Let’s start this thing off with stupid stuff I’ve done with nickels.
I used to have this baby blue ’77 Chevy Nova my friends called the “Chick Magnet.”
The car had a huge V8 in it and was mucho fun to drive despite that model not selling too well in Latin America because No Va, in Spanish, means No Go.
Anyway, the nickels.
I was at an intersection waiting for the light to change, fiddling with a nickel on the steering wheel when somehow I lodged it into a crack and engaged the horn, which bellowed like King Kong with a thorn in his foot.
Embarrassing enough in any case, but this was panic-inducing.
There were I’d say 15 refrigerator-sized Hells Angels in front of me, also waiting for the light to change. Harleys rumbling, the bikers took an agonizingly slow look back at me, expressionless, as my horn kept honking away.
Expressive enough for all concerned, I raised both hands in the air and put on my best “Please don’t hurt me, I’m not honking at you, I’m just an idiot” face.
Their heads swiveled back to the red light, thank the Good Lord’s divine intervention, seemingly satisfied that I wasn’t honking at them but rather was just a goof who probably did something stupid, maybe with a nickel, to cause his horn to malfunction.
Live and let live.
Many years later, I was again fiddling with a nickel at work when I accidentally dropped it into a fax machine, pretty much destroying it. The fax machine, that is.
So yup, that’s me and nickels.
Given my history with five-cent coins, even I would ban me from being anywhere remotely near the Big Nickel in Ontario.
You know, that nine metres (30 foot tall) replica of a 12-sided 1951 Canadian nickel? I’d probably lean against it or something, knock it off its supports and destroy Sudbury in the process. No more Saturday nights there.
Indeed, doing dumb things with money runs in the family.
I don’t want to embarrass anyone in particular – I’ll just say it was my sister Shirley – who once found a crisp $20 bill on the floor of an aisle in K-Mart. This was in the 1970s, and that was a tidy sum back then, especially for a child.
She scooped up the bill, walked up to the nearest “adult” she could find, and asked her “Excuse me ma’am, is this yours?”
The woman’s eyes, like raisins pressed into cookie dough, darted left and right, scanning the immediate area before she snatched the bill from my sister’s hand, snapped it shut in her handbag and took off before anyone with a conscience could intervene.
Well, my sister was a lot younger when this cruel world deprived her of her $20 find than I was when I did my dumb things with these two nickels.
With a nod to sibling rivalry, and $20 being 400 nickels, I guess I have 398 stupid things left to do with these five-cent coins before I catch up with my sister.
And that’s money in the bank.
