“Has anyone got any quarters?”
I love pretty much everything Carol says, because each word that comes out of her is accompanied by a melodic Irish brogue that makes every syllable sound like a song. Everybody likes being sung to. Which is probably why, when she asked for change for the coffee machine, I whipped out my coin purse without really giving it much thought.
“How many do you need?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if she was looking to break a dollar, or just borrow the $.50 that the machine in the break room charges. I was willing to give it to her either way.
“Four,” she answered, but her Gaelic lilt made it sound more like “Fow-uhhhr.” She has this lovely way of stretching out even monosyllabic words so that they last longer. My name even lingers into two when she says it, sounding something like “Fye-uth.”
I dropped the coins into her palm, and she handed me a crisp one-dollar bill. As I folded it to put it back on my wallet, I spied some writing on it. At the top, in the center: “Scott Harmon.” And over the seal of the Federal Reserve, “For Lerna,” accompanied by a crudely drawn heart.
I allowed myself a brief moment in the day to muse about the laws that were undoubtedly written against such a seemingly innocuous practice, and the countless number of government agencies likely employed to enforce them. “Defacing of federal currency.” “Destruction of government property.” Something of the like. I pictured a group of black-suited cube-dwellers housed in some Pentagon facility five floors below the surface of the earth, their skin bleached pale by the lack of sunlight, milling about like ants in a subterranean colony, not speaking to each other, but all nonetheless focused on one central purpose. I also thought of the young man (why do I think he’s young? No reason… defacing federal currency is just something I suppose I think of as being beneath baby boomers) who wrote the inscription, seated cross-legged in the grass with his back against a dogwood tree, or perhaps in a noisy theatre waiting for the lights to dim for a movie, a fetching curly-haired blonde at his side. Were they together when he wrote it, or thousands of miles apart? It seems as though his intent was to send the message across whatever vast distances dollar bills are like to travel. To find the mysterious Lerna herself? Or to cross the path of a stranger, to make their fingers traverse the letters carved in blue ink and long-since dried, and simply wonder? Scott and Lerna… husband and wife? Lovers? Relatives? Or merely two friends captured by a whim?
I smiled. Mostly because I simply don’t know. Because as a person who occasionally fancies herself a writer, my mind was simply flooded with the possibilities. Of course, the curse of a person with a fanciful imagination is that whenever the reality of a situation presents itself, it typically falls far short of our imaginings. The mysterious Lerna could be the married woman at the dry cleaner’s counter that our hero, Scott Harmon, harbors a lecherous crush on. An exotic dancer swinging on a pole for one of her beer-swilling regulars. A waitress at a diner that some young hot shot attempts to pick up on a dare spurred by the ribbing of his colleagues at a business luncheon. The wonder and beauty of this dollar is that I will simply never know. So Scott and Lerna, whoever they are, are left entirely to my imagination. They are what I choose to make them. And for the time being, I choose to make them two people who, by whatever association brought them together, have the sort of connection for which one would bravely risk destruction of government property.
I had thought briefly to keep the dollar in my wallet, as some sort of constant thing, an anchor in cotton, linen, and ink, even a friendly little reminder that people are occasionally mindlessly thoughtful. Then it occurred to me that to do so would basically defeat the purpose for which it was intended, to pass a message of devotion along to several strangers, perhaps eventually into the hands for the one to whom it was inscribed. I sincerely doubt that the dollar will ever fall into Lerna’s hands, and I suspect that somehow she already knows about it (young men given to flights of fancy can hardly help bragging about it, after all), but all the same, it’s not my place to stop the life cycle that each bill goes through before it reaches the end of its lifespan. According to the United States Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the average circulation life of a dollar bill is 21 months before it is retired and destroyed. True, I could prevent this destruction indefinitely simply by holding it captive in my wallet, but letting it live out its normal life seems a little more fitting. And I can hardly deprive the next recipient of the bill from the same little smile it gave me. So I may hold it for just a little while, then release it back into the world, to a cash register drawer or vending machine or bank deposit envelope, wherever it may end up. And perhaps I’ll find the inspiration to inscribe another bill with a dedication of my own. I couldn’t really say what I’d write, or to whom, at this point. (I’m open to suggestions.) But the idea is there.
So thank you, Scott Harmon, for instilling in me a bit of inspiration to engage in a wee bit of destruction of government property.
