… you know things are bad.
Yesterday, as I emptied my mailbox of its daily detritus — pizza delivery circulars, credit card solicitations and those fucking ads for Bed, Bath & Beyond (have those people no shame?), I saw something with my name on it that stood out from the paper fray. It was an envelope from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society with one of those plastic windows. The plastic window doesn’t make it special; I’m just trying to show, not tell.
Anyway, the envelope was different than its junk-mail contemporaries in my postbox that day — it contained a shiny, silver nickel. The nickel had its own plastic window, you know, to lure me in with the promise of five free cents. I tore open the envelope and admired my gleaming new specie. So exciting! Normally, the only people who send me money are my dad and my grandparents. But my grandparents are dead, so really it’s just my dad. And when he sends me money it’s in the form of a check with a note attached that says something to the effect of “Lauren, let’s make this the last time I have to pay for your [rent, car repair, food addiction]. You’re 53 years-old already.”
This is the nickel that came in the mail. The safety pin is for scale. Please note Thomas Jefferson’s au courant microbangs.
So you can imagine how exciting this surprise nickel was. But after the excitement of a shiny new thing passed, I felt kind of sad/bad. Why was a charity, which would normally be trying to rip my last nickel from my hot, grubby hands, giving me money? And this is when I realized I was in some bad shape. I had become so poor that now non-profits, which heretofore had begged me for my spare change and entreated me to give with threats that thousands of children were going to die violent, protracted deaths if I didn’t pony up, were now donating money to my cause. That I had become so financially embarrassed that I was now my own charity was a complete surprise to me. I just thought I was somewhere between impoverished and destitute. I didn’t know I had crossed the down-and-out threshold and was now fully indigent.
I sat with that knowledge for a bit and then came around to the idea of charities filling my personal coffers, one lonely nickel at a time. I can’t wait for tomorrow’s mail.
