old money

after a week and a half of cross-country adventure, the sweetie and i dragged our tired selves, our overstuffed bags and the small brown dog through nineteen degrees and 25 mph wind gusts, over three blocks and up two flights of stairs to home. now, when you've been gone a while and are getting in around mealtime (that's 8pm for those of you in the midwest) you don't have too many options. there's nothing in the fridge that should be used for anything but a science experiment. the pantry has plenty of boxes and cans, none of which can be combined with any of the others in what might be called a meaningful way. the obvious thing to do when you live in brooklyn is order pizza. but if you have come home with only a few dollars in your pocket and all the rest of your cash resting comfortably in an atm, you are faced with going back down two flights of stairs and over several blocks through wind and plummeting temeperatures to an atm and then food. or you can starve to death.

i was contemplating the prospect of just this sort of death while putting away all the things i'd dragged to missouri and then upstate and finally back home. i picked up a necklace to put in a heart shaped tin on my bedside table. the tin is unpainted and bruised and packed near to the top with buttons of every sort. i'm not much of a jewelry wearer so the only necklace i currently own went to sleep with the buttons. but when i opened the tin, two bills lay quietly on a bed of buttons. a ten and a twenty. more than enough to bring hot pizza through the cold night up the stairs and to our door. i called to the sweetie, exclaiming over this post-new year's day miracle and then put the bills on the kitchen table. the sweetie called in our order and we sat back to wait for our slices of heaven.

the sweetie looked at the clock and headed to the kitchen to pick up the money. "this is 1950s money!" he moaned. now, first you ought to know that 1950s money spends just the same as any other money. but the sweetie had come home with these bills among his change a while back and we'd both been smitten by the crispness and darkness of them. they looked ancient and somehow important and we had stowed them in the tin, assuming it would be obvious from their place there how important they were. and although we certainly could have traded them for pizza, neither of us considered it for a second. we scrambled frantically for bills wadded in pockets, stowed in the bottoms of bags, hidden under stacks of paper. i found a five i'd accidentally ripped in half last month and pawed around for tape to fix it. i handed over the mended five and we stood there in the kitchen, the sweetie counting up small bills while i eyed the change jar. a few bucks short. the sweetie shook his head. no way we could pay a delivery guy with quarters. no way. i nodded. "it's okay," i said. "we can spend the ten and we'll still have the twenty." the sweetie frowned but didn't say a word as i began counting out quarters into a pile on the table. the delivery guy traded a pizza and two liters of soda for a bunch of singles, a taped up five and twenty quarters.

we ate our pizza on the couch while watching a show about the punkin chunkin on the science channel. when we finished i took the dishes into the kitchen. then i took the 1950s money, folded it in half the way i'd found it and put in in the heart shaped tin between the layer of buttons and the layer of necklace. there are times i've questioned the rightness of my choices. but i have managed to hitch myself up to a man whose desire to keep this ridiculous money is exactly, inexplicably, the same as my own. how can anyone question something like that?