I do follow the news: war and global suffering, diplomacy (?) and fear, racism and hate crimes, shoot-outs and car-jackings, women and all kinds of abuse—”all the news that’s fit to print”—not to mention the dearth of affordable housing, the high price of gas and its corollary, the high cost of iiving, and the cost of high living.

My second book was a cookbook, Encore, about leftovers. It received one of the best reviews I have ever had, and I still remember the conclusion: “You could save $1000 a year with this book.” (Not hard, really, when the writer-cook was a wife and mother with four children and a tall, slim, handsome husband with a hollow leg and an undying devotion to peanut butter. My cooking caught up with him eventually, but he was never fat.)

I thought of that comment about my cookbook this week when I read the most recent news about the price of food. A reporter went out to price a grocery list—last year’s and this year’s, the same list, examined twice , a year apart. It cost $1000 more this year.

Ouch.

You have to be very careful.

What about people who are already careful—painfully so? What about people who never saw the inside of a food bank before? What about you? What about me?

My mother was frugal. Her family was frugal—generous, lavish, even, but frugal too—and her generation coped with the Depression. I was born in the middle of it, in 1931. My father’s peers stopped him not to congratulate but to express their wonder at his courage? foolhardiness?—or their envy?

“You must be doing well, Jack,“ they said, “to have a second child during this depression.”

You see? I was born to grow up frugal. My mother and her contemporaries knew how to make one dollar do the work of two, and look like five. But they/we had the first dollar.

It’s harder now. We need lessons in frugality.

More tomorrow. I have work to do.