Cashing In Memories

5.14.24

The other night at 11:30 I got a text message from another part of the house —it turns out we had a “tooth fairy situation” on our hands. Did I happen to have any cash?

I checked my wallet but this was the second such request in a week (I’d forgotten that kids of a certain age lose teeth in bunches) and the first one had claimed my last four dollar bills.

Those had lingered in my wallet for an unknown amount of time because sometime during the epidemic I stopped carrying cash. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but everything I bought was online and my credit cards or PayPal were the only options.

For decades before that I had always kept cash on hand; maybe it was the lingering influence of my Scottish grandparents or maybe my general distrust of credit as a way of financing life’s demands.

In any event, as I rummaged through my possessions. hoping I’d locate a secret stash of a few dollars or large coins somewhere or another, I came upon an old wooden box crafted by my great grandfather in Scotland in the 1880s.

My mother had given it to me when I was a boy and I used it to save old coins people gave me as payment for their newspaper subscriptions in my years working as a paperboy.

Inside it are things like nickels with buffalos and dimes with the Statue of Liberty and aluminum pennies from World War Two. There are old fashioned quarters and silver dollars from the 1920s — coins almost never seen now but still common in my youth.

Then I spied several folded up bills at the bottom of the box. These turned out to be the real treasure because they were old Francs and Reichsmarks from the 1940s. These were collected by my Dad at the end of the war when he was in Europe for the only time in his life.

As I was handling these old wrinkled bills, I was struck by how it is often the tiny things we have later in life that hold true meaning because they can unlock a memory.

Those bills hold real value for me because they once were my Dad’s and I miss him.

***

While I was lost in my musings, I’d almost forgotten abut the Tooth Fairy. Luckily, due to some spare change located elsewhere in the house, this story has a happy ending.

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