Buying the free stuff

Tom Sawyer convinced his pals to trade their treasures for a few minutes with the white wash brush in front of Aunt Polly’s nine feet high fence.
All it took was a bit of acting and an attitude that it wasn’t work, it was art. “Tom surveyed his last touch with the eye of an artist. … “ I reckon there ain’t one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it the way it’s got to be done,’” Tom told his pal Ben in Mark Twain’s classic.
Ben begged Tom to take his apple in trade for a few minutes with that brush. Other pals eagerly took up the brush when Ben laid it down.
Tom had had a nice, idle day with plenty of company – and ended the day with three coats of whitewash on the fence. “If he hadn’t run out of whitewash, he would have bankrupted every boy in the village,” wrote novelist Mark Twain.
Tom Sawyer pales beside today’s healthy life style industry. Swinging their white wash brushes they convince us to pay for products and services that once were – and still are – free: water, air and naps.
In the small village where I lived as a child, a bright red pump at the hardware store with a tin cup chained to it provided fresh, cool water to any passerby willing to give the handle a heave or two. Until the advent of Evian water (did you ever notice that backwards it spells ‘naive’?), water was free at restaurants, fast food places and the local fountain. Putting up a picnic lunch included filling canning jars or old ketchup bottles with fresh tap water. Thanks to the today’s Tom Sawyers, we can’t leave the house without our water bottle – or go on a picnic without stopping at the store for a case of water in disposable plastic bottle.s
“The next thing you know they will be selling the air we breathe.” I jokingly told my daughter as we chatted in the line waiting to enter the 50-cent movie.
The man in front of us, turned around, “They already do. They sell oxygen for students to breathe before they take a test. It’s supposed to increase their ability to think and remember.”
It is not just for students. The Oxygen Experience, located on the ground floor of The Cambridge Side Galleria in Cambridge, Mass. provides deep, calming breaths for $5 for five minutes – in your choice of flavored smells, according to the Associated Press story.
The Tom Sawyers of this world thrive because we believe them. In that same village, I walked 15 minutes each way to school every day and automatically fulfilled the recommended 30 minutes a day of daily exercise. Now I fork over $30 for 30 days of 30 minutes at a local gym – plus membership fees and, if I really want to look right, I must add the cost of purchasing a cute gym outfit and gym shoes.
If after your early morning exercise you spend the morning in the board room white washing the fence of gullible passers-by, you may need a bit of a nap to make it through the rest of the day. In New York City, that nap costs $18 for a half hour at MetroNaps in the Empire State Building. This business provides specially designed sleeping pods for executive “power naps.”
And to think in the village that helped raise me as a child, my kindergarten teacher insisted I lie down on the cot she provided and take a nap every single day. And she never charged a penny.
Things were much simpler in that village – even if it did include an occasional Tom Sawyer with a bucket of whitewash at his side.


Posted

in

by

Tags: