So the older child announces fifteen minutes before we leave for school that he has show and tell, and he needs something that begins with M. Although only six, the boy immediately comes up with “Money!” because he hopes that either I’ll give him some American money, and he will get to keep it, or that I’ll let him take some out of his piggy bank, and he’ll get to spend it.
Oh, but no.
Fortunately, my desk is a veritable Hammerspace (the term I discovered when trying to remember the source of the phrase Trenchcoat Schtick which I remembered from a single gaming session at Gencon in the late 1990s–apparently, I was playing a demo session of Tales from the Floating Vagabond).
As such, I was able to immediately lay my hands on a couple pieces of money for him to show and tell:
The top is a 500 Afghanis note, and the bottom is a single Trinidad and Tobago dollar.
Where did I get these? They were on my desk.
Seriously, though, I don’t know where I got them. I used to have a little sack of foreign money that I’d acquired from traveling relatives and whatnot, but I sold that sometime in college or immediately post-college to raise some capital to invest in driving my little car to the Central West End for some coffee or some such. These new bills I have acquired sometime in the last two decades then.
They got onto my desk because they’d resided in the drawer of my office’s second desk, and I had recently (within the last six months) scoured those drawers for something else and came up with the bills, which I’d hoped to put into a more displayable form or something.
But now they’ve been to school and back to save the day, and they’re back on the desk in the sea of rubble which includes a single card from The Worst Case Scenario Game, an extraneous copy of Robert B. Parker’s Rough Weather (which I find a lot at yard sales and think I’ll fill out my collection with the books I’ve read from the library, only to discover it’s always Rough Weather for sale at garage sales), empty coin folders for Lincoln Cents 1959 to Present and Jefferson Nickels from 1962 to Present, and a copy of Dallas: The Television Role Playing Game.
My desk is, indeed, a wonderland.
