Woolworth. August 16, 1992.

At the time of this purchase (August 16, 1992) I was dating a woman who spoke frequently of her days of poverty. She had been living with a man who, equally destitute, resorted to rolling quarters into wrappers and taking those coins to the bank. I found her account of this activity interesting, and all these years later I think of it once in a while. I have horded coins and stuffed them into wrappers since childhood, and I never thought twice about it. Since childhood I have seen times of affluence, days of negative bank-account balances, and everything in between, yet it never occurred to me to question this ritual of stuffing coins into wrappers and eventually taking them to the bank. I feel conspicuous at the bank, dropping one roll of coins after another under the bank teller’s bullet-proof window, making a lot of noise and holding up the line with this small-ball money-drop. Sometimes I sympathize with female tellers who chip a magnificently-manicured and polished nail on their index finger while scraping these coin rolls from the opening. No teller has ever questioned or blanched at me when I appear with my deposit of $150 in coin, but my understanding is that in response to the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, bankers now might suspect you of terrorism or other evil things if you deposit what is, in their opinion, too many coins. I read of a man who, each and every day, deposited hundreds of dollars worth of coins at his local bank. Suspicions were aroused and it turned out this fellow was robbing coin-operated devices like parking meters and vending machines. Hearing about these detainments and questionings of people on superficial grounds of small-change deposits (regardless of the fact that in this case the gentleman was a criminal) used to make me keep my coins at home until the quantity became unmanageable. Hundreds of pounds worth of quarters and nickels accumulated in my closet until the bucket into which I threw them could not be moved. I bought some coin rolls and commenced the laborious task of sorting them and adding up their value. I had to stop when I reached $1,000. I could not take it any more, the prestidigitation of the task was making my elbows ache, and I arbitrarily decided I had reached my goal (retroactively established) of making the bucket full of coins movable. That goal did not exist until I reached it, but in recognition of my accomplishment I freely moved that one-third-full bucket of coins all over the place! I used that $1,000 worth of coins to buy a recliner chair. These days my management of coin-mountains is considerably better, but it is no delight for me to occasionally haul heavy boxes full of coins to the bank. The purpose of this stream-of-consciousness ramble, however, is to say that I never understood why the woman I dated during the time I made this purchase at Woolworth felt that stuffing coins into wrappers was a sign of poverty. To me it is just a common-sense practice, and I thought nothing of its appearance of indignity even when I was dirt poor.