San Diego Blogger: Eilene Zimmerman

Last week I had a new sink installed in my kitchen—white, cast iron, just like the old one only with sides more equal in size. New faucet, new garbage disposal. The whole thing had been disintegrating, literally coming apart in my hands along the sides where the grout was just a memory. A brown, mildewed memory, to be exact. The garbage disposal made way too much noise to be crunching up eggshells.

The "rent-a-husband" store.

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I debated for weeks what sink to get. I knew stainless steel would be cheaper to install (only one guy) but that it wouldn’t match the white tile in the kitchen. In the end here’s how I figured out what to get.

On a night my kids were at their dad’s I went to Home Depot, figuring it wouldn’t be crowded. I hunted down the man who staffs the plumbing department and said, “Hi. I need a new sink and I don’t know anything at all about this. If I was your sister, what would you advise me to get?” Fifteen minutes later I was pushing a cart with a sink, faucet, air gap and new drains. I said to this guy, “Wow, thanks. This is like rent-a-husband.” And he turned to me and said, “Ma’am, that’s what Home Depot is all about.”

He was very serious about his job so I didn’t make any jokes at the time, but you can imagine what was going through my head. On the other hand, I need people like that in my life, because there is so much I don’t know about buying sinks. Or ovens. Refrigerators. Cars. Etc.

In a house that’s nearly 60 years old, stuff breaks. I hadn’t really counted on that when I said I wanted the house in the divvying up of property that occurs during a divorce. I felt lucky to have it—and I still do, only every month I feel a little less lucky, as housing prices continue to slide and now the 40-year-old Jenn-Air oven in my little kitchen is turning off on its own (and can’t be restarted for half an hour), and the similarly aged microwave gives me reason to pause … as I wonder if I’m giving us all cancer every time I use it.

A new oven will cost me close to $1500; a new microwave … oh, why even get into it? A lot, that’s how much. I’ve already looked at them, gently running my fingers across stainless steel handles, internally debating whether or not I really need convection (I do, I like to bake). This is the thing about home ownership—you can’t call the landlord. On the other hand, you can’t hear your neighbors brushing their teeth. Though there’s not much you can do about their dog barking.

So… this is Christmas, as the song goes. It’s hard for me not to compare this year’s holiday season with the last one, when I was still reeling from the end of my marriage, two months past my ex-husband’s move out of the house, and my kids were struggling to come to terms with what all of it meant. I was struggling too. A year later, I feel like I’m walking on more solid ground. Usually.

I did the usual running around this year, for both Hanukkah and Christmas—an American Chrismukkah, no doubt—and, depending on what you believe, that’s either a good or bad thing. Religion has little to do with the holiday season for us. It’s more about being together, eating too many sweets, having lots of lights around (whether the menorah, the tree or just strings of lights), the smell of cinnamon and nutmeg, and the presents. Even in a recession, we buy things. We may buy less of them, we may buy cheaper things or wait until the last minute, but we’re buying.

The Huffington Post’s crack team of holiday reporters told us yesterday that Christmas Eve is really “Black Friday, The Sequel” and if the snaking line of cars desperate to get into Fashion Valley mall yesterday was any indication, it’s likely true. An analyst with NDP Group told the Post “I’m calling it Fantastic Friday, because I really do think it’s going to be one of the busiest [shopping] days of the year.”

The National Retail Federation predicts that holiday spending, when all is said and done, will reach $451.1 billion this year, up 3.3 percent over 2009. It’s also the biggest year over year increase since 2006. If we were to believe George Bush (and why, honestly, would we?), that would mean we’ve all done our patriotic duty to help the country get back on its financial feet.

Although the reality is the recession drags on and after tomorrow, Christmas Day, there will still be nearly 10 percent unemployment in the country and a long, uphill climb to a healthy economy. Not to be Scrooge, of course. Maybe we all just want to forget what a tough year it’s been. Sometimes buying things for the people you love really makes you feel, well, holiday-ish.

Much of what I bought my own kids were, actually, things they needed anyway, like pajamas and slippers and rain boots. But there’s also the requisite game for my son’s Nintendo DS, and sweaters and costume jewelry for my daughter. But nothing huge. I even got my ex-husband a couple of goodies, because unlike some families that split the holidays, we would each be broken-hearted having to do that—at least we would be right now—so we spend it together.

I sit back now at the end of the year and take stock, like so many other people do, of 2010. I managed to accomplish all the goals—financial most of them—I set out to accomplish this year, as my marriage unwound. Most of the goals were just to separate mine from his and figure out what to do with what remained, how to save for retirement when someone else isn’t doing it for you, what house repairs must be made now and what must wait. Things like that.

