Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Friday, July 11, 2008

Seattle has been on my mind — and in my dreams — for the last ten days now, ever since Henry and I returned from that great city by Elliott Bay. Seattle has always been a mythic city in America’s imagination and mine: individualistic, sea-faring, progressive, a rugged outpost holding the mighty Pacific at bay.

My first visit there was in 1983 when I received my first contract from Doubleday to write a book about young Americans in the 1980s. The publisher gave me license to go anywhere in our nation to take the pulse of the under-30 populace. Where had all the hippies gone?, my editor wondered. What was the ethos that replaced theirs? I journeyed to mostly predicable places and locales where I had relatives to accommodate me. But Seattle was my one destination where I knew almost no one but wanted to know more. (Still I managed to find a connection to a lovely elderly couple named the McLaughlins who lived on Queen Anne Hill and were happy to supply hospitality and a guest room in exchange for face time with a young journalist.) I have returned to salmon-scented Seattle many times since — often on business and sometimes on pleasure, occasionally a combination of both. Thankfully, this latest visit fell into the combination-plate category.

Two weeks ago today, Henry and I flew out to visit my good friends of almost twenty years, Cecile and Paul Andrews, who live in the Phinney Neighborhood in northeast Seattle, just above Green Lake. Cecile is a legend in the world of simplicity advocacy. A gifted writer and speaker, a quick wit with a comic touch and a ready laugh, Cecile is a woman to whom I took an instant liking when we first met back in the early ’90s. At the simplicity conferences we’ve attended through the years, we always gabbed like girls. “We would have been best friends had we met up in high school,” Cecile has said more than once.

Cecile’s first book, “A Circle of Simplicity,” published in 1997 by Harper Collins, makes the case for starting simplicity circles, self-education groups that build community while they’re going. The book traces the history of small study groups to the Scandinavian countries and tells you how to get one started. Her latest book, “Slow Is Beautiful,” which invites people to slow down and rediscover “joie de vivre,” was recently published by New Society Publishers.

She and Paul, a former reporter for the Seattle Times, have been fixtures in their neighborhood since the 1970s. In recent years, with the addition of their beloved bichon, Maggie, they’ve become a troika in the Phinney neighborhood. They take their white puffball on frequent walks along the sloping sidewalks around Phinney where they stop and chat with neighbors. Occasionally, Paul shoots video of Maggie and has even put a few clips from her up on YouTube! The Phinney neighborhood, in fact, has emerged as a kind of of “eco-village” with such features as a farmer’s market, tool exchange, babysitting coop, and a campaign to get people to slow down, take time to stop and chat… kind like an old-fashioned slow Southern town.

The Andrews’ commitment to simplicity includes many sensible ideas, like living only on the first floor of their older home and turning the top floor and basement into rental units, thus lowering their ecological footprint and enhancing their income stream. They’re also smart about arranging house-swaps, using public transit and putting into practice many things that those of us in the sustainability field have been advocating for years. You will not find a microwave in their home but only an abundance of books.

Among other things, Cecile had invited me to speak at a simplicity gathering she’d organized at nearby St. John’s Lutheran Church (it was in walking distance, of course!) on June 28. The theme for the gathering was “Less Is More: Voluntary Simplicity in Troubled Times.”

“We’re all dandelions,” Cecile told the audience of over 100 at the half-day, free-to-the-public event. “They can’t weed us out. We’re just too plentiful. Every one is going to have to live on less. We have no choice.” The question, she said, is whether we form of culture of simplicity and do so through conversation and in community, embracing the coming changes as positive ones, or whether we try to fight the changes that are around the bend.

Another beloved Seattlite, John de Graaf, the PBS producer of the “Affluenza” series (I hosted the second of the two-part series, “Escape from Affluenza”), has stayed busy in the decade since those acclaimed specials were released with many things, including penning a companion book, “Affluenza,” and more recently launching a “Take Back Your Time” campaign for which he met with an interested Senator Barack Obama, several years before the Illinois senator put his hat in the presidential ring. The latest part of that time effort is a “Right 2 Vacation” campaign. John and I spent part of three days together. On Saturday, we rubbed elbows at the workshop; on Sunday, we took our boys and a ferry ride out to Bremerton; on Monday, John invited Henry and me to pose for posters for his vacation campaign, which are now up on his website.

The shot of Henry features by almost 11-year-old son, his brown eyes glassily glued to a DS game, shunning all extraneous connections — including the great outdoors — except for that electronic game box. The text reads: “Our children spend only half as much unstructured time outdoors as they did a generation ago. One reason is shorter vacations. Fewer parents have time to take their kids to the woods. The United States is the only industrial country without a law guaranteeing paid vacations. www.right2vacation.org.”

My pose is equally disturbing. I’m playing the overworked working woman slumping in front of her laptop …. a role I’ve played more than once in my life, I hate to admit: stressed, headachy. The text suggests that a heart attack could be in my future if I continue plodding on without relief or time off.

Henry and I took John’s message to heart. After the conference, though Cecile and I met faithfully every night about our new book project, during the days, Henry and I made the rounds. We went to the top of the Space Needle; we visited the Woodland Park Zoo; we toured the Science Fiction museum; experienced the Experience Music Project; ate at Pike Place Market; toured the Acquarium and the waterfront.

Henry parted with some hard-earned cash at an Asian import store. When Henry inquired about buying another item there, I suggested he might want to save a bit for our final stop of the day — a trip to Elliott Bay Books, the fabulous local new and used bookstore several blocks away. Only in Seattle, the Asian import clerk chimed into the conversation. Instead of urging Henry to blow his wod there, he advised: “Definitely, spend your money on books.”

Taking the clerk’s sage advice and mine, Henry did spend his last dollar at the bookstore. (He managed to get me to “spend” a few of mine on books for him as well.) So it was onto the bus for the final ride back to Cecile and Paul’s. They were waiting with a lovely salmon dinner and more conversation.

Much of it was about Starbucks and the late-breaking news that the company was closing 600 stores. It was a sign of the times, the times that are a ‘changing. Paul noted that he sensed Starbucks was fading when local coffeehouses were beating the franchise to new locations. It’s about embracing change, not fighting it. This coming era is the time of new, local things to come.