"Walkin'-Around Money"

It used to be that newly married couples stereotypically argued about whether to squeeze the toothpaste tube from the end or from just any old place in the middle (and by that phrasing, you can guess my preference...)  But now that toothpaste comes in plastic tubes that rebound instead of the old aluminum tubes that stayed compressed when you compressed them, that argument has waned.

We've found one to replace it.

We were leaving the hospital Wednesday afternoon, and stopped by the parking garage cashier's counter to pay our tab before going to the car.  It was cold out, and Nora was wearing a down parka over a down vest, which meant a) she was pretty warm, and b) she had a LOT of pockets to stuff things into.  So she began her search for the parking ticket.

Friends, it was like watching a magician pull eighty yards of scarves out of a shot glass.  Every pocket contained a great melange of money and tissues and Post-it notes and the missing tenth copy of the Magna Carta, a vast and blooming garden of paper materials.  She was probably warmer at least in part just because of the insulative value of all that paper.

I started taking some of it, both so that she could have hands free to explore new pockets and because I just wanted to see whether there were squirrels or budgies living in all of it.  And as part of that, I took the money I found, straightened it out, oriented it so that it was all facing the same direction, and arranged it in denominational order, with ones in the front and twenties in the back.

There are ten or twelve people around us watching this circus (we probably looked like Penn and Teller, the gregarious and exuberant one paired with the stoic and orderly one), all of them trying not to be too overtly interested in the amount of bills being flashed around.

Now, one of the nice things about being a guy is that I have fairly few carrying destinations, and I know exactly what goes into each one.  For instance, guys always have pants with four pockets.  Starting from the right front and going clockwise, they are keys, comb, wallet, and change.  The shirt pocket is for glasses.  Inside the wallet, there are credit cards and insurance cards and ID cards, each of which has its designated and unchanging location; and some amount of paper money, arranged in denominational order with ones on the front and twenties in the back, all with the presidential portraits facing upward.

I know that some amount of my psychological energy goes into maintaining that kind of order, energy that might otherwise be used to solve subatomic physics problems, but it makes me calm and happy.  If I had everything everyplace, I would just go berzerk. 

Let me say here that I try to be careful about judgments.  (No, really, I do, all evidence above to the contrary...)  For many years, I was in a relationship in which I was the comparatively disordered one, and I heard endlessly about the right way to do things.  I know how much that chafed, so I try to be conscious about accepting that each of us do things differently than the other.  It's more a sense of surprise, a kind of anthropological wonderment at the varied expressions of material culture.

I ultimately found the parking ticket in one of those fistfulls of paper, gave that to her, and quietly finished arranging the bills before handing them to her so she could pay the parking fee.

I wonder where they are now...


[Editor's note: Beware...H is about to go play pool and this may take longer than he wants to allot... but here goes. I got a call at 5:30 p.m. that my newly minted husband was in an ambulance on the way to the hospital from the airport, and I got the cats and the cat food and the sweaters and the keys in my hand (more-or-less) so that I could be by his side by 11 p.m. with the cats in the house and fed, and I didn't have an accident on the black ice. And I had to stop for gas since the tank was low, and the aforementioned husband had lent / given me $40 for emergency money several days before, and I had paid for the grange calendar and had something less than $40, so I had to stop at the bank for cash.... so there WAS cash in my pockets. And if YOU had gotten that call? You might not have stopped every time you went to pay for something when it was 8 degrees outside and put the bills in size order!  But I digress... When we needed Grand Marnier for the martinis we made at New Year's, who had it stashed in the hall? And when there was a glass jar at hand that remained from the salsa that we had used and the newly minted husband had tossed the lid away in garbage-who-knows-where, and we filled that jar with leftovers, who, I mean WHO, had a Ziploc under the sink with every size lid known to humankind and found one that fit that jar perfectly?  And when we needed a left handed monkey wrench who had one in blue and one in red? I mean... when you live in the country, you have to be prepared! And by the way, he just edited my typos before I had even hit "save!"  And who is it that deals with the insurance company / phone company / computer repair geeks on the phone and builds a meaningful relationship with each one? Huh? I mean I AM "she-who-speaks-with-doorknobs!"  Harumph.

One last note... Many years ago, I heard a story that may be apocryphal but I like it. It concerned a particularly nasty divorce. The husband had all his record albums (remember those?) in order alphabetically and by the type of music. After the divorce, the wife went in and put Willie Nelson in the jacket for Harry Manilow. And Souza in the jacket for Elvis.  Just you wait Henry Higgins, just you wait!] 


[by the way, Wanda, if you're reading this: this is the 200th published post in the one-year history of Nora and Herb's Wedding Blog.  So there.]