An immigrant father teaches the karma of a consumer society
By Catherine Rankovic
Dad left Eastern Europe for the United States on a steamship in 1950. He learned English, but he spoke it like a telegram, so he couldn’t really lecture his four American-born kids, or talk things over, and the words of wisdom we got from him were few. When we kids began dating, he warned us, “You marry ugly, you get ugly children!” We still quote him, laughing, before we take to the road: “Don’t drive like-a nuts!” And one more bit of advice crossed our language barrier, a tip on the nature of material things:
“You buy nice, you got nice. You buy junk, you got junk.”
That’s my father, Dragomir, talking. I hear him whenever I am thinking of saving a few cents by purchasing something cheap rather than pay a higher price for an item that will last twice as long. I use his advice for everything from light bulbs to lawnmowers.
In his way, Dad was saying, “You get what you pay for,” and the maxim has guided me whenever major purchases loomed—a year-old Buick versus a four-year-old Ford Mustang with 73,000 miles; a VCR that cost $100 more than the standard model but after 13 years refuses to die. It helped me choose a larger, brighter wedding diamond over the smaller, yellowish one I was tempted to choose just to save some money. I mean, save it for what? If you’re buying a diamond, you should buy nice!
I couldn’t always follow Dad’s advice, but I always regretted ignoring it. Once I furnished a bedroom and chose to economize on the mattress. It soon developed a deep lengthwise crease, in which I lay like a hot dog in a bun. Trying to sleep, I pictured my father—short, compact, olive-skinned—in the doorway, wagging a hairy finger and saying, “You bought junk—you got junk.”
Dad himself relished cheap novelties—he was a big fan of those wooden “drinking bird” toys that bowed perpetually to a brimming shot glass—and souvenirs, such as the plastic zoo animals vacuum-formed in a vending machine. “For memory,” he’d say, sliding coins into our hands. My mother wailed whenever he spent a buck or two on rubbish. Yet he paid cash for a new family-size Chrysler every seven years while the all-American father next door worked a second job to pay for his family’s five matching snowmobiles. And whenever Dad knew better, he bought better. (He knew of only one place to buy his wife and kids boxed Valentine chocolates, and that was the grocery store—but at least he bought them.)
Having a foreign-born father gave us a dual cultural perspective we didn’t always appreciate. Americans thought back yards were for swing sets and patios; he and his Old Country friends thought back yards were for vegetable gardens. When I pleaded for an allowance because my classmates all had one, I explained that it was an American custom for parents, each week, to owe their children free money. He was miffed, not by my calculating approach but at the implication that he did not provide everything his kids could want. Instead of giving us allowances, he bought the things we pestered him and Mom for, but only after he made sure they were good. In my guitar phase I received a nice guitar. Promptly I changed my career plans to photography and wanted a camera I couldn’t pay for. Dad might have then told me, as he sometimes did, “Go jump in the lake,” or “You don’t got two cents in your brain.” But maybe because he’d been granted the chance to start over and do better, he granted me the same. We went to a camera shop, where he spent two weeks of his pay on a camera and equipment.
I hope I told my father, “Thank you,” because I remember hesitating to say it then and there. I felt overwhelmed, sensing that this gift, to be well used, would demand character and discipline that he was betting I had. The gift was the only way he could say this that I could possibly understand. He was also betting that I would someday know enough to understand, because at the time I was 17, radiantly ignorant, spoke only English and was trying to hide my feelings by fussing with the camera that I would use for the next 20 years.
You buy nice, you got nice.
