Bank of America owes me a lot of money. A couple of
decades after “The Quake,” when I was in grade school, students were encouraged
to learn the value of saving by bringing a few coins to school, exchanging them
for savings stamps to put into a “savings” booklet provided by the then Bank of
Italy (which later changed its name to Bank of America). Soon other banks complained that Bank of
Italy was monopolizing this practice, so the school district abandoned it. I
never went to the bank to collect my savings.
I wouldn’t know where to start, since the bank name changed, and so did
my family name.
I figure that at 2% annual interest, my original two dollars
or so of savings stamps should be quite a bit by now. It could buy a farm somewhere in East Troy,
WI. Or perhaps a lot in front of the Washington Monument. I could establish a wind power company in The
Doldrums. Or maybe just buy Bank of America.
I saved other
things, too, usually because they were temporary fads at school. You know -- baseball cards. I amassed eight or nine cards, I think. And stamps.
I got a stamp collection booklet,
pasted a couple dozen worthless foreign
stamps that came with the booklet onto their assigned squares, then found the
booklet years later in the leg of an abandoned sweat suit.
My sister suggested saving pennies. She'd save them until she had five or ten,
exchanged them for a nickel or dime, and saved those until she could swap for a
dollar. I don't know what she did with
the dollars. She liked those fleecy
sweaters that girls wore to football games.
I never established one place to accumulate pennies. My mother kept finding them in pockets of
pants in the laundry. She'd say, “Look
what I found.” and keep them. I didn't
mind; but I didn't learn, either.
I was more successful with collecting sand. We lived on
square miles of it. It came in with shoes, inside socks, with the morning
newspaper, into the garage with the car, in with the cat, in hair, and in with
guests.
One reason I loved the shore was
that, when the wind blew, what hit you was salty spray, not gritty sand. That is, if you were at water's edge. If you
were back a bit, you got sea spray AND sand in your eyes, ears, and teeth. People
bringing a bag lunch to the beach usually opened it up behind a small dune,
sort of out of the wind. But I took mine
right to water's edge. The wind wet the
bread a little, but the food was sand free.
If I ever decide to collect on my Bank of Italy savings,
I think I'll invest in a startup company that turns sand into water, or helium,
or sweater fleece. My sister would have
liked that.
A neighbor boy had an unusual collection. When I was
young, Bayer sold aspirin in flat, rectangular tins, about a dozen in a
tin. This fellow's house had a living
room cabinet with glass doors. When he
showed me his collection, there were hundreds of Bayer tins in it. Looking at loose piles of aspirin tins, many
of them dented, many rusted, I asked him what he planned to do with them.
His eyes went wide
for a moment; then he said, with utter contempt, "Keep 'em."
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