Being Gas-Worthy: Diary of a Cheapskate

Saying goodbye to a friend is never easy. 

But at $3.41 a gallon, it’s absolutely excruciating.

It’s been a rough few days. I’m currently nursing a hangover (at least it was cheap wine, my favorite kind) and a slightly bruised spirit. A co-worker whose skills and sense of humor I greatly admire unexpectedly quit when a fabulous job offer in another state landed in his lap.

Because he’s so deserving, nobody begrudged him his sudden good fortune (well, the office softball team did consider kidnapping him, but only through playoff season). Indeed, we were determined to throw him a goodbye bash that would make My Super Sweet 16 look like a nuns’ tea party by comparison.

On the day of the festivities, I arose at dawn to make French bread from scratch. Next stop was the gourmet market I’d previously only visited vicariously through a dinner party hostess who’d served us its “free-range, naturally aged and organically nurtured premium poultry.” In other words, chicken. Yet now here I was, plucking brie and pate from the cases with abandon, and without ever looking at a price tag.

For once in my life, it seemed, money was no object.

Then I finally read the e-mail telling me how to get to the party.

Twenty-seven miles. Each way. That’s how far I’d have to drive to bid adieu to this fellow who, come to think of it, was the one turning his back on us.

Just how gas-worthy was he, anyway?

Remember that classic Seinfeld episode where Elaine was horrified to learn that her favorite contraceptive sponge was being taken off the market? She bought up as many as she could, but after that, anyone she was considering canoodling with first had to pass her “sponge-worthy” test. The grading was necessarily brutal: men who might have hit home runs in the past were permanently stuck at first base because of this new law of (limited) supply-and-demand.

Now do you remember a time when friendship wasn’t measured almost exclusively at the gas pump? When it didn’t feel like opening a vein and having your life’s blood pour out because you’d expended an eighth of a tank of your precious petroleum while driving a Meals-on-Wheels shift? When filet mignon cost more than the gas it took to drive to the grocery store, not the other way around?