It’s also been a year since I started dating–and although there have been stretches when I just retreated–for the most part, it’s been an education. If you’re married, you think it would be exciting to date again–and it is. There’s a world of first kisses and flattery you just live without after years of domestic familiarity and kids…small things that get lost in the rush of everyday life. It’s a revelation in many ways to feel things when you haven’t felt much for a long time. But those feelings also include hurt, disappointment, self-doubt, frustration. It’s all a learning process—and it sounds so Pollyanna to write it—but it’s honestly true. And I’m grateful for the education. So here’s looking forward to 2011, all of it—the ups, the downs, the recessions and the recoveries. Happy New Year.

For Thanksgiving, I spent a lot of money. Well, not for Thanksgiving per se—as my cousin Sherri and her husband Bruce hosted dinner—but during that holiday weekend, the blackest of all black shopping weekends, my inner consumer got the best of me.

No, I didn’t sleep in my car outside Best Buy waiting to purchase –for some ridiculous sale price—a television or laptop or whatever. But I did have to go back to the AT&T store to take advantage of the ridiculously good offer they gave me on my daughter’s cell phone upgrade.

About 100 people were waiting in line at the mall while my son and I were at AT&T. It was 8 in the morning and these people were lined up waiting for some mysterious “Free Gift!” being given out by a woman dressed, vaguely, as an elf crossed with an angel. Employees from Jamba Juice were giving out teeny tiny smoothies to all the people waiting in line, as if they were runners in a marathon that needed to be shored up for the last leg of the race. Finally someone got the gift—it was a booklet of coupons—and within minutes the entire line dispersed. They may be sheep, those shoppers, but they aren’t stupid.

My son then pressed me to take him into WalMart—a store I’m just opposed to on so many levels it would be another blog post entirely—so that he could have “The Black Friday experience.” I said, “Do you know what that experience is? A lot of people shopping.” But he had hung in there for almost an hour as I signed up for U-verse, got my daughter her free upgraded phone and signed more documents than I signed when refinancing my house, so I felt I owed him. “Ten minutes,” I said. “Seriously. Ten minutes.” He raced intuitively to the electronics section and began comparison-shopping for PC laptops.

Then I started to get in the spirit. This must be what it’s like in church, for some people, who are so moved they start to sway and speak in fake languages. I actually considered waiting on line to buy a Coke in a bottle shaped like a round ornament—really, unbelievably cute—but then remembered: this is WalMart. So we left.

The next day, still feeling dirty from all the shopping, I actually—in a moment that should qualify as temporary insanity—decided to hit the outlets in San Ysidro, thinking: who is going to drive practically to Mexico, when Fashion Valley is right here? I’ll be alone! I’m embarrassed now, thinking how smug I felt. Who drives to the border? I thought. Everyone, that’s who.

It took me 30 minutes and an anxiety attack to find parking, and then I decided to hit three stores and just make it work—find gifts for everyone for the holidays in those three stores. This isn’t a particularly smart spending strategy. By the end of the day, I felt mostly disgusted with myself, like every other over-consumptive American, hyped-up-on-the-Black-Friday-to-Cyber-Monday buying mania, grabbing any gift that seemed reasonably priced just to get it over and done with.

We’ve got non-religious Hanukkah AND Christmas around here, and that’s a boatload of unnecessary spending, believe me. It was with relief that I realized, yes, the weekend was ending. I’d shopped and survived and all that was left was to live through my fifth visit from the good people at Sears on Monday.

My Bosch dishwasher has been on the fritz since August. I blogged about it a few months ago, about how I’ll never buy one again. Be warned, friends, a Bosch isn’t for the feint of heart. I’ve had the motherboard, heater, valves, hoses and god- knows-what-else replaced on that thing and still—STILL—it doesn’t heat the water. The “Quick Wash” cycle runs 199 minutes. A man named Stan from Bosch called me a couple of months ago saying Bosch was “very concerned about customer satisfaction” and wanted to make things right.

Since that time he has yet to return a phone call—and believe me, I’ve left messages. I faxed him all my service receipts, just like he asked me to do. I’ve been without a dishwasher for three months, I’ve spent 17 hours either waiting for or babysitting Sears repair people. The poor man that came a week ago worked on the Bosch for 3.5 hours—he was in a full sweat by the end of it, lying on the floor. And still, the machine doesn’t work.

Which is a long way of saying that tonight, as I sit here doing dishes by hand and realizing the sweater I got my daughter at the Banana Republic outlet probably won’t fit her, I’m tired of spending money. And tired of spending time spending money. That stupid dishwasher cost my ex and I nearly $800 five years ago. You would think that would buy me a modicum of customer service? Please. This is America! Ever try calling 1-800-4-MYHOME? It’s a call center somewhere in India where all these very nice people keep repeating lines from a script. I tried getting past that. Last week I was screaming into the phone: “Stop saying that! You don’t understand that I’m upset! Stop reading the script!” The woman who called herself “Stephanie”–honestly, Stephanie?–hung up on me.

