as it’s -10 degrees(-23 in celsius)in nyc tonight i thought i’d write about summers when i was little.
or, littler.
the summers when i was growing up had a deathly and cloying stillness to them, and we were very poor although we lived in an obscenely wealthy town.
my friends had idyllic summers spent playing tennis and taking sailing lessons and swimming in clear, gigantic pools with high and fantastic diving boards.
i, on the other hand, watched a lot of tv. every now and then i’d wrangle an invitation to a friend’s country club, where i’d spend my time in the pool or near the pool, trying not to look weird and poor. i felt as if my poverty clung to me like a bad stink. somehow i knew that everyone i encountered was aware that: a-i didn’t belong, and b-i lived in relative and depressing squallor.
the summer of 1973 was particulary rough. my mother was smoking a lot of pot and dating a member of the charter oaks motorcycle club. so i spent my days at my granparents house. my grandparents had a big and beautiful suburban house, and they had a color tv(which we didn’t)and their tv had an antenna(ours had a coat hanger. really. coat hangers can actually get pretty good reception).
normally i was perfectly happy to spend my days in front of the television, but this was the summer of watergate.
all of my favorite shows were cancelled to make room for the watergate trials. hour after hour they droned on, and every hour like clockwork i would go back to the tv to see if the watergate hearings had been postponed to make room for cartoons. any cartoon would have been greeted like a liberating soldier after a brutal fascist occupation.
but this summer there were no cartoons. there were no monster movies. there were no sci-fi shows. there was just the watergate hearings. hour. after. hour.
which left me fending for myself and figuring out ways to stave off the stultifying tedium of summer in the suburbs.
i would build things out of lego’s. i would run hot-wheels track down the staircases. i would burn my g.i joe’s. but my favorite thing to do was to play with my coin collection.
i know, that sounds sad. but i loved it. and in hindsight it makes me think that i probably should’ve been a banker. i would take my coin collection(most of which i had inherited from my uncle)and i would sit on the porch and sort through the money and arrange it by country and denomination(keep in mind i was 6 or 7 years old at the time).
and then i would invent fiscally motivated conflicts between the different countries whose coins i had. bolivia would suddenly be at war with italy because italy wanted bolivias coins.
england would battle china over the weird chinese coins that must’ve had some value because they looked so odd. this honestly kept me entertained for WEEKS. just sitting on the porch playing with my coin collection.
i would also keep my bank book with me and look at it on occasion. see, my grandfather had started a savings account for me and every month or so i would go down to the bank to find out how much money i had made through interest.
my grandfather started the account with $5, and within 9 or 10 months it had gone up to $5.65. this seemed like magic to me. i earned money by doing nothing??
i would go to the bank office and they would stamp my balance in my little bank book and it would always be more than it had been before, EVEN IF I HADN’T PUT MORE MONEY INTO THE ACCOUNT.
i honestly would’ve been happy to have gone to the bank every day to have them tell me that my bank balance had gone up 1/8th of a cent. that was 1/8th of a cent of very easy money. i didn’t have to work for it. it just magically appeared, like a homunculus at the bottom of an alchemists test tube.
as time passed i started to put more money into my bank account. i would do an odd job and make 50 cents and deposit that.
i would get a $5 bill for my birthday or christmas. so within a year or so i suddenly had a bank balance of OVER $12. i would look nostalgically(but not longingly)at the $5.65 cents i had at one point looked at so reverentially. in my mind i was rich.
i was in double digits. the faded ink of $5.65 taught me the valuable lesson that change does come with time. bank balances grow from $5 to $12 and, i think i forgot to mention, the watergate hearings eventually ended and the cartoons and monster movies returned to daytime television like returning nobility after a long war.
the strange thing about playing with my coin collection and putting money in the bank and checking my bank balance every month was that i never really gave much thought to spending the money. i just loved the order and stability and regularity and promise of coins and bank books.
see, my childhood life was fairly chaotic. my mom was nice a lot of the times, but she smoked a lot of pot and had long hair and dated guys like al who carried a gun and worked at the gas station and had a big beard and shot plates when he got drunk.
i couldn’t go to the country clubs except as the suburban equivalent of a charity exchange student, and i didn’t live in a particularly nice or orderly house, but i could play with coins and bank books. and coins and bank books were never chaotic. even if the coins had a chaotic design(like some of them did)they were still made out of metal and they had weight and they were official and spoke of respectable things like banks and bankers and buildings with ionic columns and business lunches and suits and ties.
oh as a closing aside, if you have a 1955 penny look at it carefully, it could be worth a lot.
-moby
