Free The Seventeen Traditions by Ralph Nader Page B

something bigger, it becomes bigger; if you make it smaller, it becomes smaller.”

9.
The Tradition of Simple Enjoyments
    A sk yourself, when do you laugh the hardest and the longest? When you’re watching a situation comedy, a reality show, or a comic on late-night TV—or when you find yourself in hilarious situations with friends or family? No contest. Those bellyaching laughs come faster, and last longer, when you’re with friends or family. The television shows are part of the market-driven manufacturing of laughter. Friends and family are a gift, and those personal relationships engender deeper, more truthful mirth.
    We grew up in an environment of simple enjoyments, aworld largely separate from market entertainment and almost wholly diverted by family entertainment. The ways we enjoyed ourselves might appear impossibly quaint to today’s youth, who’ve grown used to nonstop commercial entertainment so fast-paced that anything slower is greeted as BO-RING. Theirs is a video-audio, sensualized, commodified world that has displaced simple homemade pleasures, driving them down the rungs of attraction so that only the youngest children are expected to embrace them.
    In our town there was one movie theater, the Strand. It had Saturday matinees for children, and we were allowed to go to the movies about twice a year. More often we headed to the Soldiers’ Monument grounds, where we ate delicious sandwiches while feeling the coolness of the stone seats on our legs during a hot summer day. On Sunday afternoons we took our bikes on exhilarating rides down the tree-lined road to the nearby village of Colebrook. I can still feel the thrill of the breeze as we cruised down the long hill on our way home. Roller-skating on a neighborhood sidewalk was perfect for sunny days, but the rain didn’t stop us: We just headed downstairs and skated in our basement. I even shot basketballs in that cool basement, into a bottomless apple basket hung on the staircase.
    Our daily lives were full of these simple pleasures, no matter how old we were or what time of year it was. Running up to the garden to pick tomatoes or squash or beans, then back into the house to help prepare them for dinner, made us little onesfeel we were part of a big act. Climbing up the venerable apple tree was a blast, and plucking the insect-scarred apples left us with small but very juicy bites. (Nobody had to tell us the apples were “organic”!) Just the thought of eating Mother’s homemade pastries, whose aroma wafted from the oven to the kitchen table, made our mouths water.
    Winter brought the crunch of a white Christmas, even as we walked to midnight service at the Episcopal Church. Mother would take us outdoors and teach us the alphabet by carving letters in the snow. As we grew older, we sledded to school on snowy mornings. Then, come Easter time, my mother would hard-boil dozens of eggs with onion skins, staining them dark red. After they were all hidden, we would go running around finding them—and then compete to see which egg would survive what we called the “cracking competition.” Each of us would make a wish, and then crack our egg up against one of our siblings’ eggs. We looked forward to the cracking competition for weeks.
    Summers were an exciting time; we all looked forward to a change of pace. When we were little children, Dad would take us up to Highland Lake, where we’d go driving over the spillways between the lake and the spill of water down the valley into the Mad River, cruising through half a foot of moving water. “Wheee!” we’d cry. “Turn around and do it again, Dad!” Then he would take us up to Crystal Lake, the bucolic town reservoir, where we would look out over the water with a kindof reverence. Coming from the Middle East, where water is scarce and deserts plentiful, our parents taught us to view abundant clean water with gratitude.
    We spent our