Sears tried to charge me for their repair work today, saying it had been more than 90 days since the original service call, as if this was somehow my fault. I laughed at the repairman on the phone. “I’ll have to call my supervisor then,” he said, cautiously. Go head, call him! I yelled, a little crazily. “Better yet, give me his number!” I shouted. “I’d like to talk to him!” I’m mad as hell, as they say, and I’m not gonna take it anymore. Or at the very least, I’m not going shopping anymore, especially for large kitchen appliances.. I’ll be sitting here waiting for Sears to come and repair my dishwasher instead.

I’ve been doing research for a story and as part of that, came across a woman, Nancy Folbre, who wrote a book called “Valuing Children.” She’s an economist at UMass, and her book isn’t so technical that a layperson like me can’t understand it. One thing she writes in her introduction that struck me—and for any parents reading, it will resonate with you too–is that as a society we produce things in order to care for our families and ourselves. We sometimes forget, Folbre writes, that the process of caring is also a process of production.

She says the language we use in describing how we raise and educate our kids makes it appear that we are doing it so that our children will produce more things–ultimately increasing the country’s gross domestic product. Maybe not even a bad thing, since the purpose of GDP “is to make our lives better now and for generations to come,” she says. But here’s the part where Folbre sounds more like a poet than an economist.

“Children look ahead,” she writes. “They tug us away from our immediate self-interest toward a longer-run concern for the future of something bigger and more difficult to define.” Which likely explains why we invest so much of our money, time and selves into said kids—we are, at heart, hopeful people. We want our kids to have rich, full lives but we also want them to contribute to the rich, full lives of others. I don’t know if what I just spent at the Halloween Superstore will guarantee the future success of my kids, but it certainly should.

Last week, after we finished Halloween shopping and stopped at In-N-Out to eat–of all things to eat at a burger place– grilled cheese sandwiches and fries, I was thinking how my spending on costumes and decorations for the house would benefit my kids in the long run. Or how it might benefit society. I decided my spending might be helping the GDP (which, by the way, is the total monetary value of all goods and services produced in the U.S.) The more illuminated skeletons in shrouds people like me buy to hang on the front door, the more will be produced. Money made from those decorations—and paychecks received by the people who make them–will be spent on other things.

In reality of course, my spending this year was done without a thought to the nation’s GDP. It’s really more the act of a desperate parent. This week my kids turn 12 and 14, rapidly approaching the age limit on trick-or-treating. For years, we have had a big group of parents and children walk our neighborhood on Halloween night. In recent years, they come back to our house afterwards for soup, chili, beer, wine and whatever other parents care to bring. We eat and talk and watch the kids in costumes spill their loot out onto the family room floor, make trades with one another, throw candy at one another and gorge themselves on various configurations of sugar. It’s the most wonderful thing, because it’s a group of children outside of school pressures and adolescent cliques just being kids.

I realize this will inevitably end. Already my daughter is making noises about trick-or-treating next year with some friends from her school. It’s another one of those moments that have been written about ad nauseum by others. The problem is universal. We want them to grow up, of course, but then again, we don’t. I want Halloween to last for the next twenty years. I want my children to someday bring their children here to trick-or-treat. I’ll still make the soup. And the chili. And let the kids throw tootsie rolls behind the television. I know it’s fleeting. I know I know the money I spent on the fake blood, the light-up skull, the ridiculous “Danger: Haunted Zone” sign in the family room, was probably overkill. We already had ghost lights and a fake half-decayed skull on the piano. Was overpriced skeleton garland also necessary? No. I should have stuck to a Halloween budget. We do it for Christmas and Hanukah, don’t we?

But there’s something about Halloween—even more than the winter holidays for me—that screams “children.” Christmas, for example, isn’t limited by age. Gifts under the tree don’t disappear after you turn 15. But there are few 17-year-olds that want to dress up as witches or vampires and trick-or-treat. Which means the joy I feel when I see my kids and my friend’s kids so earnestly inhabiting their costumes, trying hard to embody the green M&M shell their mom made, adjusting the wig, or the fangs or the hat… running with the frenetic, crazy joy only a 10-year-old can when faced with yet another front door, and the possibility that this candy will be better than the last.

So this year may be our transitioning year. Nothing’s for certain. Next year I could wind up spending almost nothing on Halloween. My son might lose his enthusiasm and just throw a white sheet over his head, cut some holes for eyes and call it a day. Or I could actually spend more, hoping that by throwing money at Halloween, it will charm my children into staying children a little longer.