Fungible Convictions

My college friends and I stay in touch on a forum we set up years ago, and when we’re not talking about crazy coworkers, Wake Forest basketball, or Lost, we usually giving each other pretty good advice. Today someone asked if we knew of a way to get a bunch of change turned into dollars without a bank or machine taking out a percentage, a question that all of a sudden put me back in a six-year-old mind:

My dad saved about 15 years of change in old Tropicana orange juice glass bottles and left them in our basement.

When I was six or so, me and this other kid, for no reason other than we were idiots, trashed another kid’s toys. The punishment my mom handed down? To roll enough of that change in the Tropicana jars to pay the kid back for everything I’d broken.

I hate change now. Any change I have I put in a ziplock bag in my bedside table and every four months take it to the grocery store to feed into the Coinstar machine, I don’t care about the percentage it takes out.

I’m not too keen on OJ either.

At least two years ago, maybe three, I wrote a poem about some of my favorite days: waking up early on a Saturday morning at Paddy’s house, eating the enormous breakfast his mother would make, and being driven together to our baseball game. And those extra-great days when, after the game, my father or Patrick’s would drive us to an Orioles game. This must have been written around the time of my conversion to Orthodox Christianity, because there’s an idealized version of Catholicism in the poem—I’d always felt a little bad that I went through six years of Catholic school, which second to my family is the biggest definer in my life, only to switch teams in my 20′s. . . . Continue reading

As a friend just said, “It finally happened!” We can now buy Big Wheels for Adults. Nostalgia forever!

If you’re reading this, want to add a comment about other nostalgic products?