Rant #3,311: Money

My son is in a bowling league which plays its games on Saturday afternoon.

He likes to.pay exact change to cover the two games each Saturday, and usually, there isn't a problem in putting together the proper collection of bills to get his payment to be exact.

But this past Saturday, for the first time in my memory, between myself, my wife and our son, we could not come up with exact change.

We looked through our wallets and simply couldn't give him exact change with anything we had in those wallets.

He was going to have to break a large bill to pay for bowling, which was doable, but which was also the first time he was going to have to do this in all the years he had been in this league.

Again, no big deal.

We looked and looked, and cobbled together a few singles and a $5 bill, but it still left him short of what he needed for exact change.

And then one of us said, "Look in yout bank," meaning getting out a bank our son had in his room that we figured only had change in it.

We found the bank, and I dumped dozens of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters on my bed ... but then I noticed that there was something else in there--

It sounded like paper dollars.

Since we had not opened up this bank in probably a decade or more, I had no idea what was in the bank, and when I discovered that there were a few paper dollars in there, I assumed that they were $1 bills, which would have been fine and solved the problem if that is what was in there.

I reached in with my fingers, and pulled out three separate bills.

But they weren't $1 bills--

They were $2 bills!

I hadn't seen a $2 bill in ages (have you?).

I know that esrly in the 20th century, they were in circulation, were later pulled, and did not come back until 1976, the Bicentennial year, when they were re-released with great fanfare.

But then our government found out thst most people weren't recirculating the $2 bills; they were keeping them, pretty much as oddities.

Nearly 50 years later, the government still produces them, they are legal tender, and they can be circulated.

So we put together one of the $2 bills with the other bills we cobbled together, and I reminded my son that they are legal tender ... but if, for some reason, he was questioned, that he could take some change with him to cover the $2.

But there were no problems, and his streak of paying exact price for his bowling continued.

I have no idea where he got those bills, but we obviously buried them in his bank, not circulating them like most people don't do.

Thomas Jefferson is on the front of the bill, a rendering of the Declaration of Independence is on the other side, and it actually is a nice looking bill.

Preserved at the bottom of an old bank that we hadn't opened in years, it was like finding buried treasure, in a funny sort of way.

The $2 question is this: will we have to use another $2 bill this week to keep our son's streak alive?

I don't know yet ... let me look in my wallet.