When I was 9 we moved into a new neighborhood. The first few days were hectic, there was no cable and I was so I was just milling around overwhelmed by preteen boredom, too old to play with toys, too young to obsess over girls. My dad must have felt the same way because he sent me out to buy a paper as we had no newspaper service yet.
He gave me a handful of change and told me to walk down the block to the newspaper machine. I strolled over to the machine ready to make what may have been my first non-candy based financial transaction. Once there, I saw that the papers cost 75 cents. I counted the change, I had 65 cents! What was I going to do? If I failed getting a simple paper, Dad would never trust me with my pending Christmas list items: ATVs, guns, and rocket packs (which I was sure were just on the horizon of being invented).
In a stroke of genius, I decided to check the change well for an errant 10 cents. Surely, the last news junky must have been in such a rush to get to his daily Ziggy cartoon that he left some money there. Alas it was empty. I literally felt the inside of the change well to make sure my eyes weren't fooling me (when you recently discover that Santa isn't real and that David Hasselhoff doesn't really ride around the country solving mysteries in a corvette, you develop a habit of double checking everything).
While feeling the inside of the change well, I noticed something. I could actually stick my small little hand up the slot where the change came out. What's more, I could stick my hand into where all the other change gets deposited. I started pulling out handfuls of change with glee. In the middle of my giddy rush, I was struck with self-doubt (this is still a recurring phenomenon) This has got to be wrong, I thought. My mind was spinning, if I took all the change, then the Newspaper conglomerates would realize something was up and start reengineering newspaper machines across the nation, now that their fatal flaw was discovered. I decided to play it cool and take just a little.
I returned home with a paper, some change in my pocket, and fantasies of me saying to my mother, "Dinner's on me tonight," while I emptied a sack full of nickels on the dinner table.
Unfortunately, my scheme was cut short by the fact that little hands often come with short attention spans. I totally forgot about the newspaper machine as I became lost in the dramatic crescendo of that night's episode of "Blossom".
A year later, while beginning to compile a modest comic book collection, it reoccurred to me that I was still a young Croesus at the Herald Tribune's expense. I sauntered on over to the newspaper machine which was conveniently on the way to the drug store that sold the comics, and according to the cashier was also "not a library." Once again, I stuck my hand into the change well only to discover that in a year I had metamorphosed into some giant oaf who couldn't stick his hand through a 2 inch by 2 inch hole.
I was literally, a day late and a dollar short.
