Painted on stockings during WWII

The scene: two weeks before Christmas, 1988, lunch time

The players: Megan, age 6, Collyn, age 4, and Marinne, age 3 (and me, their mom)

Megan: Mom, you gotta see this! Look what Collyn made!    

Me (standing at the sink, washing dishes): Just a minute .  .  . (this was my stock phrase to buy time)      

Megan: You better hurry before she eats it–            

Me (turning towards the counter where the girls were eating their baloney and cheese sandwiches): I’m coming!

Collyn: (proudly displaying a blue plastic plate with a nativity scene created from white bread, baloney, and processed cheese) Look, I chewed out the whole scene with my teeth!                    

Megan: You can see the little baloney Jesus in the bread manger. And the cheese wisemen can stand up by themselves!  

Marinne: I like it!  

Me (incredulous): Wow.

Collyn: Can we keep it?        

Megan: She means can we spray it with that clear stuff that makes it last. You  know, so we can keep it and put it out at Christmas every year  

Me: We’ll see .  .  . (my other stock phrase to buy time) 

In the sanctuary of ingenuity, a nativity scene chewed lovingly from white bread, baloney and sliced cheese is less a wonder than a challenge. You have the makings of a sandwich that you don’t want to eat: what can you make with it? how can you transform it before our very eyes?

Sometimes ingenuity comes at a moment just like this. You are comfortably sitting in your home (or wherever), and the opportunity for ingenuity arises. So you take it because you want to and because you can. And from these moments, you discover new and more efficient ways to cut your watermelon, to tie a silk scarf, to braid your daughter’s hair, to substitute an ingredient in a recipe you desperately want to make–but for which you lack one crucial ingredient, to decorate a room on a dime, to jimmy-rig a riding lawn mower so it will run again, etc.

But just as often, ingenuity is born from need. Sometimes desperate need. In Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “The Lovers of the Poor,” she writes of the volunteers from the Ladies Betterment League who make their scheduled visits to Chicago’s poor. Having romanticized their mission work and the recipients of their largesse, these volunteers are ultimately appalled at the sights, sounds, and smells they find in the projects:

They have never seen such a make-do-ness as                                                             Newspaper rugs before! In this, this “flat,”                                                                   Their hostess is gathering up the oozed, the rich                                                               Rugs of the morning (tattered, the bespattered. . .)                                                     Readies to spread clean rugs for the afternoon.                                                             Here is a scene for you. 

To be ingenious is to make do in the face of poverty and want, to roll out newspaper rugs for your guests. Depression era survivors used their ingenuity to find countless uses for those ordinary things we unthinkingly throw in the garbage: left-over pieces of aluminum foil, plastic butter tubs and Cool Whip containers, scraps of fabric and automobile parts. During WII, ingenious females drew fine lines up the back of their bare legs to simulate the hosiery that was neither available or affordable. In lean times, all clamor to enter the sanctuary of ingenuity.

  Consider the world’s foremost online sanctuary of ingenuity: Pinterest. Enter this sanctuary and be sorely amazed! You can learn how to become a real-life MacGyver who, armed with a box of paper clips, can save the world–or at least make some cool jewelry. You can make perfect pancakes with a squeeze bottle, organize a drawer of cords with toilet paper tubes, remove a stripped screw with a rubber band, rub deodorant stains out of your clothes using old pantyhose, and unclog a drain with Alka Seltzer and white vinegar. With a little help from your Pinterest friends, your make-do-ness will guarantee you a spot in the ingenuity hall of fame.

For in the sanctuary of ingenuity, a paper clip is never just a paper clip, a cereal box never just a cereal box. That is the beauty of ingenuity: something’s destiny is never bound by its original form or function.

If we can look at a paper clip or a baloney and cheese sandwich with new eyes, why not a struggling student, an aging neighbor, a despairing man, woman, or child? Why not a person–any person? Maybe I will create a Pinterest site for those who want to enter this sanctuary of ingenuity and be just as amazed at the ways in which we can transform our perceptions of those around us.