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The Gift that Keeps on Giving |
This is a piece published in South Florida a couple Christmases ago .. hope you enjoy my sentimental method of $aving for the holidays!
I feel sorry for people with money.
Everyday, you gotta worry about the stock market crashing, or some corporate executive selling out the shareholders for personal profit. Money is worry. Burn in hell Kenneth Lay!
I don’t have portfolio problems. I know where my nest egg is at all times and can look at it whenever I want. It’s right under my night stand, sitting in the bottom of a large, plastic Coke bottle bank.
My ex-wife, Michele, and I went shopping for our daughter’s first Christmas at the Pembroke Pines Toy’s R Us on a December evening in 1990.
We grabbed a shopping cart and headed for the aisles containing the noisy, enchanting items that amuse 9 month olds. On the way, Michele stopped with the cart and reached over to a bin containing the large Coke bottle banks and put one in the basket.
Janelle’s festive first Christmas came and went and the Coke bottle bank found a spot in her room. I immediately got into the habit of emptying my pocket change into it almost every day. Over the next 8 years, the bottle slowly filled and was approaching capacity when times got tough for me in the late 90s.
With the house in foreclosure (only I could buy property in South Florida and be unable to sell it- not even for what I owed on it!), and creditors calling, I eventually turned to the First National Bank of Coke for help.
I had no idea how much 8 years of loose change had accumulated to when I pried the lid off and poured the contents onto my bed. I was hoping to find a few hundred dollars to cover an overdue FPL bill and a car payment.
I began segregating the change by denomination and rolling it, an activity that induced Carpel Tunnel Syndrome from the waist down after a couple hours. I stayed at it with “rain man” intensity until my bed was covered with more rolls than a Publix bakery.
With piles of change yet to be wrapped, I started counting and was astonished to find I had almost $1200 ready for a real bank- a life saving amount of money at that point in time. I lost the house, but managed to keep the car and move on with my life. Like Mary’s little lamb, that bank went wherever I did, along with one uninvited guest- guilt.
That was Janelle’s money I borrowed. I vowed to pay it back but it wasn’t until 2001 that things improved to where I could even save my spare change again. So, in addition to change, I began putting all my single dollar bills in there on a daily basis, and slowly the aging bank, now yellow with age and cracking towards the top- began to refill with silver and green.
I had moved into a beautiful home where I rented 2 rooms from a very bi-polar chick named Moira. Life was good again. Still, to be cautious, I moved the Coke bank into the house under cover of a pillow case, and stuck it in the back end of my bedroom closet. I thought it would be safe there.
A week after moving in, I noticed a guy hanging out with Moira. She hadn’t mentioned a boyfriend, so I was cautiously curious. I don’t know if it was his appearance- he was covered with enough tattoos to be a star on “Inked”- and he looked wasted, and I got a bad vibe. One night, I returned home and decided to check my ‘bank balance’. I reached deep into the closet to pull out my plastic portfolio and knew immediately something was very wrong. It was not only much lighter, the change in it rattled loudly against the bottle’s side. Alarm bells went off and there was a knock on my bedroom door.
Boyfriend was there offering to share steaks he and Moira were grilling- a suspicious gesture if there ever was one. He heard the noise and knew what I was about to discover. I declined their meat and began counting the contents. I figured there might be $1600 in change and bills, but stopped counting when it was clear there was less than $400 left. I went to Moira to announce the theft, then called the police. Her immediate offer of $600 to replace the loss convinced me she knew who took the money- and was hoping to keep the cops out of it. I didn’t budge.
Soon the Coke bottle bank, showing its age, was on the living room floor covered in black finger print powder. Moira’s King of Tattoos admitted robbing the bank to support his heroin habit. The State’s attorney’s office asked how I wanted to proceed, so I demanded $800 in restitution and rehab for the offender- sparing him jail time I could have requested.
He had a record. The recovering addict in me, that spotted him from day one, needed to give him a chance to recover, too.
I took the check from Moira, cashed it and emptied the bank and turned it all into ten $100 bills, and went straight to Janelle’ house. There, I told her the story of tough times, borrowing her money and gave her the 10 C-notes to put in her savings account.
You see, I also had the IRS chasing me for money and they are not nice about it. Keeping money in an FDIC institution would have been akin to offering them an open invitation to clean me out on their whim. I moved out of Moira’s the next day before Captain Tattoo bailed out of jail, and rented a house for myself. I hid the Coke bottle bank in a spot where only a determined burglar could find it.
Then I began a new holiday tradition. Christmas of ’01, in addition to her other gifts, I presented Janelle with a treasure chest containing the year’s worth of silver. The first one contained a little over $300, and it has grown every year since.
The top half of the bottle has broken off, but the jagged base is filled with pocket change, and rolls of quarters. I purchase 2 every paycheck and toss them in there along with the daily pocket change. This year’s haul will probably exceed a grand!
So you can have your stocks and bonds and all the worries that go with them. If the bottom falls out of my financial institution, I can always tape it back on. It’s my nest egg, even if it’s being supervised by a cuckoo.
Happy holidays!
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