Quarters

When the treasury started issuing quarters for each state, hundreds of thousands of people began collecting them. Sandy and I were no exception. We weren't obsessed; we didn't buy the little cardboard map with slots for the coins. We just noticed when state quarters came into our possession, and added those we didn't already have to our pile. We kept a list of which ones we had so we could check quickly. The quarters originally went into an old film canister set on a shelf in the dining room. When they overflowed the canister, we just started piling them up next to it. It wasn't a big deal, just something we thought was kind of cool. Mainly, we liked seeing what each state chose to represent itself. And we were delighted to get one for American Samoa.

I've rearranged some things on the dining room shelves a few times in the last few months. Mainly, I moved the garden seeds down to the cabinet, making more room for cookbooks. But most of the little things that had been set on the shelves at some point in the past decade remained there: tiles with our house numbers that we bought in Spain in 1999; the cast of Pico's paw print; a green plastic slinky with Microsoft's logo on it; a small ceramic turtle that a friend gave Sandy, and next to it, the turtle's head, which broke off when a cat was batting it around the floor. You get the idea.

Today, I unexpectedly started going through the things on those shelves, moving things that didn't actually belong there to other places in the house. As I was doing so, I found the stack of quarters and the paper that listed which ones we had. But I couldn't find the canister that held the bulk of the coins. I'm missing 18 of the ones that were on our list.

We got our first digital camera in 2001, so the unexposed film
was probably from 2000 or 2001. But I have no idea what
would have been on it. Certainly, we were more conservative
with taking photos when they required actual film. This photo
is of Sandy in the lot next door before they ripped out the
trees and built the condos. She was saving flowers and other
plants before the bulldozers came. She's next to the fence on
the far side of the lot, in a white shirt and blue pants.

I thought at first that I must have moved the canister when I moved the seeds earlier this year. So I looked in the cabinet that has the seeds, and I found a film canister — that had actual film inside it. No sign of the quarters. There was a film canister nestled in the green slinky, and I was sure that must hold them. No. Instead, it held a roll of film that had already been shot and needs to be processed. (Now I'm hoping for more pictures of Sandy, if the film turns out after more than a decade of neglect.)

I tried to think where I might have put the canister of quarters. What would make sense to me? I checked every place that could have seemed at all logical, even though I knew I wouldn't have moved it without taking the additional stack and the paper that listed them all. Why would I separate them?

I wondered if someone had stolen them, but that's a ludicrous idea, given that the only people who have been in the house are my friends. And, anyway, if you were going to steal quarters, wouldn't you take the stack, rather than the canister?

So I'm assuming at this point that Sandy has them, and that she'll return them when she's ready. I found Bananagrams a couple of weeks ago, not on the game shelf but on the shelf below it, where I'd also looked. There's a very small chance that I had put it there last summer and that it had been there, hidden by something, when I looked earlier. But I had made a point of searching that shelf thoroughly, so I really think it appeared later.  At any rate, it's back now, like all the other things that have gone missing and left me feeling crazy.

The pursuit of these quarters—which are more meaningful to me now that Sandy's gone because collecting them was a goofy thing we did together—led me to find the film that needs to be processed. (And to discover that there's still film in the old camera, too, so I'll finish out the roll and get it processed as well.) I have great hopes for that film, because why else would she take the quarters if not to get me to pay attention to film canisters?