She asked if I wanted some strawberries. Then she added: “They’re washed and cut.” I replied “So am I!” She laughed so hard I thought she’d hyperventilate. “Can confirm! Can confirm!” she shouted. That’s right, she likes her man like she likes her strawberries: Washed and cut. The conversation sounded like impossibly bad opening of a horribly trashy romance novel. She would later say her face hurt from laughing so hard, a comment she could have made on other occasions, on other days. I would say that I make her laugh but it’s more that we laugh together. Not laughing at but with each other.
I got this 50-cent piece in change at a gas station near Calvary Cemetery last week. Have not seen one of these in a long time, certainly not in live currency.
It reminds me of when, as a child, the family had a batch of mint sets, from the U.S. Mint. Plastic holders for mint-condition coins of every denomination from a Lincoln penny up to the Eisenhower dollar. I thought the mint sets were cool, so much so that I broke them open and used the coins to buy crackers and Coke from the grade school vending machine. It was the stuff of legend for years to come. Who knows what the mint sets might have been worth in later years. I basically ate them.
A 50-cent piece found in currency today is worth approximately 50 cents. Like their bretheren 1976 Bicentennial quarters they have not increased in value. My mother and I horded bicentennial quarters for years, thinking they one day would certainly be worth multiple times their face value. Alas, today the bicentennial quarter is worth a quarter. We had the bag of those quarters stolen by a burglar who also deposited a huge turd into the ground floor toilet. The size of the turd, my mother said, indicated that the burglar was male. She said this to me in a professorial, instructive way, as if I might never have another opportunity to learn from any other source that men’s turds are larger than women’s. I don’t even know if that is catagorically true though I have a foggy memory of a Sarah Jessica Parker routine, maybe an SNL skit, where she talks about some fiber supplement she took that had her cranking out big, huge logs. These were not “squirrely, girly” turds but epic monsters suitable for display at a museum. This “memory” is probably a total fabrication on my part but who the hell knows…
