Monday, August 01, 2005
A Penny Saved...Is a Dollar Worth Spending
When I was a little girl, my father would take all of the change out of his pockets at the end of the day and drop it into an old Maxwell House Coffee can that he kept in the top of the closet in his room. He did this every day. When December first rolled around, he'd pull out that coffee can and give it to my brother and I, who with great, greedy fingers would count each penny, nickel, dime and quarter and then roll them all into their appropriate sleeves. At the bank, we would exchange all this coinage for the "green stuff", as we called it. Whatever the total came out to be, we halved it. That, then, was our Christmas shopping money; the money we were to use to buy gifts for all of our family members. It was generally about fifty dollars each, which, back in those days was a lot of money, especially to children, and as we didn't have a huge family for which to buy gifts, we were able to get nice things. (Well, whatever a child might consider a "nice" thing).
I was reminded of this today. Karim and I have been half-heartedly saving change into a "cup" fashioned from the bottom half of a water bottle. It isn't much, but in that small cup, it looks like a lot, and we decided to count it. All told, give or take a few pennies, we came up with a little over four dollars. That doesn't sound like much, but without thinking, we've dropped about a gallon and a half of gasoline into that cup. Perhaps its a grande mocha with an extra shot of "grande". Or, for the more practical mind, this little cup is full of the equivalent of a four pound bag of sugar, a four pound bag of flour, a dozen eggs, a small box of baking powder, and a bottle of vanilla extract from the Wal-mart shopping center. With this "cake" in mind, I've decided that instead of cutting bottles into parts, I'm going to start using my empty jars to make our "end of day" deposits. Instead of just half-heartedly dropping our small change into these jars, I think we should put ALL of our coins in, save for the laundry quarters, which, by the way, were NOT included in this total, and follow my Father's lead: save the change for something important. Then, at the end of the year, we could find a good reason to spend it. Maybe we could use it for Christmas money as the family tradition would merit, or we could pay our December electric bill. Maybe, instead, we could donate it to our mosque to help those less fortunate than we are.
The money that we so carelessly toss on the pavement, in the glove box, in the junk drawer could all be going for a good cause. Churches and Mosques all over America know exactly what to do with that change. If every Churchgoing Christian and every Muslim (which to round numbers is approximately 40 percent of the US population) could save u
p their change for a year, and if you figure that change to be about a hundred dollars, using my Father's total as an example, with growing population of about three hundred million people, that comes to TWELVE BILLION DOLLARS!! Okay, my percentages could be off for one reason or another, but the number is probably pretty close to what you'd get anyhow. Think of the people that could be fed and clothed with that amount of money. Just to remind you, this money is money no one would even miss out of their pockets because it's already missing at the bottom of a purse. Wow! We could "change" the world.
