The other night at about 11:30 I got a text message from another part of the house —it turns out we suddenly had a “tooth fairy situation” on our hands. Did I happen to have any cash?
I checked my wallet but sometime during the epidemic I had stopped carrying cash. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but everything I bought was online and my credit cards, PayPal, Venmo or Cash App became the only options.
For decades before that I had always kept cash on hand, partly due to the lingering influence of my Scottish grandparents plus my general disdain of credit as a way of financing life’s desires.
In any event, as I rummaged through my possessions. hoping I’d locate a secret stash of dollar bills for the tooth fairy, I came instead upon an old wooden box crafted by my great grandfather in Scotland in the 1880s.
My grandfather had given it to me when I was a boy and I’d used it to save old coins people gave me as payment for their newspaper subscriptions in my years working as a paperboy.
Inside it were nickels with buffalos and dimes with the Statue of Liberty and aluminum pennies from World War Two. There were old fashioned quarters and silver dollars from the 1920s — coins almost never seen now but still common in my youth. They constituted by boyhood treasure.
Then I spied several folded up bills at the bottom of the box. These turned out to be Francs and Reichsmarks from the 1940s. They were collected by my father at the end of the war when he was in Europe for the one and only time in his life.
As I was fingering these old wrinkled bills, I was struck by how often the tiny things we rediscover later in life unlock memories.
Those bills were once my Dad’s. I recall his stories of postwar life in Europe, as well as his old uniform I’d dress up in at a vastly simpler time of my life.
Maybe I even miss the days when the tooth fairy came for me.
Oh yeah — the tooth fairy! I almost forgot. As it turned out, my old money was not needed this time around because some spare change turned up elsewhere in the house, giving this present-day story its own happy ending.
(I first published this last year.)
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