The small change tray sitting on top of my filing cabinet at home was getting full so yesterday morning I grabbed a handful from it on my way to work. En route to work, I stopped at the grocery store for a petty purchase, and reached into my pocket and pulled out this handful of change at the grocery checkout counter. While dumping this weighted collection of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies on the checkout counter, I chuckled and told the grocery checker that I was spending my small change inheritance. She replied she had done the same a day earlier because she was low on funds, and struck gold with a financial windfall of over six dollars from her effort, and that it made her day.This reminded me of a teenager episode I shared with her about the time I wanted to go bowling with friends and asked my Mom for money to do that. When she said no, I then began a hunt for loose change sitting idle in our home and, a short while later, had enough money to go bowling with my friends and buy a snack afterwards. “Where are you going?” my Mom asked as I exited our home front door to which I replied that I was going bowling with my friends.
The grocery store checker, about my age but perhaps a few years younger, laughed and then began telling me about her youthful experiences doing the same and her similar successes in finding pots of change gold at the end of her change hunting rainbows. Her methods were similar to mine. Her favorite was looking under the cushions of the coach where her Dad sat in the evening watching television. The key to success, she shared, was patience, persistence and regularity of change hunting. I enjoyed sharing my change hunting memory with her and listening to her memories.
It was great early morning chit chat and better than the “good morning, how you doing?” small talk that doesn’t require much social interaction effort. It gave me a free early morning chuckle to start off my day so I’ve decided I’ll be regularly spending my small change inheritance.
Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum
4 comments:
My dad use to buy old used cares when I was a wee lad growing up. The first thing I did was search under the seats for change. Besides the spending change, I came up with a few collectibles that I still have to this day.
Actually that should say "old used cars" not "old used cares." My bad.
It would be an interesting experiemtn to spend a day seeing how much change I could gather, and I'm not talking about panhandling.
Everybody go online and search every name you know in the state unclaimed property site. I got a lot, friends got a lot, and my favorite was telling my state board accountant uncle that he had unclaimed property, too.
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