Monday, October 19, 2009
Change can have its challenges
Ben Beagle
The aging, semi-hysterical retired reporter rides shotgun with the greatest station wagon driver of them all down the rocky road of life. Mondays and Wednesdays, steady as she goes.
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One of the things our forefathers didn't guide us about in the land of the free and the home of the brave is loose change.
Listen, pal, you get enough of that stuff in your cargo pants and they're liable to fall off your body at the most inopportune times.
Like when you're applying for a loan to re-roof the house or telling the policeman how your accelerator stuck that time you ran over the bank's shrubbery and into the side of an SUV, the owner of which was not amused.
I don't own a pair of cargo pants, but I do have two pairs of cargo shorts -- into the pockets of which I never put a whole lot of change.
The other day I went to the supermarket and needed a penny to get paper money back at checkout.
The nice checkout lady said she wished she had a penny of her own and handed me enough change to finance a few hours of any war in which this country is engaged at the present time.
Trained to hide
Listen. Some change has been trained at the mint to roll under the dresser, the bed and the dog's water bowl.
I don't know why, but quarters seem to be the worst-behaved coins.
Pennies, on the other hand, are relatively decent, maybe because they have that picture of Abe Lincoln on them.
Nickels and dimes appear to the most likely to hide under the sofa cushions.
The other night, I couldn't sleep for obsessing about what to do with the change. Luckily, I rolled over on one of the dog's squeaky toys and this took my mind off the coins right away.
My screams, however, woke up the dog, then sleeping in another room, and you know what they say about letting sleeping dogs alone.
Sorting out this mess
Sure. We got one of those machines that sorts out coins and drops them into the proper containers, but it got all jammed up and started trying to put pennies into nickel containers and it wasn't a nice thing to watch.
So, we should go back to our pioneer roots and put the coins into the containers with our own hands.
We have this box of containers and the picture on the box shows a happy family just about to stuff these coins into the proper containers.
It doesn't show them as dysfunctional, driven mad by this monotonous business and beginning to attack one another. And wait until they show up at the bank with a plastic Kroger bag full of change containers.
Nobody wants to do that.
Ben Beagle's column runs every Monday in Extra.
