Eighteen cents

The boss and I hauled ourselves over to a bank across the river this noon to pay the school taxes on our side of the mountain. (They went up over $300 bucks this year, thanks to a change in the formula used to calculate ag taxes. It nicely canceled out most of the rebate our trusty governor saw fit to hand to New York property owners this year.)


Anyhow, while the boss was standing in line waiting to render up our portion, another fellow was getting in trouble for overpaying his share by $ .18.
Eighteen cents.
Today that will not buy a first class stamp.
It will not buy penny candy. A cup of coffee. A shoe lace.
Or much of anything.

When the boss and I were kids (and Fonda had several stores that sold such things) that same eighteen cents would have bought a grape Nehi or an Orange crush.
Or a Royal Palm root beer.

AND a palm-sized Three Musketeers candy bar. Or a Milky Way. Or a Snickers.

AND SIX pieces of Double Bubble chewing gum. That's a lot of gratuitous sugar in any body's book.


However, we were not fat. We were skinny, wiry critters, probably partly because it wasn't easy to come by eighteen cents when you were a kid back then. That much cash would also darned near buy a gallon of gas for the old Chevy and that had priority over treats for kids. However, it was probably also because he worked all the time and played baseball and because I spent most of my childhood being a horse (since I couldn't have one) and galloping or trotting everywhere.
If by chance we weren't doing something useful my parents' favorite refrain (particularly when we hung around the antique store pestering them for a nickel) was, "Go outside and play. Go over to the playground and swing or something."

So we did