trading in tea bags.

Now that the economy has dragged its slump out long enough for advertisers to begin musing on how best to reflect on their newly-termed Great Recession, I've begun to wonder how I will tell future generations about my experience. Will I grossly exaggerate and talk of literal coke-bottom glasses, walking five miles in the snow uphill both ways? Will I flat-out lie and tell them when I was young, movie theater tickets were only a dollar?

My great-grandmother Isabel used to gift each of us kids two dollars and a handful of Lipton tea bags, informing us not to "spend it all in one place." Presumably she meant the dollars, though as extreme as her stories get she could have believed tea to be a currency in its own right. Regardless, in the '80s even a kid knew that spend $2 in multiple successive locations was impossible. I informed Isabel once that the money "won't even buy a cheeseburger." I believe she pulled my ear.

Her "cocktail hours" started at 2 and went until she fell asleep so an ear-pulling was an easy punishment. Vodka cran served in Mason quilted canning jars.

But the troubling question is, "What's so great about this recession?" Or better yet, did anyone ever determine how destructive it has been?

I've heard at separate times unemployment numbers that either far exceed the Great Depression's or that pale in comparison. While many people I know have gone through bouts of joblessness, never have we resorted to desperate measures. There seem to be no iconic bread line photographs, no TVA or CCC, no great folk musical and artistic cataloguing of the pain wrought from economic collapse.

Maybe this return to Seattle has softened the blow - Seattle has a reportedly lower unemployment rate and slightly higher home resale value than the national average. But on the whole, the outlook doesn't look so grim as to force one to begin bartering with Twinings and Harney & Sons (Lipton is shit, America, and the sooner you admit, the sooner I'll stop lecturing).

True, I have turned to some old methods of stretching the not-so-all-mighty-now Dollar - I can produce, I pickle beets, carrots and green beans and I bake banana bread so rotting bananas cannot make it to the compost heap. But a huge part of me is suspicious that this is just good practical math and I should have been doing all this all along. Why not always be economical? Isn't that what the recession in the '80s was supposed to teach us - the error of our extravagant ways?

Maybe this one, now that it achieves the "Great" title will help us recover from the yuppie and techno-hungry consumerism of the late '90s and aughts. Of course, such a learned lesson seems unlikely. The great American war- and advertising-machine will pump out feel-good patriotic campaigns to highlight our dutiful service as "true patriots of the Mall of America" so we can once more sleep at night, tightly tucked away in our Snuggies of Pride. We won't recover from this pattern of bloat and deflation until as individuals we realize the only vote that matters is the one made with our wallets. So we'll see the only truly "great" thing about the Great Recession will be the innovations in marketing made to steady the general confidence, to re-convince us that buying is good and we'd better outdo the neighbors.

As a friend just said let us "wipe away a red white and blue tear at [this] point or, rather, [let] the flapping of a bald eagle's wings dry it from my cheek." God bless the soldiers of the Great Recession.