'Tis the Scotch in me

When my great-grandma was a little girl, she had only one dress. On washday, she stayed in bed. At sixteen she immigrated from Scotland to Canada, because the docking fees were less expensive than in the US. Her family moved here a few years later.

My grandma never tasted ketchup until she went out with her friends as a teenager, because her mother wouldn't buy it. Once she found 47 cans of tuna in the pantry, and Great-Grandma explained, "they kept going on sale and I couldn't eat them fast enough." She didn't realize how funny she was until somebody pointed it out, and then she said " 'Tis the Scotch in me, makes me act the way I do." (My mother can say this with a perfect accent.)

Grandma is so fond of rummage sales, she hosts several each year. I don't know where she gets all the goods, but she earns money, you can count on that.

When I was a kid, I complained bitterly about wearing second-hand clothes. My embarrassing mother would get down on her knees and crawl under a store counter to pick up stray pennies. She's convinced that cheaper food tastes better. Not once in 13 years did I have all new school supplies, while Everybody Else got a new backpack and lunchbox annually, along with their pencils and notebooks.

My older brother was latrine queen during Air Force training. One day he called and said he'd found a nickel in a toilet tank, and reached in to retrieve it. That's when I realized I had no control over my destiny. I, too, would become Scotch.

So my daughter, not yet old enough to realize how embarrassing I am, begs to go rummaging. She knows where the best toys come from. Her backpack was mine in high school. I keep a stack of notecards to record competing prices of items I buy regularly, so I'll know whether a sale price is good. We have a huge, perfectly good Winnie-the-Pooh that came from somebody's garbage. A Jenga game that's missing five blocks, but it only cost 50 cents. An old cell phone instead of a PDA. A sweatshirt I got when I was 14.

'Tis the Scotch in me. Thanks, Mom.