just have less

Now I'm thinking green. Still working on the red lace shawl of course and still engaged - have nearly finished first panel. But tomorrow I pick up the ball of Trekking sock yarn in this color green that the shop ordered for me. And there is a vine pattern that I'll knit into it...and if it weren't so late I'd drove over there right now (will it always be like this? these constant beginnings?).

Reading the New Yorker this morning I came across an article about Tomas Maier, the director of the design house Bottega Veneta. He had been asked by the interviewer if $6,000 handbags caused him to think about those who are jobless and in financial distress. In other words, the middle class. He answered this way (italics mine): "Bottega's goods are not beyond the reach of middle-class-people, who have simply been trained to want too much stuff. Anyone could afford one five-hundred-and-fifty dollar hand-painted cashmere scarf.   
Just have less."
      After an initial negative reaction to his statement (while also thinking about that scarf), I have come to believe that he's right on about the "just have less" part. In our prosperous country we have been trained and spoiled and even families with very little money often have way too much. A Navajo poet living in a small hogan once said quite simply, "if you need a storage unit you have too much stuff. " How this translates into my future purchases and the size of my stash remains to be seen. But I do like the philosophy of less is more. The question is, can an old dog learn new tricks?

Speaking of old dogs, yesterday I reread a 1962 paperback of Francoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse. I first read it when it came out in 1955 and I was a teenager. I loved it (Sagan was 19 when she wrote it). The writing was alive, the angst so real, the setting romantic. When I saw the movie with Jean Seberg two years later, I wanted to be her. I wanted that French look that Sagan also had.

Short hair, thin boyish bodies, a sort of wild and bohemian air about them. I had my hair cut into a pixie style ala Seberg at a beauty shop on Allerton Avenue in the Bronx, but alas I couldn't achieve that elusive look. They both experienced success in their respective fields of writing and acting, but sadly, both women came to ends that involved alcohol, drugs, loss of money. I wasn't sure how I'd react to reading the book again after so many decades had passed, but I must admit that I still find her writing to be alive and contemporary although perhaps I've grown past the subject matter.

when later years 
become present years
existential crisis occurs