maybe I’ll try to harvest my own, or at least walk to the farmers’ market and buy them. But I won’t smuggle ketchup packets home.

—Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson is a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Literature on Deadline (2007).



The first one was all of 4-foot 7-inches tall, with a red-lettered Salucci Brothers logo emblazoned across the chest of his baseball uniform. His grandfather watched from the stands of the dustbowl Little League field in my hometown and would grimace and growl and sometimes yell at the umpires. As one of those umpires, I quickly grew to dislike his silly protestations. To spite the old man, I provoked his grandson into cussing after I’d made a particularly egregious third strike call and ejected him from the game. I found the experience to be enjoyable.

The second one was the alpha-male coach of the R&B Liquidators-sponsored team with whom I’d had a running feud since the beginning of the season. He got his comeuppance when he stared at me a little too long from the dugout after I intentionally called out one of his little minions at second base. I won the staring contest and chucked him from the game with a roundhouse swing of my right arm, index finger pointing him to the parking lot.  

The third one was the aptly named Mario, coach of Frank’s Construction Partners. He was the owner of a bushy mustache, broad suspenders, and a dumpy oval-shaped body. Over the long summer he had continually nipped at my heels with his pathetic commentary: That’s not a strike! He hit that ball fair! He hit it FAIR! You’re biased against my team!

Armed with a dull mind and a shrew-like personality, he made for easy pickings, and I ejected him twice near the end of the season—much to my delight. For the second ejection, I belittled him by drawing a line near his dugout in the dry dust of the late-July afternoon and forbade him from stepping over it. He took the bait and stepped over the line.

In my sixteenth summer, I was finding the taste of authority to be very satisfying.  It was a taste I would find difficult to spit out.

—Name withheld. The names of people and business establishments have been changed.




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Topic            Deadline            Publication

Weight         Sept 8, 2008      Nov 2008
Gods            Oct 6, 2008        Dec 2008
Invention     Nov 7, 2008        Jan 2009

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