The spending train

I’m a child of a child of the Depression. My mother’s philosophy was rooted in the idea that you would never have enough, would always be scrounging and fearful of losing your income. She made feasts out of leftovers, dressed elegantly without a Bloomingdale’s charge card, made her own dining-room table out of a piece of Lucite and a pair of sewing-machine trestle-bases that she enameled shiny black.

When she finally owned a home, in her 50s, it was a shell of a manufacturing loft on Wooster Street in Manhattan, an area now known as Soho. Later, with plenty of sweat equity, it became a clean, modern home with minimal furnishings and maximum style.

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Signal to noise

Laci Peterson – now there’s a name I’ll bet you never expected to see in these august pages. The River Reporter, after all, focuses on quality and in-depth coverage of important local stories, as well as useful and entertaining information about local and individual happenings, and Laci’s story wouldn’t quite fit into any of those categories. Laci, as you may recall, was the victim of a tragic murder in California in 2002. You might also recall how the announcement of the discovery of her decomposed body in April 2003 marked the sudden and abrupt end of the round-the-clock, bomb-by-bomb media coverage of the invasion of Iraq.

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