Change I Can Believe In

"Stop!" I yelled to Tiffany on Sunday afternoon.

We were running up a steep, muddy hill in the middle of a park outside San Jose.

"What?" she asked. "Are you okay?"

"A dime!" I said, triumphantly.

"Oh my god," she said. "Only you could find a dime way out here in the middle of nowhere."

It was true--that we were in the middle of nowhere, I mean. We had set out to run a 3.5 mile loop, but, as usual, had gotten lost (more on that later, perhaps). By our estimation on the map I was carrying crumpled up in my fist, we were now committed to a good 7 mile loop, bare minimum, in order to get back to our car. But since that map was the same one we set out with in the wrong direction, we weren't hopeful.

Now that I'd seen the dime, I didn't care.

"It's not even dirty!" I said, stooping to rescue it in all its shininess from the mud.

I slipped it into my right shoe, shaking my foot so it settled flat underneath my arch. Nothing makes me happier than change.

See, Tiffany and I have this change-jar. And it's actually kind of famous among our friends and family members because it's not, in fact, a jar. It's a pretty big flower vase. And I obsess about putting change in it.

As in:

"Wait, I thought I had some change in my wallet," Tiffany will say.

"Oh, you did," I'll say. "It's in the vase now."

The reason for my obsession is that when Tiffany and I started the change-vase we agreed we would use it to fund our eventual move closer to our families. Every time I see a penny, I visualize a mile marker.

Shortly before we moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco (not at all closer to either of our families), we started a change-cup. It was just an after-thought really. We set it on the kitchen counter and started tossing our change in. But we also took change out for laundry and meters. Even still, the cup was worth $80 when we cashed it in for gas money for the move to San Francisco. This turned out to be spectacularly anti-climatic as gas prices were at all time record highs and we were hauling our car behind a U-Haul truck.

Money only goes one way in our change-vase in San Francisco. Well, that's not quite true. We still sometimes take out quarters for laundry, but they are tallied on a sticky note as an IOU.

Once our friend John bet me a ziplock bag of quarters that Tiffany and I would not upgrade any of our forms of technology by a certain date. He and his wife Meg were visiting from Boston, and John had brought the bag... actually, I can't remember why, maybe to pay tolls and meters in California? I had to explain my obsession with coins after I shoved him out of the way to pick a penny out of a puddle.

At the time, Tiffany and I both had flip phones, our ancient laptop was only online if it was plugged into a cable and when there was a show on TV that we wouldn't be around to watch, we slipped a tape into our VCR and pressed record. Of course we did not meet his deadline, and, when Tiffany finally bought an i-Phone, John informed me he'd given the bag of quarters to a homeless man.

Impossible to hold that against him, obviously.

But seriously, who travels across the country with a ziplock bag of quarters?