Needful Things

I remember when I was a kid that my parents used to lecture my sisters and I whenever we whined that we needed something. Although we were always broke, my parents both came from seriously poor families and never hesitated to remind us the difference between “want” and “need.”

My dad’s definition of need was simple; if you had clothes on your back, a roof to sleep under and ate at least two meals a day your needs were met. He made no distinctions about the clothes fitting or how many siblings might share the bed and he considered a can of pork and beans (cold or heated) to be a meal suitable for six.

While my parents may have taken the concept a bit too far, for most Americans the line between what we want and what we need is blurry at best. These days a parent who sends his eight year old to school without a smart phone is liable to be reported to Social Services for neglect.

Andrew Tobias once wrote that today’s luxuries are tomorrow’s necessities. When I was in elementary school, most of the kids in my class didn’t have home phones, some didn’t have televisions and almost no one had a color TV. My house usually didn’t have any of the above; but we had pork and beans, so we were good.

Over the years my opinion of things I really need has continually changed. When I was five I needed a flat top haircut and some jeans that needed to be rolled up before I started Kindergarten. In 1962 all of the coolest Kindergartners wore flat tops and rolled up blue jeans.

I wanted to walk home by myself but I knew that my mother would never let that happen, but I was cool enough to hold hands with my mom because I had a flat top and some nicely cuffed jeans.

Other things that I was sure I needed as a youngster included a cool stingray bike with raised handle bars and a three foot sissy bar with a surfer’s cross on top, a “Johnny Seven” machine gun that came complete with a bayonet, a grenade launcher and a hidden pistol to pull out when your plastic ammo-belt ran out (coolest toy gun ever) and a Hot Wheels race car set with a 360 degree loop.

During that same time my dad was sure I needed a steady supply of flat top haircuts, blue jeans (big enough to last two school years), a used bike to be used on my paper route and all the pork and beans I could stomach.

When I reached junior high school my needs changed. Entering junior high in 1969 meant that you needed bell-bottoms, turtlenecks and chains to wear around your neck while listening to your new Beatles and Rolling Stones albums. I knew I needed those things because it was impossible to be cool in the seventh grade without them.

My old man continued to feed me pork and beans, buy me jeans and sent me to get a flat top and a drug test when I told him I needed the new Three Dog Night album. I still remember him shaking his head and saying, “Jeremiah was a bullfrog my ass.”

Everybody knows that when you get to high school you need a car; my day didn’t know that. He thought that when you got to high school you needed a job to pay for your own jeans and flat tops. If I had enough money left over to pitch in for a can or pork and beans, so much the better!

Now that I’m an adult, allegedly, I have a better understanding of my wants and needs. I need a laptop computer so I can write this stuff and can avoid a real job. I need a healthy supply of shorts and Hawaiian shirts so I can be properly dressed when I go get the cheeseburgers and ice cream I need to survive. These are things I need to be me.

I want a nice car to get me there and I want a chili-cheeseburger and a banana split but I realize that those things are luxuries and I don’t actually need them.

Seriously, I realize that I could get a flat top and live on pork and beans if I needed to but I can honestly say that there is no way that I’ll ever want to. I understand that people do what they need to do to get by and, if you’re lucky, you get to do what you want to enjoy life.

Nobody really needs a cell phone and no one ever died from not having a fancy game system attached to their HD TV. We’ve just convinced ourselves we need them. Still, I think I need that stingray bike; those things were really cool!