Beginning of the month, after my dad received his salary, he would diligently sit down with a pen and paper and do the budget for the month. Every anticipated expense would be jotted down and totalled. One of the items in that budget would be our monthly grocery. Though the grocery budget wouldn’t be itemized, we (my brother and I) knew it included a very important item that we both cared about that would make our lives a little easier. It was a tube of toothpaste.
Back then, toothpaste used to come in aluminum tubes. These tubes would invariably run out toward the last week of the month. But we knew we couldn’t just go buy a new tootpaste from the corner store. We will have to wait until our dad got his next month’s salary and a new budget was written down.
So, the two of us would have our work cut out every morning. When the tube wouldn’t yield any more toothpaste after relentless and vigorous squeezing, the tools would have to come out of the toolbox. The first choice of tool would be a rolling pin—the one used to make rotis. The tube would be rolled flat on the cement floor to extract whatever toothpaste was left. That exercise would usually get us through a day or two. But the damn month wouldn’t be over yet.
After the rolling pin stopped yielding results, the next tool of the trade would be a pair of pliers. We knew the circular head/mouth of the toothpaste tube—an area the rolling pin couldn’t reach—still held some of our elusive paste. The pliers would now be employed to gently cajole the remaining toothpaste from that area. That would stretch us another day or two.
When even the pliers would stop helping, the final tool to come out of the toolbox would be a pair of scissors. The tube would now be cut open to surgically extract the last vestiges of toothpaste clinging to the inside walls.
By that time, the month would finally be over, and we would get a new tube of toothpaste—allowing our morning routine to go smoothly for a few weeks 🙂
